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“Primavera,” a film about Antonio Vivaldi, the Italian Baroque composer and violinist who penned “The Four Seasons,” has been bought by a flurry of major distributors.

Represented by Memento International, the movie shot in Rome and Venice, and marks the feature debut of Damiano Michieletto, a leading opera director.

Warner Bros. will release the movie in Italy while Diaphana Distribution will release it in France. The pre-sales closed by Memento International are Benelux (Cineart), Germany and Austria (X Verleih), Spain (A Contracorriente Films), Switzerland (Frenetic) and Poland (M2 Films). Several other territories are in negotiations.

“Primavera” was penned by Ludovica Rampoldi, the award-winning screenwriter of movies such as “The Traitor” and “Gomorrah – the series,” among others. The script is loosely adapted from Tiziano Scarpa’s critically acclaimed novel “Stabat Mater.”

Set in 18th century Venice, “Primavera” follows Cecilia, a 20-year-old violin virtuoso who lives at the Pièta orphanage. Despite her talent,...

Antonio Vivaldi, the Italian Baroque composer and violinist who penned “The Four Seasons,” will be portrayed in “Primavera,” the feature debut of Damiano Michieletto, a leading opera director. Memento International has boarded the film which begins shooting this month in Rome and Venice.

“Primavera” was penned by Ludovica Rampoldi, the award-winning screenwriter of movies such as “The Traitor” and “Gomorrah – the series,” among others. The script is loosely adapted from Tiziano Scarpa’s critically acclaimed novel “Stabat Mater.”

Set in 18th century Venice, “Primavera” follows Cecilia, a 20-year-old violin virtuoso who lives at the Pièta orphanage. Despite her talent, Cecilia remains confined within the orphanage, knowing that marriage is the only way out. Yet, her life takes a turn after she meets Antonio Vivaldi, a brilliant and ambitious composer who becomes the new violin teacher. Guided by Vivaldi and his music, Cecilia “finds the strength to challenge the destiny that once seemed inevitable,...

There’s a certain formula that often defines the recipients of the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious top prize, the Palme d’Or. These films, especially in the last two decades, tend to have a sense of importance about them, frequently due to their sociopolitical awareness of the world (Laurent Cantet’s The Class), or of specific societal ills.

From time to time, the Palme d’Or goes to a bold, experimental, and divisive vision from a well-liked auteur, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Terrence Malick’s The Three of Life. But more often it’s awarded to a film in the lineup that the majority of the members on the Cannes jury can agree is good. That felt like the case for Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley and I, Daniel Blake, as well as Julia Ducournau’s Titane,...

With exceptional frankness, director Mishima presented “Voice” to the public of Udine Far East Film Festival, revealing that the film – that she wrote as well – is inspired at large, by her own trauma of being sexually abused at the age of 6. Said frankness is something that comes undoubtedly from a long and painful path of recovery and the director has challenged herself navigating self-worth and guilt in her latest work.

Voice is screening at Udine Far East Film Festival

The film is in omnibus format, composed by three episodes of different style and far apart location, and a bridging conclusion. In the first episode, in a stylish house near lake Toya, in the North of Japan, a woman, Maki (Maki Carrousel) is preparing Osechi, a traditional New Year's feast that contains several dishes, all highly symbolic of good fortune, safety, good health and longevity. In doing so she follows the...

Oscar-winners Helen Hunt and Dustin Hoffman have signed on to star in the new, still-untitled feature from British director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover).

Principal photography for the film has begun in Lucca, Italy.

Sofia Boutella (Kingsman), Giacomo Gianniotti (Grey’s Anatomy), Jonno Davies (Kingsman: The Secret Service) and Laura Morante (The Son’s Room) co-star in the drama, the first feature from Greenaway since 2015’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato.

Based on Greenaway’s original script, the film is the story of an intelligent man whose final big adventure is intended to be his own death, which he wants to organize in an elegant, sensible and tidy manner, with as few loose ends as possible.

“The theme of this film is highly relevant and topical in these times, where the end-of-life topic is headline news on a daily basis,” said Greenaway. “As such, I am very excited...

Berlin has unveiled the international jury for the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, which runs Feb. 15-25.

The 2024 jury will include U.S. director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux), Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui (Summer Snow), Berlinale regular Christian Petzold (Afire, Undine), Spanish director Albert Serra (Pacification), Italian actress Jasmine Trinca (The Son’s Room) and the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko.

Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave, Black Panther) will serve as president of the International Jury.

The four-woman, three-man jury will screen the competition titles at this year’s Berlinale and select the winners of the 2024 festival, including the Golden Bear for best film. The winners of the 74th Berlinale will be announced live at a gala ceremony in Berlin on Saturday, Feb. 24.

