News

Italian screenwriters Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi have completed the screenplay for The Echo Chamber, the unfinished project by Bernardo Bertolucci he worked on before his death.

Italian producer Indigo Films acquired the dramatic feature in 2018 and now has the project in active development and being shopped for co-production partners at the Toronto Film Festival. Bernardini penned the Italian series Corpo Libero and Rampoldi was a writer on Max’s Gomorrah gangster drama.

Bernardini and Rampoldi wrote the first draft of the screenplay for The Echo Chamber with Bertolucci, and have finished the screenplay. Carolina Iorio is producing the $6 million English language feature that centers on a love story in a single house. Leo, a successful music producer struggling with addiction, starts a relationship with Layla, a passionate, yet enigmatic physiotherapist.

There’s no word on casting for The Echo Chamber, as talks on an Italian director for the project continue.

Crime shows look for a new angle, argued Berlinale Series participants on Monday.

There is no shortage of new offerings, from Berlinale Market Selects’ “Two Sides of the Abyss,” Serbia’s “The Fall” or South Africa’s “Donkerbos,” created by Nico Scheepers, to China’s melancholic, decades-spanning “Why Try to Change Me Now,” with Golden Bear winner Yinan Diao attached as executive producer.

But while there is still an appetite for traditional detective stories, producers and broadcasters are venturing out of the “damaged, middle-aged white detective slot on a Sunday night,” suggested All3Media International’s Rachel Glaister. They are also thinking about their younger audience.

“[‘The Gymnasts’] wasn’t born as a pure crime show. We were also attracted by other themes, including coming-of-age,” said Carlotta Claori of Indigo Film when discussing the series about a tournament in the Italian Alps, gone horribly wrong.

With “The Gymnasts” adding a female detective, absent...

Coming of age thriller “The Gymnasts,” one of the most recent titles from Europe’s public broadcaster partnership The Alliance, has been licensed to over 30 territories, London-based super indie All3Media International confirmed on Monday at the Berlinale Series Market.

Based on Ilaria Bernardini’s bestselling novel “Corpo Libero” (“The Girls Are Good”), the six-part series is produced by the Oscar-winning team at Indigo Film, behind “The Great Beauty,” in co-production with Zdf Neo’s German company Network Movie.

The series has been made in collaboration with Rai Fiction and Paramount+, and in association with All3Media International.

Such powerful partners feeds through to the distribution. Spearheaded by the collaboration of Paramount+ Italia, Paramount +/Viacom has acquired rights to Australia, South Korea, Canada and the U.K.

Now newly announced territories take in New Zealand where “Gymnasts” will air on Paramount+/Viacom.

In a combination of multi-territory streamer deals and...