News

Exclusive: Chervine Naamani has joined ColorCreative, the management and production company co-founded by Issa Rae, Deniese Davis, and Talitha Watkins, as a manager and producer.

Naamani joins from the management company Rain, where he spent four and a half years building a diverse, multicultural list of next generation filmmakers and writers. In his new role, he will continue to help spearhead the development of diverse emerging talent in the entertainment industry, reporting to ColorCreative President Talitha Watkins.

Notable clients Naamani is bringing with him include filmmakers Bishal Dutta (It Lives Inside), Razelle Benally (Murder in Big Horn), Nardeep Khurmi (Land of Gold), Linh Tran (Waiting for the Light to Change), Jonathan Cuartas (My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To) and Bo Mirhosseni (History of Evil), as well as writers Kira Kalush (Ghosts), Erica Meredith (La Brea), Nicole Saad (Lioness), Savannah Ward (Cruel Summer), Brandon Schultz (Star Trek: Discovery...

Brut, the influential digital media publisher which became one of the main partners for the Cannes Film Festival last year, has just finalized its fourth funding round for approximately $40 million.

The company, founded by Guillaume Lacroix, Renaud Le Van Kim and Laurent Lucas six years ago, has enlisted a pair of powerful financial backers: CMA Cgm, the world’s third-largest container shipping company owned by billionaire businessman Rodolphe Saadé, which also recently nabbed 10% of France’s second biggest commercial network M6, and the daily newspaper La Provence; and MoonPay, a leading Miami-based financial service company for web3 whose investors include former tennis star Maria Sharapova, as well as Snoop Dogg, Drake and Justin Bieber, among others. Aryeh B. Bourkoff’s LionTree advised the deal with MoonPay.

With this fourth round, Brut has raised nearly $140 million since its launch, and has been able to keep its former investors on board, including James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems,...

Premiering as a Special Screening at Cannes was a documentary co-directed by Houda Benyamina, Anne Cissé and subject Melanie Diam’s, the former French rapper and music sensation who stepped away from public life in the early 2010s after converting to Islam. “Salam,” meaning “peace” in Arabic, follows Diam’s new life as a philanthropist and mother, far from the chaos and fame of her past career.

Her new religious path in life was met with vast shock and criticism from the French media at the time, and pushed Diam’s further toward the realization that she needed to abandon her music for good.

Benyamina was reluctant to share the direction of the film at first because of a need to “have my own projects and my own voice,” she says.

“But when Melanie asked me to direct her movie by myself, I told her no. It’s her story...

Bio-documentary is co-directed by ex-rapper Melanie Diams, ‘Divines’ director Houda Benyamina and writer Anne Cissé.

Former French rapper Diam’s cut a swathe through France’s male-dominated underground rap scene of the 2000s with her feminist and social activist lyrics to become one of the country’s most popular mainstream artists.

She found herself in the eye of a media storm and public backlash in 2009 after weekly news magazine Paris Match ran images of her emerging from a mosque in full hijab and robe, following her decision to convert to Islam and withdraw from public life.

The ex-rapper, who was...