Petzold is probably the most familiar face for Berlinale audiences. The German director has had 6 films in competition in Berlin, most recently Afire, which won...

Eddie Cockrell, who reviewed films for Variety for many years and programmed for several film series, died of liver failure Dec. 29 in Sydney, Australia, according to his sister Ann. He was 67.

Cockrell reviewed dozens of films for Variety from the Berlin, Karlovy Vary, Montreal and Toronto festivals. He also reviewed for Indiewire, Nitrate Online and several television outlets.

After relocating to Australia in 2005, he focused mostly films from Australia and New Zealand. Since 2010, Cockrell had served as a TV columnist, feature writer and film reviewer for the Sydney newspaper The Australian.

He served as associate director of film programming for the American Film Institute National Exhibitions at the Kennedy Center, and for more than two decades was a guest presenter at Harlan Jacobson’s “Talk Cinema” screening and lecture series.

Jacobson said, “Eddie was a favorite with Talk Cinema audiences, who loved his energy, humor and inside baseball insight. He...

Palme d’Or winner (The Son’s Room in 2001) Nanni Moretti makes another trip to the competition with an ode to cinema (and Martin Scorsese’s inbox) with Il sol dell’avvenire (aka A Brighter Tomorrow). Once again inviting Margherita Buy to be part of what is an endless supply of young, new and old actors (you’ll find some surprises), this is a triumphant return to the comp especially after Three Floors being one of the worst titles feature there in 2021.

A film director unhappy with the movie he’s shooting about a Hungarian circus stranded in Rome during the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising faces divorce from his producer wife.…...

Having previously won the Palme d’Or in 2001 for “The Son’s Room” and premiered the majority of his films in competition, Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti has been a mainstay at the Cannes Film Festival for several decades. His latest film, “A Brighter Tomorrow,” marks a welcome return to the French Riviera following the poorly-received “Three Floors.” Getting special permission from Cannes to release his films locally prior to hitting the Croisette, Moretti’s 14th feature was released in Italian theaters on April 20, where it has greatly resonated with audiences and earned around $4 million.

Continue reading ‘A Brighter Tomorrow’ Review: Nanni Moretti’s Latest Is A Messy Meta Comedy About Filmmaking [Cannes] at The Playlist.

New films by Tran Anh Hung and Nanni Moretti take their place on the grid.

Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot-Au-Feu posted a 2.8 average on Screen International’s 2023 Cannes jury grid, whilst Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow landed joint-bottom with 1.3.

Vietnam-born Hung’s seventh feature, his first since 2016’s French family saga Eternity, is a food-themed period romance starring Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel as a cook and a gourmet who fall in love.

Click on the jury grid above for the most up-to-date version.

The Pot-Au-Feu scored fours (excellent) from Meduza International’s Anton Dolan, Time Magazine’s Stehanie Zacharek and rogerebert.

The captivating opening sequence of Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow (Il Sol dell’Avvenire) watches as a dusty old Fiat passes Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome and pulls up next to the Tiber. A man with a can of red paint and a rope steps out and scoots halfway down the stone wall that hugs the riverbank, neatly painting the words of the title. The whimsical music instantly alludes to Fellini, an homage confirmed soon after by the arrival in town of a Hungarian circus, and for all intents and purposes, the film is Moretti’s Otto e mezzo. Or at least it wants to be.

More than 20 years after winning the Palme d’Or with his shattering grief drama The Son’s Room, Moretti is back with his 14th feature for his regular appointment with Cannes. But after decades of wildly varying success attempting to stretch beyond his signature auto-fictions,...

In competition at Cannes, the Italian director’s comedy-drama about a failing film-maker is full of non-comedy and anti-drama – a complete waste of time

Nanni Moretti is the Italian director who will always have a place in our hearts, not least for his masterly The Son’s Room (2001), in my view the greatest Cannes Palme d’Or winner of the century so far. And more recently his cinephile comedy Mia Madre (2015) was tremendous.

But his new film in competition is bafflingly awful: muddled, mediocre and metatextual – a complete waste of time, at once strident and listless. Everything about it is heavy-handed and dull: the non-comedy, the ersatz-pathos, the anti-drama.

It is effectively a film within a film, both as dull as each other. Moretti himself plays Giovanni, a high-minded film director with a failing marriage who is struggling to shoot his passion project about the Italian Communist party standing up to...

Elisa Giudici reporting from Cannes...

It is not easy being coherent with your work when you have as strong moral compass as Nanni Moretti. The Italian director and Palm d’Or winner has built a career around his political beliefs and precise reading of reality. In Moretti’s world, everything is black or white, with some Communist Red. Compromising is surrendering to the enemy.

