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A new high-profile event dedicated to global TV series is being launched in Italy with “Bridgerton” star Adjoa Andoh, Evangeline Lilly (“Lost”) and Italy’s ‘Godfather of Disco’ Giorgio Moroder on board to be feted with career awards.

Also set for tributes at the new Italian Global Series Festival (Igsf) are the locally popular Italian comic actor and director Carlo Verdone and beloved actress Elena Sofia Ricci, who recently starred in pubcaster Rai’s top-rated Holocaust drama “La farfalla impazzita.”

Igsf is being touted as a reincarnation of the Roma Fiction Festival, which ran in the Eternal City between 2006 and 2016 and was prompted at the time by an urgency felt by Italy’s TV production community to expand its horizons.

Unlike its predecessor, the new TV event will run in two adjacent Italian seaside resort towns, Riccione and Rimini, with dates set for June 21-28. That slot will add one...

Madonna is slamming the Donald Trump administration for their slew of executive orders targeting marginalized groups.

The pop icon took to her X account (formerly Twitter) on Thursday to express her support for the LGBTQ community after the president, who returned to the White House last Monday, signed an order barring transgender people from serving and enlisting in the military.

“It’s so sad to watch our new Government slowly dismantling all the Freedoms we have been fighting for and Won over the years,” Madonna wrote, adding the LGBTQ pride flag and broken red heart emojis. “Don’t give up the Fight!”

On Monday, Trump signed a controversial executive order titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” The order reinstates a policy from Trump’s first term and rescinds a 2021 order by Joe Biden that allowed trans people to enlist in the military and serve openly. The president has also rolled back diversity,...

Italy has selected Maura Delpero’s Venice Silver Lion winner Vermiglio as its entry for the best international feature Oscar.

Vermiglio won the Grand Jury Prize in Competition at Venice earlier this month. Set in 1944 in the Italian alpine village after which the film is named, it sees the arrival of a deserter soldier disrupt the life of the village teacher and his family, as the eldest daughter falls in love with him.

Producers on the film are Francesca Andreoli, Santiago Fondevila, Leonardo Guerra Seragnoli and Delpero, for Italy’s Cinedora with Rai Cinema, in co-production with France’s Charades...

Italy has selected Maura Delpero’s Venice Silver Lion winner Vermiglio as its entry for the best international feature Oscar.

Vermiglio won the Grand Jury Prize in Competition at Venice earlier this month. Set in 1944 in the Italian alpine village after which the film is named, it sees the arrival of a deserter soldier disrupt the life of the village teacher and his family, as the eldest daughter falls in love with him.

Producers on the film are Francesca Andreoli, Santiago Fondevila, Leonardo Guerra Seragnoli and Delpero, for Italy’s Cinedora with Rai Cinema, in co-production with France’s Charades...

Exclusive: After announcing its first comedy special for Netflix — a current events-themed talk show format, hosted by Tim Dillon — Elan Gale’s TheYearOfElan Productions has struck a first-look deal with the world’s largest independent producer of live stand-up shows, Don’t Tell Comedy.

A go-to platform for emerging comedians, Don’t Tell will collaborate with the company to develop and produce a range of unscripted content. Along with Head of Creative and Development Bill Dixon, Gale will shepherd the new partnership, working directly with Don’t Tell Comedy’s executive team, including CEO Kyle Kazanjian-Amory, COO Brett Kushner and Vice President of Production Marissa Gallant. Another partner on projects emerging from the deal will be ITV America, which set an overall deal with TheYearOfElan last year.

In a statement on the deal, TheYearOfElan’s Dixon said, “We’ve been following the growth of Don’t Tell Comedy for years, as fans,...

Christina Applegate in Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead Photo: Outlaw/Hbo/Mercury-Douglas/Kobal/Shutterstock For those old enough to remember it, kids ruled the ’90s. Between our very own “Choice Awards” and a steady stream of slime to shower celebrities with, Nickelodeon, The Disney Channel, and...

New Italian sales company Vision Distribution, headed by veteran executive Catia Rossi, is launching from the European Film Market with a still-small multi-genre slate but big ambitions to become a leading global distributor of Italy’s domestic output.

Having a new player with muscle and expertise specifically dedicated to distributing Italian movies internationally is good news for Italian producers and “signals the vitality” of the country’s current filmmaking output, says Rossi. It also is another sign of a market shift towards sales and production forces increasingly merging.

Vision Distribution’s muscle comes from being the sales arm of a unique content alliance formed in 2016 by pay TV operator Sky Italia and five prominent Italian production companies — ITV-owned Cattleya, Fremantle’s Wildside, Lucisano Media Group, Palomar and Indiana Production — that inked a deal to jointly release their films domestically. Their new international sales arm just takes the pact one step further.

Leanne Tonkes, Martin Sacks and Victoria Garrett.

Martin Sacks enjoyed working with director Victoria Garrett in her debut feature Don’t Tell so much that he was keen to collaborate with her again.

The actor had been mulling the idea of a film about a father and son relationship which is tested by an unforeseen tragedy, so he pitched the concept to Garrett early last year.

She immediately sparked to the idea and is now developing the project with Sacks, screenwriter John Ridley and producer Leanne Tonkes.

Sacks will play the lead, the father of two teenage sons who live in a small country town. He’s an ordinary man on an ordinary day until he finds his life turned upside down by an indiscriminate tragedy.

Susie Porter, Nathaniel Dean and Daniela Farinacci will play supporting roles.

For the key role of the 15-year-old son the producers are keen to find a fresh face.

