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Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino is this year’s recipient of the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo award to be bestowed upon him during the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, which will also feature a retrospective of his films that will be screened as part of the fest’s “tribute to” program.

The honor and tribute will be “in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the art of cinema,” Sarajevo fest organizers said on Tuesday. Sorrentino will also hold a masterclass and “share his thoughts on contemporary art in a conversation with the audience,” they noted.

“I am deeply honored to receive this prestigious recognition and grateful for the attention given to my filmography,” said Sorrentino. “I look forward to being with you in Sarajevo. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

The fest highlighted the effect the Italian director and screenwriter’s oeuvre has had on audiences. “Paolo...

Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino will be this year’s recipient of the Sarajevo Film Festival’s Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award and a retrospective of his films will be shown as part of the festival’s “Tribute To” program.

Sorrentino will also hold a Masterclass and share his thoughts on contemporary art in a conversation with the audience.

The award is in recognition of his “outstanding contribution to the art of cinema.”

Jovan Marjanović, director of the festival, said: “Paolo Sorrentino managed to do what every filmmaker dreams of – he left a global impact through local, personal stories. With visually luxurious, emotionally filled and intellectually insightful style, he won the hearts of audiences around the world, who saw his characters, no matter how eccentric or withdrawn, as a mirror of our world, often absurd, sometimes cruel, but always deeply human. The Honorary Heart of Sarajevo is a recognition of the...

The role that Italy has played in film history is significant with Neorealist greats such as Roberto Rossellini or stylized auteurs like Federico Fellini shaping a view on the world that is both fantastical and honest. In modern Italian cinema, the most significant voice that has the same priority of both style and substance is the underrated, yet internationally recognized Italian director, Paolo Sorrentino. His filmography, as diverse and far reaching as it is, remains one of the best modern cinematic styles in both visual and thematic terms. Visual feasts and introspective looks into loss, aging, and beauty in his spiritually grounded world of cinema make him a modern day film auteur worth looking into. Things to do: Subscribe to The Hollywood Insider’s YouTube Channel, by clicking here. Limited Time Offer – Free Subscription to The Hollywood Insider Click here to read more on The Hollywood Insider’s vision, values...

January 2025 could mark a bleak month for very specific reasons, but in that month one can watch a nicely curated collection of David Bowie’s best performances. Nearly a decade since he passed, the iconic actor (who had some other trades) is celebrated with The Man Who Fell to Earth, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Linguini Incident, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Basquiat. (Note: watch The Missing Pieces under Fire Walk with Me‘s Criterion edition for about three times as much Phillip Jeffries.) It’s a retrospective-heavy month: Nicole Kidman, Cameron Crowe, Ethan Hawke, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Paolo Sorrentino, and Sean Baker are given spotlights; the first and last bring with them To Die For and Take Out‘s Criterion Editions, joining Still Walking, Hunger, and A Face in the Crowd.

“Surveillance Cinema” brings Thx 1138, Body Double, Minority Report, and others, while “Love in Disguise” offers films by Lubitsch,...

Italian director Paolo Sorrentino is reteaming with Neapolitan actor Toni Servillo, star of Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty, for his next feature, titled La Grazia.

Details of the new film are being kept under wraps, but it is said to be a love story. Sorrentino, who also wrote the script, is set to begin shooting next Spring. Annamaria Morelli, head of Fremantle-owned The Apartment will proceed together with Sorrentino’s shingle Numero 10, in association with PiperFilm, which will release the movie in Italy.

PiperFilm has had huge local success with Sorrentino’s latest, Parthenope, a sumptuous love letter to his native Naples. The feature has grossed more than $8 million at the local box office, making it the most successful Italian film of the year and surpassing the Italian take for Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. A24 picked up Parthenope for the U.S. ahead of its Cannes festival premiere...

Paolo Sorrentino – whose latest film “Parthenope” is scoring record-breaking grosses at the Italian box office – is set to return behind camera to shoot “La Grazia,” a drama that will re-team the Oscar-winning director with “The Great Beauty” actor Toni Servillo.

Plot details of Sorrentino’s next film are being kept under wraps besides the fact that it will be a love story set somewhere in Italy. The title, “La Grazia,” can be translated in English as “Grace.”

Servillo is best known to international audiences for his memorable turn as Roman writer and socialite Jep Gambardella who embarks on a Dantesque descent amid the Eternal City’s grotesque glitterati in “The Great Beauty,” which won the 2014 best international film Oscar.

The Neapolitan actor has appeared in seven of Sorrentino’s 10 feature films to date, starting with his dazzling debut, “One Man Up” in which Servillo played an ageing cocaine-addicted crooner. Besides “The Great Beauty,...