His new picture Il sol dell’avvenire (English title: A Brighter Tomorrow) is a tale of how difficult it is to be alive in a world in which everything you love and believe in is either dying or betraying you. It is a movie within a movie with a half dozen other movies tied up in it. After the disappointing Tre Piani, Moretti returns to what he does best: playing a fictional version of himself on screen, and letting the mask slip when necessary to reveal his pain.

Nanni Moretti always dresses impeccably — whether tuxed-up for the Cannes red carpet for his eight competition appearances since 1978 (his ninth, for A Brighter Tomorrow, will come May 24) or walking the Croisette in the casual chic (cashmere sweaters and chinos with open-collar shirts in dark gray or plum) that appears to come naturally to Italian men of Moretti’s generation. But the mantle of elder statesman of Italian cinema seems to hang on the 69-year-old director more like an ill-fitting suit.

It’s hard to deny Moretti’s position as a successor to the great neorealists — Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini — and the generation of New Wave heroes of the 1960s like Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and Lina Wertmüller who reclaimed and restored Italian cinema after the ravages of fascism. His list of awards and acclaims alone — the Palme d’Or for The Son’s Room in 2001, Cannes best director in 1994 for Dear Diary,...

The 76th Cannes Film Festival announced this morning that its closing night film in, oh, just about five weeks will be Pixar’s latest innovative animated film, “Elemental.” The movie is directed by Peter Sohn, whose only other feature credit as director is 2015’s “The Good Dinosaur.” Sohn has been a part of Pixar, working in some capacity as an animator or story developer on most of their titles, going back to 2003. Job security at that shop!

“Elemental”’s premise is a forbidden love between anthropomorphic representations of Fire and Water in Element City. How this will make any kind of logical sense is beyond me, but have you seen how much money the “Cars” franchise has earned? I think it’s best not to worry too much about realism and, following water’s lead, go with the flow.

The voice cast is led by Leah Lewis of “The Half of It...

The lineup for the 76th installment of the Cannes Film Festival has finally been announced. Nineteen films will be competing to take home the prestigious Palme d’Or, including a record six films helmed by women. The festival will be taking place in the French Riviera from May 16 to May 27. This year’s jury will be headed by Ruben Östlund, who won his second Palme d’Or last year for “Triangle of Sadness.”

Knowing a filmmaker’s previous track record at Cannes can sometimes help give an idea as to who might be in the best position to claim the Palme. For instance, five of this year’s entries come from directors who have previously won the Palme. Another five are from auteurs who have had previous films win a prize in the main competition other than the Palme. Another five are from directors having their first film screen in the main competition.

The lineup for the 2023 Cannes Film Festival will include a couple of world premieres for two of the anticipated upcoming films of the year as well as some notable entries for the competition. The new president of the Cannes Film Festival, Iris Knobloch unveiled the list of films set to make screenings and remarked, “Cannes is going back to the future of cinema.” The roster of filmmakers featured this year features a bevy of renowned names from all over the film world. The Hollywood Reporter gives us a breakdown of the highlights of titles that are scheduled to make their appearance.

Two big Hollywood world premieres include the upcoming sequel to Indiana Jones and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. The much-anticipated film reunites Scorsese with not only his frequent collaborator, Leonard DiCaprio, but with his legendary collaborator, Robert De Niro. The plot synopsis for Killers reads, “In 1920s Oklahoma,...

Grab your baguettes, everybody, it’s time to head back to the Cannes Film Festival.

Iris Knobloch, the new president of the festival, presented the bulk of this year’s slate, with artistic director Thierry Frémaux at her side. The main competition sees a number of returning veterans, as well as some new faces.

There are not too many movies in the main competition this year coming from directors that also work in the Hollywood orbit. The ones that do include: “Asteroid City” from Wes Anderson, which stars Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, and countless other stars; “May December” from Todd Haynes, which stars Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman (a movie about an unlikely couple also produced by one: Christine Vachon and Will Ferrell); and a new one from Jonathan Glazer called “The Zone of Interest,” a film set at Auschwitz based on a novel by Martin Amis. Austrian...

“Cannes is going back to the future of cinema,” said Iris Knobloch, the new president of the Cannes Film Festival, unveiling the lineup for the 2023 event on Thursday. And looking at this year’s selection, it’s hard to argue with her.

The 76th Cannes International Film Festival looks like an all-killer, no-filler program, with some of the biggest names in international cinema, many of whom got their start on the Croisette, returning to that famed red carpet. The 2023 competition lineup includes new films from Wes Anderson, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ken Loach, Todd Haynes, Nanni Moretti and Aki Kaurismäki. In addition, Cannes has packed its out-of-competition screenings with blockbusters, including Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, as well as a new documentary from Oscar winner Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave).

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, one of the director’s typically-quirky and star-studded affairs,...

Piovani composed the Oscar-winning soundtrack to Roberto Benigni’s ’Life Is Beautiful’.

