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Italy’s Groenlandia, the Banijay Entertainment-owned and Rome-based company headed by directors and producers Matteo Rovere and Sydney Sibilia, is on a roll with three shows launching this month respectively on Disney+, Sky Italia and Netflix. They include crime drama “This Is Not Hollywood,” which bows Friday at the Rome Film Festival.

The four-part crime series is based on the true story of a 15-year-old named Sarah Scazzi, whose body was thrown into a well after she was strangled in the a small Southern Italian town of Avetrana. A massive media storm ensued over the 42 days it took to find her body. The show, directed by Pippo Mezzapesa (“Burning Hearts”), will premiere Oct. 25 on Disney+ in Italy and across European, Middle East and Africa territories, plus some other countries, and also on Hulu in the U.S.

Rovere says the show’s catchy title refers to the fact that...

Pippo Mezzapesa’s Italian romance centres around the forbidden love of a rich heir and a Mafia wife.

Screen can exclusively reveal the first trailer for Pippo Mezzapesa’s Italian romance Burning Hearts which will premiere in the Horizon’s strand of Venice’s 79th International Film Festival (August 31 - September 10).

Rome-based sales outfit True Colours has picked up worldwide rights on Mezzapesa’s adaptation of the book Ti Mangio Il Cuore (I Eat Your Heart) by Carlo Bonni and Giuliano Fosch.

Centring around the forbidden love of a rich heir and a Mafia wife, it stars Italian singer Elodie...

Part I. A Filmmaker’s Apotheosis

April 20th, 1938 marked Adolf Hitler’s 49th birthday. In the past five years, he’d rebuilt Germany from destitute anarchy into a burgeoning war machine, repudiated the Versailles Treaty and, that March, incorporated Austria into his Thousand-Year Reich. In Nazi Germany, fantasy co-mingled with ideology, expressing an obsession with Germany’s mythical past through propaganda and art. Fittingly, Hitler celebrated at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, Germany’s most prestigious cinema.

There, Nazi officials and foreign diplomats joined dignitaries of German kultur. Present were Wilhelm Furtwangler, conductor of Berlin’s Philharmonic Orchestra; Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and confidante; actor Gustaf Grundgens, transformed from Brechtian Bolshevik to director of Prussia’s State Theater; and movie star Emil Jannings, Oscar-winner of The Lost Command and The Blue Angel, now an Artist of the State. Also Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who nationalized German cinema in...

By modern standards, Quentin Tarantino would be considered an auteur; a director whose films reflect that his personal creative vision. But what exactly is that vision, and how is it reflected in his work? One major observation that one can make about Tarantino’s films is that he often incorporates a number of references, many of which refer to cinema, specific films, or pop culture. His films are laced with this intertextuality were the relationship between texts (or films) is constantly being redefined. This method of pastiche is one way that he draws attention to the fact that his film is a constructed piece of fiction, or a “simulation.”

His rational behind this is heavily influenced by French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “hyperreality.” Hyperreality in this case refers to the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, as the two become blurred into one. Baudrillard argues that...

"Thats none of your business," an agitated man said. Kristian Harlan is his name. He's sat at his kitchen table, a mixed bundle of emotions. He's stubborn in maintaining that his opinion of his father should be private, yet appears to recognize a sense of obligation to speak. Kristian is just one of over a dozen family members interviewed for this documentary. Some of them are painfully aware of their legacy, others have a harder time superimposing such horror on their relatives. But they're all part of the Harlan clan.

Their long-deceased patriach, Veit Harlan, was Joseph Goebbels' golden boy during the Third Reich. The Harlan family tree's legacy is Jew Suss; a movie so anti-Semitic and unapologetically fearmongering that Goebbels declared it required viewing for anyone in the SS.

Harlan probes the family as they are today, to see their wildly conflicting reactions to this fact and how...

What a difference a year makes! Just after World War II, hundreds of French citizens who like Maréchal Pétain and Pierre Laval collaborated with the Nazi regime, became "resistance fighters." So it seems in Germany as well, as tens of thousands, perhaps millions of Germans who shouted "Heil Hitler" became "disgusted" with everything to do with Nazism, particularly with the Holocaust. With the film "Harlan-In the Shadow of Jew Süss," writer-director Felix Moeller deals with a filmmaker who quite obviously collaborated with the Nazi ideology in that he made anti-Semitic films while glorifying the Third Reich but who, like Adolf Eichmann and so many other top criminals, caviled that they were forced to do as the apparatchiks commanded.Harlan-in The Shadow Of Jew SÜSS (Harlan-Im Schatten von Jud Süß)

Zeitgeist Films

Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten

Grade: B

Directed by: Felix Moeller

Written By: Felix Moeller

Cast: Stefan Drössler,...