Paolo Sorrentino has done a wide range of films but until his most personal, The Hand of God two years ago (a prize winner in Venice), he had not returned to Naples, the land of his youth, except for the very first feature he made, 2001’s One Man Up. Since then though, he has been to Cannes with his films six times, and his impressive list of movies have included The Consequences of Love, Il Divo, Loro and his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty. There have been more mixed reactions for his starry English-language films like Youth and This Must Be the Place, but Italy seems to drive his creative mojo and may be closest to his heart in the current phase of his filmmaking career when he has found new inspiration by going back to his youth, first in Hand of God which closely reflected his own coming of age in Naples,...

Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino is one of Italy's most acclaimed filmmakers. Since his 2001 feature debut One Man Up, he has directed a string of gems, usually featuring rich characterization and stylish visuals. In this regard, he is frequently described as a throwback to Italy's golden age of auteur cinema; his movies have been compared to the work of directors like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His defining film thus far is The Great Beauty, about an aging playboy reassessing his life, which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2014.

Gary Oldman has joined the cast of Paolo Sorrentino’s new film that is currently shooting in Naples.

Details about Oldman’s role in the still-untitled Italian-language drama are being kept under wraps.

Sorrentino’s 10th feature is about a woman named Partenope “who bears the name of her city but is neither siren nor myth,” as the auteur – who won an international Oscar in 2013 for “The Great Beauty” –put it in a statement to Variety in June, when the shoot started.

In Greek mythology, Parthenope, as she is known in English, is the name of a siren who having failed to entice Odysseus with her songs, cast herself into the sea and drowned. Her body washed up on a symbolic foundational rock where Naples lies. Neapolitans in Italy are also known as “Parthenopeans.”

“Her long life embodies the full repertoire of human existence: youth’s lightheartedness and its demise,...

Roughly two years after his return to Naples for “The Hand of God,” Paolo Sorrentino is heading back to his hometown for another movie steeped in the lore of his native southern port city.

The still untitled film is about a woman named Partenope “who bears the name of her city but is neither siren nor myth,” the Oscar-winning auteur has revealed to Variety.

In Greek mythology, Parthenope, as she is known in English, is the name of a siren who having failed to entice Odysseus with her songs, cast herself into the sea and drowned. Her body washed up on a symbolic foundational rock where Naples lies. Neapolitans in Italy are also known as “Parthenopeans.”

Shooting on Sorrentino’s new film is set to start “at the end of June” and will take place in Naples and on the island of Capri.

Here is the film’s full director’s statement,...

In a new series, Variety catches up with the directors of the films shortlisted for the International Feature Oscar to discuss their road to the awards, what they’ve learned so far, and what’s taken them off guard.

Paolo Sorrentino, who won an international Oscar for “The Great Beauty” in 2014, is back in contention with autobiographical film “The Hand of God,” which marks the director’s return to filmmaking in his native Naples 20 years after his debut, “One Man Up.”

This Netflix Italian original film is the story of a goofy kid named Fabietto who starts harboring a passion for filmmaking in the tumultuous Naples of the late 1980s. As Sorrentino has put it, “it’s a tale of destiny and family, of sport and cinema, love and loss.”

What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for the best international feature Oscar, after already winning this prize once?...

To shoot “The Hand of God,” Paolo Sorrentino returned to his roots and did a lot of things backwards.

“After 20 years of filmmaking I was perhaps a bit tired of the spot I was in,” he says. So in tackling the autobiographical story — which brought him back to his native Naples two decades after his debut “L’Uomo in Più” — he decided to proceed differently.

“Visually this film is the opposite of my other films,” Sorrentino notes, pointing out that in his other works, such as “The Great Beauty” and “Youth,” it was the choice of settings — the city of Rome and the Swiss Alps, respectively — and also the light, that had to “bend to an aesthetic idea that I had in mind.”

But in “Hand of God” “it’s exactly the reverse,” he says. “It’s the aesthetic aspects that had to adapt to the locations,” which were dictated by...

Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God” kicked off its theatrical rollout with a gala event Tuesday evening in the director’s native Naples, the city to which he returned after 20 years to shoot his most personal film.

“I am as excited as I was at my wedding,” said Sorrentino ahead of the red carpet screening in the central Cinema Metropolitan attended by some 400 guests including Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini and players from the 1980s Ssc Napoli soccer team, once led by late great champ Diego Maradona who, as the film reveals, involuntarily saved Sorrentino’s life.