Italian composer Nicola Piovani will receive a lifetime achievement at the 2023 World Soundtrack Awards, held at Film Fest Ghent on October 21.

Piovani is best known for composing the score to Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful for which he won the Oscar in 1999.

The composer began his career in 1971 with Silvano Agosti’s N.P. Il Segreto and has gone on to compose the music to more than 200 films and series.

He worked with Federico Fellini on a number of his films including Ginger & Fred (1986), Intervista (1987) and...

Although a theatrical release date has not yet been set for Lukas Dhont’s second feature Close, A24 is capitalizing off the Telluride premiere of the Grand Prix Cannes winner by releasing the first trailer. Coming from the 31-year-old Belgian director, the film follows Léo and Rémi, two thirteen-year-old best friends whose seemingly unbreakable bond is suddenly, tragically torn apart.

David Katz said in his review, “Lukas Dhont’s Close, following up Girl from 2017, admirably attempts to delve into a friendship like this, with sensitivity and a rare gift of observation. Where it falters is an attempt to stir and batter the viewer with melodramatic plot turns and operatic emotion. This approach will likely please more of its audiences to come than others, but Dhont here arguably becomes so carried away with the emotional tempest he has an undoubted gift to conjure that the arc of the film feels artificial,...

There is a dearth of films about what it means to lose a friendship. With a close friend at most mature stages of life, there is a sense of vibrant chemistry (if usually not intimacy), and also the feeling your bond with that person somehow defines who you are. Dan Sallitt’s under-seen Fourteen—about a friendship between two millennial women which commenced at that mid-adolescent age—has been one of the only recent films to broach this topic, and its slow-motion accretion of detail could be a lesson towards the subject of this very review.

Lukas Dhont’s Close, following up Girl from 2017, admirably attempts to delve into a friendship like this, with sensitivity and a rare gift of observation. Where it falters is an attempt to stir and batter the viewer with melodramatic plot turns and operatic emotion. This approach will likely please more of its audiences to come than others,...

Blue Eyes might be a heist movie or a policier, a revenge fable or an exercise in aesthetic sensibility. There's enough of each that it is perhaps all of them. What's certain though is that within the varicoloured hues of a neo-noir it manages a tone of almost effortless cool that recalls other highlights of genre.

Michela Cescon's début feature, Blue Eyes is an assured piece of film-making. Co-writing with Heidrun Schleef and polymath and occasional novelist Marco Lodoli, the film's episodic nature feels less televisual than literary.

Split into un-numbered chapters separated by title cards, the tale is at least at surface a simple one. There is a thief, a daylight robber, who strikes at will across Rome escaping on a scooter. The thrill of the chase is there.

Except, and one of the film's many striking decisions, it isn't. A crime thriller predicated upon...

Belgium’s Lukas Dhont takes a deserved step up to the Cannes Film Festival competition with Close, only his second film — a minimalist melodrama that shows a definite growth in visual style but may be confronting to some with its deliberately unhurried, Eric Rohmer-esque aesthetic. The international success of Dhont’s well-intentioned debut Girl, about a young trans-female ballet dancer, was somewhat blunted in the U.S., where G.L.A.A.D. amplified complaints of misrepresentation on behalf of the trans lobby. Close is a much safer proposition, but may yet sail into choppy waters with its themes of youth suicide.

Most certainly mined from personal experience, it stars newcomer Eden Dambrine as Léo, a 13-year-old boy who lives in a rustic idyll with his best friend Rémi (Gustav De Waele). Léo’s family runs a flower farm, and flowers are a constant motif throughout, whether growing, blooming, being threshed,...

‘Trump In Tweets’ Producer Wonderhood Bolsters Senior Team

Trump in Tweets producer Wonderhood Studios has bolstered its senior leadership team with the signing of The Apprentice indie Naked’s Head of Production and promotion of a Head of Factual and Head of Development. Fremantle-backed Naked’s Lianne Hickey will oversee production in the newly-created role, for the indie founded by former Channel 4 CEO David Abraham that has produced the likes of Channel 4’s Baby Surgeons: Delivering Miracles, Sky’s Devil’s Advocate: The Mostly True Story of Giovanni di Stefano and BBC Three’s Trump in Tweets. At Naked, Hickey oversaw big formats including BBC Three’s The Rap Game. “Good Heads of Production may sometimes be in unsung roles, but they are absolutely key to the success of any indie, and in Lianne we have one of the very best,” said Susie Dark, Wonderhood Managing Director. Meanwhile,...

The last French acting star to preside over the jury was Isabelle Huppert in 2009.

French actor Vincent Lindon has been named president of the jury for the 75th Cannes Film Festival, running May 17-28.