Much has been made of the fact that, within two weeks, we have two movies that deal - if only indirectly - with the crisis in newspapers that is threatening contemporary journalism as we know it. In last week's State of Play, Helen Mirren, as the editor of the Washington, D.C., newspaper where Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams work, admonishes them about the fact that the paper has new owners - and they want stories that sell copies. The implication is that the bottom-line-oriented business people who have taken over the nation's print media are more interested in profits than truth, in making money than serving the public trust. In this week's The Soloist, Robert Downey Jr., as real-life L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez, watches as one colleague after another packs his belongings into boxes and is escorted from the building by...

ROME -- Italian films, for years maligned even in their own country, are enjoying a renaissance, with boxoffice booming and critical accolades rolling in. According to Italian cinema monitoring company Cinetel, some 34% of Italian boxoffice receipts have come from Italian films over the first four months of this year, compared with 23% for all of 2005 and less than 15% in most years. Figures have been buoyed by such commercial successes as Carlo Verdone's Il Mio miglior nemico, Fausto Brizzi's Notte prima degli esami, Nanni Moretti's The Cayman, Michele Placido's Crime Novel, and Cristina Comencini's Don't Tell -- all of which have raked in more than €5 million ($6.4 million). Il Mio miglior nemico heads the pack, approaching €20 million ($25.7 million) in ticket sales.

Having invited 91 countries to submit films, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Tuesday that a record 58 took the Academy up on its offer. Three countries that had not previously been represented submitted films: Costa Rica, which offered Esteban Ramirez's Caribe; Fiji, which submitted Vilsoni Hereniko's The Land Has Eyes; and Iraq, which entered Jamil Rostami's Requiem of Snow. Several movies arrive in the wake of local controversies. Christian Carion's Joyeux Noel, from France, had drawn a formal complaint from France's independent producers union, the Societe des Producteurs Independants, claiming that the choice of film -- by a seven-member selection committee appointed by the state's funding body, the Center National de la Cinematographie -- was "politically motivated." The SPI, lacking legal recourse, has since backed off. When Italy's first submission, Saverio Costanzo's Private, was ruled ineligible by the Academy because none of its dialogue is in Italian, Italy submitted Cristina Comencini's La bestia nel cuore.

ROME -- Despite a chorus of voices calling for a boycott, Italy's Oscar selection committee picked Cristina Comencini's La Bestia Nel Cuore (Don't Tell) to represent Italy in the race for the best foreign-language Oscar. Don't Tell, a competition film at the most recent Venice International Film Festival, replaces Saverio Costanzo's Private, which was ruled ineligible by the Academy last week because the film's dialogue was not predominantly in Italian. The dialogue in Private, which follows the travails of a Palestinian family whose house is occupied by Israeli troops, is in English, Arabic and Hebrew.

Giovanni Veronesi's Manuale D'Amore (Manual of Love), the Italian boxoffice hit directed by Giovanni Veronesi, will kick off Cinema Italian Style, a two-week showcase of contemporary Italian cinema, on Thursday at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Giovanna Mezzogiorno, named best actress at the recent Venice International Film Festival, and director Christina Comencini will accompany the screening of their film La Bestia Nel Cuoure (Don't Tell), screening at the Egyptian Oct. 7. The closing night film Oct. 16 will be the L.A. premiere of Pupi Avati's "So When are the Girls Coming?".

VENICE, Italy -- Italian independent producer Domenico Procacci took aim at Venice International Film Festival artistic director Marco Muller for ignoring his mandate to discover first-time directors in his selection process. Procacci, in town with first-time helmer Fausto Paravidino's Texas, which is screening in the Venice Horizons section, openly questioned at a news conference why his film was not selected to compete for the Golden Lion. "For Muller, in fact, as he declared to the press, the festival should photograph the present and doesn't have to discover new talent. I do not share this view," said Procacci, who noted that the three Italian films in competition -- Roberto Faenza's I Giorni dell'Abbandono, Cristina Comencini's La Bestia Nel Cuore and Pupi Avati's La Seconda Notte di Nozze -- are all from established directors.

VENICE -- James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro and the Coen Brothers waltzed their way onto the Lido Tuesday for the premiere of the bawdy musical Romance & Cigarettes. Director Turturro's movie was the second U.S. title to unspool here in competition. One of the largest entourages to arrive yet provided ample opportunity for a packed news conference to quiz the filmmaker and stars. But the event was largely dominated by questions fired to Sarandon about her views on Hollywood and politics. Sarandon joshed that the only way to end your career in Hollywood was to get "old and fat." She said Hollywood wasn't really a "political entity that is going to evolve in some way." She also said that it was a pity that men got paid more than women to be in movies but added that many of the roles did not appeal to her. The movie script, described by producers Joel and Ethan Coen as "sufficiently demented" to bring them on board, trades in foulmouthed dialogue and lewd sexual references. "Dirty language of a certain kind is a certain art and everything can't be sweet," said Turturro, who penned the project in addition to directing it. "We made a list of interesting expressions and as long as it is humorous it is fun." Prior to the news conference, a war of words broke out between Venice festival organizers and a major Italian newswire service. Organizers said Italy's second-largest wire service, Adnkronos, had misrepresented the tone and content of festival coverage from outlets including The Hollywood Reporter. Adnkronos ran an article -- picked up by the Venice daily Il Gazzettino -- which said that U.S. press coverage had slammed the festival organization and the movies so far. But organizers fired back at the wire service, saying in a press statement that the "tone and comments" of coverage "were in fact positive." As the war of words broke out, Venice entered the home stretch and Italian entries pushed to the fore. Tuesday saw the first Italian movie unspool in competition as Roberto Faenza's I Giorni dell'Abbandono hit the screen. Both Cristina Comencini's La Bestia Nel Cuore and Pupi Avati's La Seconda Notte di Nozze also will vie for the jury's attention as Saturday's awards ceremony approaches.