Sorrentino underlined that he was particularly pleased, and also anxious, about the Naples premiere — which was followed by a reception at Naples’ Teatro San Carlo opera house — because “here the film can be understood in all its nuances; a test that is not easy to face.”

The city of Naples also took...

The country’s box office is still sputtering but Italian cinema is instead “in a state of grace,” as Venice chief Alberto Barbera put it recently as he announced the five features from Italy that are competing for the fest’s Golden Lion. It’s the most he’s ever selected from Italy.

And Barbera is adamant that he didn’t allocate almost one-fourth of Venice’s 21 competition slots to Cinema Italiano “to support our colors at a difficult time.”

“Some years he selects very little from Italy,” notes Barbara Salabè, who is the top Warner Bros. exec in Italy. “But this year Alberto told me: ‘the [Italian] films are good.’”

The Italian contingent on the Lido spans a wide range of cinematic styles, from “Il Buco,” an eclectic film with no dialogue or music about a group of speleologists who, in 1961, discover the world’s second-deepest cave — directed by underground helmer Michelangelo Frammartino,...

In movies as disparate and vividly imagined as Il Divo, Loro, the Oscar winning The Great Beauty, as well as English language efforts like This Must Be The Place, Youth, and his TV miniseries The Young Pope and The New Pope Paolo Sorrentino has always seemed to be a director with a large brush and even more of a Fellini influence in some cases. That is why his latest, a largely autobiographical coming of age film called The Hand Of God which just had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and is next headed this weekend to Telluride, is such a departure, one absent the usual flourish the director often favors. Instead is an enormously effective and touching personal memoir of growing up in Naples circa the 1980’s. In many ways this is Sorrentino’s Amarcord, Day For Night, Cinema Paradiso,Pain And Glory, but first and foremost...

When Paolo Sorrentino was 16 he lost his parents in an accident involving the heating system in a mountain house where he always used to go to with them. But that weekend he didn’t go, because he wanted to watch his idol Diego Maradona and S.S.C Napoli play a soccer match in Tuscany. And that saved him. Having recently turned 50 amid the coronavirus lockdown, the Oscar-winning director of “The Great Beauty” decided he was “old enough” to tackle his autobiography. So after 20 years he returned to his native Naples to shoot “The Hand of God.”

This Netflix Original film, which world-premieres Thursday in Venice, is the story of a goofy kid named Fabietto who starts harboring a passion for filmmaking in the tumultuous Naples of the late 1980s. As Sorrentino puts it, “it’s a tale of destiny and family, of sport and cinema, love and loss.” Excerpts from the conversation follow.

Venice this year has the goods and the glitz with a star-studded lineup packed with hotly anticipated titles such as Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune,” Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” and Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel,” alongside more esoteric titles. It’s likely to make the Lido a place to reignite theatrical and bolster its standing as an awards season kingmaker.

The U.S. studios and indies will be out in force. European cinema is well-represented, especially Italy. Latin America has a significant presence, as does the Middle East. The only notable absence is China, which, due to Covid restrictions, makes travel to and from the country extremely difficult for filmmakers.

“Up until recently all Americans were in lockdown, which was much more rigid than what European productions had to contend with,” says Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera. “Americans shuttered for a year, films were not released,...

The Venice Film Festival has unveiled a star-studded lineup full of hotly anticipated new works from Jane Campion, Ana Lily Amirpour, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Denis Villeneuve, Ridley Scott, Paolo Sorrentino and Edgar Wright — to name a few standouts — who are likely to bolster the Lido’s standing as an awards season kingmaker.

Amirpour’s “Mona Lisa And The Blood Moon,” in competition, starring Kate Hudson as girl with unusual powers who escapes from a mental asylum, will bring the Iranian-American director back to Venice after her post-apocalyptic cannibal love story “The Bad Batch,” scored the Special Jury Prize in 2016.

Campion, as anticipated by Variety, is competing with “The Power of the Dog,” a drama about feuding brothers set in 1920s Montana starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons. “Dog” is one of two Netflix Original films in the Venice competition, the other one being Paolo Sorrentino’s personal drama “The Hand of God,...

Jane Campion, a Cannes legend who remains the only female director to have won the Palme d’Or with “The Piano,” will have her latest drama “The Power of the Dog” world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

A Netflix Original, “The Power of the Dog” stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons. The movie’s screenplay was penned by Campion, based on the 1967 novel of the same name by Thomas Savage.