He will be joined by eight other jury members comprising UK actress and director Rebecca Hall, Indian actress Deepika Padukone, Swedish actress Noomi Rapace, Italian actress and director Jasmine Trinca, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, French director Ladj Ly, US director Jeff Nichols and Norwegian director Joachim Trier.

In the same release, Cannes also announced that Trinca’s debut feature Marcel! will world premiere as a Special Screening.

Presenting two films at Rotterdam Film Festival this year, his sixth feature as a director “Hold Me Tight” and musical comedy “Tralala” by his regular collaborators Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu, Mathieu Amalric admitted he found it hard to shake off the role of a singer-songwriter in search of the Virgin Mary.

“It might have been the first time I didn’t want to leave my character. I didn’t cut my hair for a long time, I kept my beard. I was like [a cross between] Jesus and Jim Morrison. I have never felt that gorgeous before!,” he said during an online conversation with festival director Vanja Kaludjercic.

But the film also marked a turning point in his life, as he decided to take a longer break from acting following the shoot.

“After ‘Tralala,’ I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Everything was dark. There was this extraordinary project with Noémie Lvovsky,...

Sorrow mounts to the exclusion of everything else in Three Floors (Tre Piani), a decade-spanning account of the ongoing misfortunes of multiple families residing in a comfortable Roman apartment complex.

From the opening scene, writer-director Nanni Moretti, adapting a best-selling novel by Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, has chosen to focus only on the misfortunes and regrettable incidents of those years, an approach that oddly, and melodramatically, stacks the deck in a way that seems forced and unrealistic. This over-balance stressing the negative, rather than all things of life, works to the film’s detriment, making it seem, ultimately, not true to life.

This unfortunate emphasis undercuts plenty of solid dramatic scenes and the more-than-able actors, both venerable and fresh. Moretti, who has been to Cannes on numerous occasions and won the Palme d’Or 20 years ago for The Son’s Room, certainly knows how to build strong, unsettling moods. But the...

Enlisting a huge ensemble cast, Tre Piani was already identified as a Cannes entry last year. Following in the footsteps of the agreeable 2015 item Mia Madre, Nanni Moretti won the Best Director prize for Dear Diary in 1993 and of course the Palme d’Or for The Son’s Room in 2001. This stars Riccardo Scamarcio, Margherita Buy and Alba Rohrwacher.

Well it appears the long wait for the film did not pay off – entering our grid as the second lowest graded item.

Click on the grid below for a larger version and latest updates!

…...

It’s been exactly 20 years since Nanni Moretti won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with “The Son’s Room,” a graceful, humane and often surprisingly witty drama about a family regathering itself in the wake of shattering tragedy. That’s a long time ago, and it feels longer by the minute as you watch the Italian writer-director’s latest, “Three Floors,” a film clearly conceived to hit the same bittersweet notes as his 2001 triumph, but scarcely recognizable as the work of the same filmmaker.

Dramatically stilted, cinematically drab and morally dubious at multiple turns, this soapy lather of assorted crises concerning the residents of a single Roman apartment block may come as a crashing disappointment to fans who have been waiting six years for a new Moretti feature. Pedigree alone has secured this misfire a Cannes competition slot and healthy international sales, though we certainly won’t be thinking about it in two decades’ time.

There are powerhouse performances and queasily effective scenes in this story of a man who suspects his neighbour of abuse, but it’s a soapy shadow of The Son’s Room

Nanni Moretti has come to Cannes with this watchable and tautly structured soap-operatic ensemble movie about four families living in the same apartment building, adapted from the popular bestseller Three Floors Up by the Israeli author Eshkol Nevo, and transplanted from the original Tel Aviv setting to Rome.

There is an element of emollient sentimentality, especially in the way the plot lines are neatly tied up, but a good deal of storytelling gusto and ingenuity, and there are also echoes (perhaps deliberately engineered) of Moretti’s greatest film and Cannes Palme d’Or winner, The Son’s Room, from 2001.

Lucio (Riccardo Scamarcio) and Sara (Elena Lietti) are a stressed professional couple with an infant daughter for whom they often need a...

Former Palme d’Or winner and past Cannes jury president Nanni Moretti returned to a familiar berth in the Cannes competition on Sunday with his Rome-set drama “Three Floors.” However, it’s safe to say the Italian director is unlikely to repeat his feat from 2001, when “The Son’s Room” earned him the highest art-house accolade. Sad to report, this latest is one of the worst efforts in a great career.

Based on a novel by Israeli writer Eshkol Novo and originally set in Tel Aviv, “Tre Piani” is now set mainly in a large, middle-class apartment building in the Roman suburb of Prati. It looks at the intertwined lives of three families who live in it, among them Lucio (Riccardo Scarmacio) who is worried about what happened to his seven-year-old daughter; Monica (Alba Rohrwacher) who is suffering from post-natal depression and loneliness; and, on the top floor, Dora (Margherita Buy...