Set in the 1920s, the film is about a pair of wealthy Montana brothers, Phil (Cumberbatch) and George Burbank. Phil is brilliant and cruel, while George is fastidious and gentle. Together, they are joint owners of the biggest ranch in their Montana valley. When George secretly marries local widow Rose (Dunst), an angry Phil wages a relentless war to destroy her by using her son Peter as a pawn. Pic is produced by BBC Films,...

Filming on Marco Chiappetta’s first work, a Teatri Uniti and RiverStudio production, has wrapped in Naples. Shooting has wrapped on Santa Lucia, the debut work by the 29-year-old Neapolitan screenwriter and director Marco Chiappetta. Led by Renato Carpentieri and Andrea Renzi who are cast as two brothers, the film is produced by Teatri Uniti – the long-standing theatre company directed by Toni Servillo which has supported cinema productions such as Morte di un matematico napoletano and L’amore molesto by Mario Martone, as well as One Man Up and The Consequences of Love by Paolo Sorrentino – together with RiverStudio. The film recounts the return to Naples, following forty years spent in Buenos Aires, of Roberto, a writer who is now blind, of his meeting with his brother Lorenzo and of the troubling past which emerges from their childhood memories, set against the backdrop of the city as we’ve never seen.

Toni Servillo (“The Great Beauty”) is set to star in Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God,” which started shooting last week in Naples, the Oscar-winning director’s hometown.

Production of Sorrentino’s new pic, which is produced by Fremantle-backed The Apartment for Netflix, has since moved to the Sicilian island of Stromboli, according to a well-placed source who on Monday confirmed Italian press reports regarding both Servillo’s casting and the film’s shoot.

Fremantle did not respond to request for comment.

Described by Sorrentino in promotional materials as an “intimate and personal film,” “The Hand of God” marks Sorrentino’s return to making a film mainly set, and shot, in his native Naples, 20 years after his feature debut “One Man Up” in 2001, in which Servillo played a cocaine-addled club singer.

Servillo, a frequent fixture in Sorrentino’s work, has since performed in four other films by the Neapolitan director.

Exactly twenty years ago, Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino shot his directorial debut “One Man Up” in his hometown of Naples. Just four years later, Sorrentino won the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film for “The Great Beauty.” In recent years, Sorrentino has had his hand at directing television, with the Jude Law-led “The Young Pope” in 2016 and “The New Pope” in 2019.

Continue reading Paolo Sorrentino To Direct ‘The Hand Of God’ For Netflix at The Playlist.

Set in Naples, shooting is soon to begin on this film produced by The Apartment which promises to be intimate and personal. Paolo Sorrentino is returning to his beloved Naples, twenty years on from his debut with One Man Up, to film The Hand of God. Made for Netflix, the title is produced by Lorenzo Mieli on behalf of The Apartment - who belong to the Fremantle group - and by Paolo Sorrentino, who is also putting his name to the screenplay. Shooting will begin shortly in the Neapolitan city. The title is a clear reference to Diego Armando Maradona (one of the director’s stated heroes) and the historic phrase uttered by the Argentine champion on the occasion of a sensational handball goal at the 1986 World Cup, but not much is known about the plot of The Hand of God, other than the fact that is will be a.

Paolo Sorrentino will return to his hometown of Naples for feature film “The Hand of God” for Netflix.

Produced by “The Great Beauty” director alongside Lorenzo Mieli for Fremantle-backed The Apartment Pictures, the film will be produced in Naples. Sorrentino will both write and direct, though further details about the project remain sparse. The film’s title, however, may be a reference to Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona, who was a character in Sorrentino’s 2015 film “Youth.”

In an interview with Variety in 2015, Sorrentino said of the football legend: “Aside from all the things I’ve said before about Maradona, he involuntarily saved my life. I lost my parents when I was 16 in an accident with the heating system in a house in the mountains where I always used to go to with them. That weekend, I didn’t go because I wanted to go watch Maradona and S.S.C...

Oscar-winning Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has been set to write and direct The Hand Of God for Netflix.

The Youth and The Great Beauty filmmaker most recently helmed HBO series The New Pope and Silvio Berlusconi biopic Loro.

His latest pic will be produced by Lorenzo Mieli for The Apartment Pictures, a Fremantle company, with Sorrentino.

Plot details have not been released yet but it is based on an original idea by the director and the team are promising “a personal film” taking Sorrentino back to his hometown of Naples, where it will shoot. His debut feature, 2001’s One Man Up, was filmed in the southern Italian city.

The ‘hand of god’ is commonly associated in Europe with Argentine soccer play Diego Maradona, who used it to describe his goal against England at the 1986 FIFA World Cup. Maradona had a famous spell as the star of the Napoli soccer team...