More than any other Italian director of his generation, Nanni Moretti has found a welcoming home at Cannes, where he has now taken eight films to competition and has won two major prizes — best director in 1994 for Dear Diary and the Palme d’Or for The Son’s Room in 2001. Three Floors (Tre Piani) is, by any standard, one of his minor works. It will click mainly with hard-core fans, who will appreciate its recap of Morettian themes, tropes, locations and actors and its heavily underlined political correctness vis-à-vis women and immigrants. Outside Italy, where it has been selling briskly, it ...

More than any other Italian director of his generation, Nanni Moretti has found a welcoming home at Cannes, where he has now taken eight films to competition and has won two major prizes — best director in 1994 for Dear Diary and the Palme d’Or for The Son’s Room in 2001. Three Floors (Tre Piani) is, by any standard, one of his minor works. It will click mainly with hard-core fans, who will appreciate its recap of Morettian themes, tropes, locations and actors and its heavily underlined political correctness vis-à-vis women and immigrants. Outside Italy, where it has been selling briskly, it ...

Film marks Palme d’Or winner’s eighth time in Competition.

The Match Factory has unveiled a slew of deals for Italian director Nanni Moretti’s drama Three Floors, ahead of its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival Competition on Sunday (July 11).

In Europe, it has sold to Austria (Filmladen Filmverleih) Benelux (Cinéart), Greece and Greek-speaking Cyprus (Feelgood Entertainment), Poland (Gutek Film), Portugal (Midas Filmes), (Romania (Independenta Film 97), Spain (Vertigo Films), Switzerland (Filmcoopi) and ex-Yugoslavia (McF Megacom).

In the rest of the world, it has sold to Australia and New Zealand (Palace Entertainment), Taiwan (Andrews Film), Hong Kong (Edko Films...

Exclusive: European arthouse sales force The Match Factory and ICM Partners are teaming up to jointly represent four films playing at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The Match Factory and ICM Partners will co-rep North American rights on Nanni Moretti’s Competition film Tre Piani (Three Floors), and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Competition entry Drive My Car, based on Haruki Murakami’s short story.

Additionally, they will co-rep North American rights on two films in Un Certain Regard: Sebastian Meise’s film Great Freedom starring Franz Rogowski and Georg Friedrich, and Eran Kolirin’s film Let It Be Morning, which marks the director’s return to Cannes where his well-received film The Band’s Visit won an award in Un Certain Regard in 2007.

As previously announced, The Match Factory reps international sales on all four of the titles.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy won Best Director at this year’s Berlinale.

Oscar-nominated French actor Bérénice Bejo (“The Artist”) has joined Pierfrancesco Favino (“The Traitor”), Nanni Moretti, and the Italian cast of romantic drama “Il Colibrì,” which has started shooting in Rome.

Fandango Sales is launching sales at the virtual Cannes market on this high-profile drama directed by Francesca Archibugi (“A Question of the Heart”) based on the eponymous novel by Sandro Veronesi, winner of Italy’s top literary prize, the Premio Strega 2020. The book is now set for translation in 25 countries, including the U.S.

Domenico Procacci’s Fandango, which is producing the €7.85 million ($9.3 million) film with Rai Cinema, has set it up as an Italian-French co-production by teaming up with Anne-Dominique Toussaint Paris-based Les Films des Tournelles. The two companies previously collaborated two decades ago on Emanuele Crialese’s Sicily-set “Respiro,” which in the early aughts made an international splash.

“Colibrì,” which translates literally as “Hummingbird,” is set over several decades.

From 23 April, the festival will offer over 150 films in streaming, homages to Volker Schlöndorff, Mia Hansen-Løve, João Nicolau and two industry days. An unusual edition, entirely online, but a programme nevertheless very rich: nine days of Festival for more than 150 films. The 39th edition of the Bergamo Film Meeting begins on Friday 23 April, with the world premiere of Brucia. Ancora. Paolo Fresu, Elio Biffi, Paolo Spaccamonti, Gerardo Chimini play Il fuoco di Giovanni Pastrone, directed by Andrea Zanoli and Stefano P. Testa and produced by Lab 80 film, in which four musicians score the 1915 film from the great director of Cabiria. Reserved to new auteurs as always, the international competition will present 7 fiction features not screened before in Italy, and 16 documentaries in the Close Up competition. The Europe, Now! section centres on the work of Mia Hansen-Løve (France) and João Nicolau (Portugal), and...

Tre Piani

Italian auteur Nanni Moretti should be set to unveil his thirteenth narrative feature in 2021, Tre Piani, co-written by Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella. As usual, Moretti is part of the cast, joined by a formidable ensemble including Riccardo Scamarcio, Margherita Buy, Alba Rohrwacher, Adriano Giannini, Elena Lietti, Denise Tantucci, Alessandro Sperduti, Anna Bonaiuto, Paolo Graziosi, Tommaso Ragno and Stefano Dionisi. The project is lensed by Dp Michele D’Attanasio.

Moretti won the Palme d’Or in 2001 for The Son’s Room. He competed in 1978 with Ecco Bombo, 1994 with Dear Diary (winning Best Director), 1998 with Aprile, 2006 with The Caiman, 2011 with We Have a Pope and in 2015 with Mia Madre (winning the Ecumenical Jury Prize).…...

This newly restored release of The Son’s Room looks ravishing, and the sound quality is excellent. There isn’t much in the way of extras: just an Interview with Nanni Moretti and Laura Morante at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Both Moretti and Morante are engaging, and offer insight into the film’s development. For example, Moretti reveals he was drawn to the idea of writing his characters as a psychoanalyst to analyse how someone deals with pain and grief, when their job requires them to be attuned to the pain and grief of others.. It is a little stilted. Moretti answers in Italian, which is then translated into French on set, with an English voice over for the viewers at home. It is often quite difficult to hear the English translation over the French interpreter....

“Traveller,” the first major screen credit of “The Crying Games’” Neil Jordan, Canadian Denis Coté’s debut feature “Drifting States” and Arturo Ripstein’s “The Place Without Limits,” a 1977 Mexican LGBTQ movie, are three titles featured in the inaugural lineup of the Locarno Film Festival’s Heritage Online section.

Another, 1954 Egyptian transgender comedy “Miss Hanafi,” underscores the wealth of discoveries offered by Heritage Online, a digital database and screening room collating details of classic film catalogs from all over the world, facilitating the work of buyers, especially VOD platforms in search of rights holders to heritage titles.

Heritage Online fully launches on Saturday with the distribution to its subscribers of a newsletter in which companies detail their offer on the website, plus a panel on heritage film distribution.

Aimed at “establishing a loop between the heritage industry and streaming platforms” by clarifying rights ownership, the site launches with film-by-film details...

Tre piani

Italy’s Nanni Moretti breaks a five-year hiatus (from feature films) with his thirteenth narrative, Tre piani, which is also the director’s first adaptation. Moretti assembles a high profile cast including Riccardo Scamarcio, Margherita Buy, Alba Rohrwacher, Adriano Giannini, Elena Lietti, Denise Tantucci, Alessandro Sperduti, Anna Bonaiuto, Paolo Graziosi, Tommaso Ragno, Stefano Dionisi and himself. Cinematographer Michele D’Attanasio lensed the feature, produced through Sacher Film, Fandando, Rai Cinema and Le Pacte. Moretti has competed seven times in Cannes, with 1978’s Ecco Bombo, 1994’s Dear Diary (winning Best Director), 1998’s Aprile, 2001’s The Son’s Room (which won the Palme d’Or), 2006’s The Caiman, 2011’s We Have a Pope and 2015’s Mia Madre (winning the Ecumenical Jury Prize).…...

A film-maker has to cope with her dying mother and a pompous American star in this tragicomic triumph by Nanni Moretti

Italian tragicomic auteur Nanni Moretti approached the subject of his own mortality in 1993’s international breakthrough feature Caro diario (Dear Diary), which documented, among other things, his all too real encounter with cancer. In his most celebrated feature, the 2001 Palme d’Or winner La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room), he dealt superbly with parental bereavement and mourning. Now, in Mia Madre, he focuses on the impending loss of a mother, drawing heavily upon personal experience (Moretti’s own mother Agata died while he was completing 2011’s Habemus Papam/We Have a Pope), but also keeping enough distance from his subject to achieve a sense of universality. The beautifully observed and delicately balanced result is a sublimely modulated blend of laughter and tears, a film that cuts to...

Check out the latest casting news below: Idris Elba (Luther) and Jasmine Trinca (The Son's Room) are set to join director Pierre Morel's action thriller The Gunman, starring Sean Penn and Javier Bardem. Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) is in final talks for director Terry Loane's coming-of-age drama, Measure of a Man, also starring Riley Griffiths (Super 8). Haley Bennett (Marley & Me) has signed on for Sony's adaptation of The Equalizer, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Denzel Washington, Melissa Leo and Chloë Grace Moretz. Hit the jump for more on each casting announcement. Heat Vision and The Wrap report that Elba and Trinca will join The Gunman. Based on the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, "Penn stars as a professional killer who attempts to leave his job behind for the woman (Trinca) he loves, but finds it's harder than expected. Bardem will play Trinca's husband, who married her to spite the protagonist,...