Director Paolo Sorrentino talks tackling TV and The Pope in new Jude Law series.

The Young Pope marks auteur filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s first foray into TV.

The Italian director, known for cinematic feasts including Oscar-winner The Great Beauty and Il Divo, will this weekend unveil the first two episodes of the anticipated, big-budget HBO-Sky-Canal Plus series on the Lido, where Venice head Alberto Barbera has reserved it the prestigious first Saturday night slot.

Jude Law stars in The Young Pope as the newly elected and unconventional Pope Pius Xiii (aka Lenny Belardo), a young man struggling under the weight of his new responsibilities and the history of becoming the first American pontiff.

The robust supporting cast includes Diane Keaton, Silvio Orlando, Javier Cámara and Cécile De France. Sorrentino co-wrote the ten-episode series with a trio of decorated screenwriters: Umberto Contarello (The Great Beauty), Tony Grisoni (Southcliffe) and Stefano Rulli (Suburra). Italian outfit Wildside is main...

Director Paolo Sorrentino talks tackling TV and The Pope in new Jude Law series.

The Young Pope marks auteur filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s first foray into TV.

The Italian director, known for cinematic feasts including Oscar-winner The Great Beauty and Il Divo, will this weekend unveil the first two episodes of the anticipated, big-budget HBO-Sky-Canal Plus series on the Lido, where Venice head Alberto Barbera has reserved it the prestigious first Saturday night slot.

Jude Law stars in The Young Pope as the newly elected and unconventional Pope Pius Xiii (aka Lenny Belardo), a young man struggling under the weight of his new responsibilities and the history of becoming the first American pontiff.

The robust supporting cast includes Diane Keaton, Silvio Orlando, Javier Cámara and Cécile De France. Sorrentino co-wrote the eight-episode series with a trio of decorated screenwriters: Umberto Contarello (The Great Beauty), Tony Grisoni (Southcliffe) and Stefano Rulli (Suburra). Italian outfit Wildside is main...

In Paolo Sorrentino’s new series “The Young Pope,” Jude Law stars as the fictional Pope Pius Xiii, the first American Pope. Young and charming, Pius struggles with his new responsibilities as a man of God for the entire world, but Pius’ mysterious nature and internal contradictions brings him attention in the Vatican and raises some new questions about his righteous path. The series also stars Diane Keaton (“Annie Hall”) as Sister Mary, a nun who raised Pius and helped him reach the papacy, James Cromwell (“L.A. Confidential”) as Pius’ mentor, Silvio Orlando (“The Caiman”), Sebastian Roché (“The Last of the Mohicans”), Scott Shepherd (“Bridge of Spies”), Cécile de France (“The Jungle Book”), and more. Watch a trailer for the series above.

Read More: Cannes: Paolo Sorrentino on Why the Boos for ‘Youth’ Amused Him

Director Paolo Sorrentino’s body of work has been greatly acclaimed by critics and audiences alike. His directorial debut “One Man Up” won the Nastro d’Argento for Best New Director; his second feature “The Consequences of Love” competed at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and won five David di Donatello awards, including Best Director; his fourth film “Il Divo” won the Jury Prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival; his sixth film “The Great Beauty” was a great success in the United States, winning the Best Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars and the Golden Globes. His latest film “Youth,” starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, received positive notices and was nominated for an Oscar.

“The Young Pope” is Sorrentino’s first TV series. It will air in October on Sky’ Sky Atlantic channel in Europe, and will premiere on HBO at an undetermined date.

Read More: Interview: Paolo Sorrentino Talks ‘Youth,’ The Happiest Moment Of Filmmaking, Michael Caine, Sun Kill Moon & More

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Paolo Sorrentino to receive Starz Denver Film Festival 2013 honor Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino will receive the fifth Maria and Tommaso Maglione Italian Filmmaker Award at the 2013 Starz Denver Film Festival. Sorrentino will be handed his award prior to the screening of The Great Beauty / La grande bellezza on November 16, 2013, at 1:00 p.m. at the Sie FilmCenter. Sponsored by the Anna & John J. Sie Foundation, the award, which "recognizes the best in contemporary Italian cinema," includes a $10,000 honorarium. Previous recipients of the Maria and Tommaso Maglione Italian Filmmaker Award are Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Massimo Natale, Gianni Di Gregorio, and Federico Bondi. ‘The Great Beauty’ The Starz Denver Film Festival press release describes Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty — clearly influenced by Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita — as follows: Populated by the debauched, disenchanted or simply disinterested elite of Roman society, Sorrentino’s latter-day Babylon revolves around Jep Gambardella...