All the Cannes gossip, including news of Michael Fassbender's fake head and Naomie Harris's long walk to stardom

M vs Moneypenny

Next year's race for the actress Oscars is already taking tasty shape after Cannes. It should be a battle of the Princesses as we see Cannes juror Nicole Kidman in Grace of Monaco go toe-to-toe with Naomi Watts in a film now, finally and officially, named Diana. But there could be another twist as two Bond girls enter the fray. Dame Judi Dench, who was M in the Bond movies, must be a cert for Philomena, the British road movie written by and co-starring Steve Coogan, for which Harvey Weinstein parted with $6m after seeing just a seven-minute showreel at Cannes, clearly scenting a movie that will swell his Oscar cabinet. But Weinstein has also swooped on Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and is, I hear, preparing...

We have an exclusive featurette from the dramatic comedy We Have a Pope, which is currently available on SundanceNow, as well as IFC Films Video on Demand, Amazon Streaming, PS3 Playstation Unlimited, Xbox Zune, Google Play and YouTube.

Michel Piccoli stars as Melville, a cardinal who is unexpectedly elected as the new Pope. Go behind-the-scenes of this indie with commentary by director Nanni Moretti.

We Have A Pope - Exclusive Featurette

Nanni Moretti (The Son's Room, Caro diario) joins forces with the great French actor Michel Piccoli (Contempt, I'm Going Home) to tell the story of Melville, a cardinal who suddenly finds himself elected as the next Pope. Never the front runner and completely caught off guard, he panics as he's presented to the faithful in St. Peter's Square. To prevent a world wide crisis, the Vatican's spokesman calls in an unlikely psychiatrist who is neither religious or all that committed,...

Our guide to the ultimate Cannes 2012 insiders

Lars von Trier: the outcast

Nine-time competition nominee and Palme d'Or winner for 2000's Dancer in the Dark, Von Trier was slung out last year for saying he had sympathy for Hitler at an ill-judged press conference for Melancholia. No film from Von Trier this year – but will he be back next year for Nymphomaniac?

Charlotte Gainsbourg: the golden girl

Combining catwalk poise and dynastic lineage, Gainsbourg gained significant artistic credibility via her Von Trier hookup: Antichrist got her the best actress prize in 2009. This year, she's in the Un Certain Regard section (along with Pete Doherty) with Confession of a Child of the Century.

Ken Loach: the shop steward

The veteran firebrand represents the British cinema the French would like to see: The Angels' Share is his 11th film in competition. He won the Palme for 2006's The Wind That Shakes the Barley,...

Tuscany's best-loved film star Laura Morante draws on Freud, romcom and the Peanuts cartoon in her movie debut as a director and writer

Amid the seedy showbiz excesses of the Silvio Berlusconi era in Italy over the past two decades, Laura Morante was often seen as a symbol of another, more dignified version of Italian culture.

One of the country's most famous actresses, Morante, who could be described as a kind of Italian Catherine Deneuve, is as well known for her intense roles, and the calibre of films she has starred in, as for her remarkable beauty.

Now she is hoping to exploit the changing times in her country by playing her own part in promoting a different, more powerful role for women in cinema.

For the first time, the actress is stepping into the director's role for a film in which she also stars and takes a co-writing credit.

Film: We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam) (2011) Cast includes: Michel Piccoli (A Leap in the Dark), Nanni Moretti (The Son's Room), Margherita Buy (Days and Clouds) Director: Nanni Moretti (The Caiman) Genre: Light Drama | Comedy | Satire (102 minutes) Crowds gather in St. Peter's Square to pray and to wait. It's a sea of scarlet as 108 cardinals make their way to the Sistine Chapel for the conclave. Journalists struggle for scraps of information... a hopeless pursuit. Once they finally get the lights turned on in the Sistine Chapel, the cardinals get down to the task of voting. When each has written a name on his ballot, he signals that he's finished by tapping his pen. As the votes are counted, most cardinals have a similar silent prayer... "Not me. Oh Lord, please not me." Although Cardinal Gregory gets the most votes in the first round, the vote isn't decisive. The smoke is black.

Deeply shrouded in mystery, the election of the Pope is a strange amalgam of modern democracy and ancient ritual. It is also a circumstance that seems ripe for farce. At least Nanni Moretti, perhaps Italy’s most revered contemporary filmmaker, seems to think so. His newest film, We Have a Pope, which premiered last year in Cannes as Habemus Papam, is an often funny, sneakily moving investigation of the Vatican’s less-than-infallible process of choosing the divine, and one man’s rejection of his supposedly divine calling. Starring Michel Piccoli as a would-be Pope who disappears after his election and Moretti himself as the psychoanalyst charged with helping the new Pope through his post-election panic, We Have a Pope finds the director, as he did in 2006′s veiled Berlusconi biopic Il Caimano, pondering the inner life of one of Italy’s most powerful, iconic men.

Since his 1976 feature debut, I...