Latest news with #RAICinema
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
RAI Cinema Chief Paolo Del Brocco on Selling ‘Heads or Tails' in Cannes and a New Victor Kossakovsky Doc Made With Italian Botanist Stefano Mancuso (EXCLUSIVE)
Roughly a year after its launch, Italian state broadcaster RAI's new sales unit for film is at Cannes with its first full-fledged slate headlined by surreal Western 'Heads or Tails' starring John C. Reilly as Buffalo Bill during his stay in Italy that is launching in Un Certain Regard. The RAI Cinema International Distribution slate also includes a new under-the-radar doc by prominent Russian documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky, known for 'Gunda' and 'Aquarela.' Kossakovsky is now making another ecology-themed doc titled 'Tears for Firs' in collaboration with Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso, a pioneer in the plant neurobiology movement who has written several best-selling books including 'Tree Stories.' 'It's about the entire life cycle of trees and the correlation between plant life and the life of our planet,' said RAI Cinema chief Paolo Del Brocco. More from Variety 'Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk' Review: A Stirring Chronicle of a Gaza Journalist Who Was Killed Before Its Cannes Premiere Elle Fanning Wipes Away Tears as Palme Buzz Builds for Joachim Trier's 'Sentimental Value,' Scoring Massive 15-Minute Cannes Ovation 'Sentimental Value' Review: Joachim Trier's Resonant Family Drama Treats a Beautiful Old House as the Foundation for Healing 'Tears for First' is being produced by Rome-based Be Water Film with RAI Cinema. Del Brocco in Cannes spoke to Variety about how the new Italian sales outfit has been faring and what's in its pipeline. Why did you launch a sales unit and how has it been going? We are Italy's main movie producers, so it made sense for us to complete the integration of our film business by starting to directly handle sales on a small portion of the films that we produce, co-produce, and distribute in order to give them greater visibility in global markets. Both in terms of commercial sales and distribution and also greater participation in festivals. We have essentially geared our sales side mainly towards new Italian cinema, as our slate shows. And after a year we have a more solid lineup and some results to show. We started with Margherita Vicario's musical comedy 'Gloria!' which sold to 40 countries, we sold Trudy Styler's documentary 'Posso Entrare? An Ode to Naples' to 35 countries, including to Hulu in the U.S. And we recently had great success with 'Madly' by 'Perfect Strangers' director Paolo Genovese that has sold to 40 territories and is still selling. More importantly, like 'Perfect Strangers' we are selling remake rights. We just sold 'Madly' to China and Paolo will be attending the Shanghai Film Festival with this film. What are your expectations for 'Heads or Tails' in terms of sales? So, first off, it's the second feature by these two directors, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppi, whose previous film 'The Tale of King Crab' made a splash in Directors' Fortnight. It's a very original film which I think is going to sell well and we are also distributing it in Italy, so we really believe in it. The cast is excellent because, besides John C. Reilly ,it has Alessandro Borghi ('Supersex') and French star Nadia Tereszkiewicz ('Red Island'). And it's a very gripping story about when Buffalo Bill came to Italy. So it's a very buzzy film and we've had plenty of buyers at the market screenings. Of course the fact that it's playing towards the end of the festival means we can't benefit from reviews yet, but it is sparking great interest and these are directors who we want to continue to work with going forward. Below are other standout fresh titles in RAI Cinema International Distribution slate: — 'A Year of School,' directed by Laura Samani. This is the second feature by Samani who made a splash with 'Small Body' that was a 2021 Cannes Critics' Week standout. It's an adaptation of Italian author Giani Stuparich's 1929 novel of the same name that's been transposed to 2007 and set in all-male high-school class in Trieste where the arrival of an exuberant 17-year-old Swedish girl named Fred disrupts existing dynamics. — 'Siblings,' directed by Greta Scarano. Matilda De Angelis ('Fuori') stars as the sister of an autistic man named Omar who is forced to return to her hometown to care for her older brother named Omar in this tender comedy that marks the directorial debut of Scarano, an actor known for roles in 'The Name of The Rose' and the Italian adaptation of British TV series 'Liar.' — 'Elisa — Io la volevo uccidere.' A new psychological drama by Italian director Leonardo Di Costanzo ('The Inner Cage,' 'The Intruder') toplining French-Moroccan multi-hyphenate Roschd Zem ('Days of Glory,' 'The Innocent') and Italy's Barbara Ronchi ('Kidnapped'). –– 'Christmas Song,' a doc by Roberta Torre ('Tano to Die For') about female inmates in a Milan penitentiary who are preparing to perform Christmas carols behind bars and provides several backstories of why they are in jail. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Six Billion Dollar Man' Review: Straight-Ahead Julian Assange Doc Looks Pessimistically Toward a Post-Truth World
The saga of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has dragged on long enough, and complicatedly enough, to render a number of past films about him, if not obsolete, clear period pieces. Documentaries like Alex Gibney's 2013 'We Steal Secrets' and Laura Poitras' 2016 'Risk,' both produced during the Obama era, are informed by a very different political climate from the one we're in now — while neither could have anticipated how the Australian editor and activist's legal difficulties would escalate in the years to come. (Bill Condon's technothriller-styled 2013 Assange biopic 'The Fifth Estate,' meanwhile, felt premature from the get-go.) With Assange finally freed last year after 12 years of confinement or outright imprisonment in the U.K., the time feels right for an expansive catch-up on the whole knotty affair: Enter Eugene Jarecki's plainly presented but detail-packed documentary 'The Six Billion Dollar Man,' which premiered at Cannes (with Assange himself present) in the festival's Special Screenings program. Beginning with the founding of initially modest startup WikiLeaks in the mid-2000s and the swift impact of its uncompromising journalism in media and political spheres alike, the film progresses in mostly linear fashion through attempts by various national administrations to stymie and silence Assange, and concludes with his 2024 return to Australia after five years in a high-security British prison, following a successful plea deal with U.S. prosecutors. There hasn't been another running news narrative quite like Assange's, in which secondary players range from Donald Trump to Pamela Anderson to a sociopathic teen hacker from Iceland: There's potential here for grandstanding, but Jarecki tells this tall true story with the same probing, drily enraged authority he brought to his 2005 military-industrial complex doc 'Why We Fight' or 2012's drug-war study 'The House I Live In.' More from Variety Paul Mescal Says Movies Are 'Moving Away' From 'Alpha' Male Leads, Calls It 'Lazy and Frustrating' to Compare 'History of Sound' to 'Brokeback Mountain' RAI Cinema Chief Paolo Del Brocco on Selling 'Heads or Tails' in Cannes and a New Victor Kossakovsky Doc Made With Italian Botanist Stefano Mancuso (EXCLUSIVE) 'Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk' Review: A Stirring Chronicle of a Gaza Journalist Who Was Killed Before Its Cannes Premiere As a work of journalism itself, 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' is a methodical assemblage of known facts rather than a revelatory investigation — though it may be an eye-opener to younger viewers who were less tuned into the news 15 years ago, and have become accustomed to a far more crowded and factionalized online media landscape than the one that gave rise to WikiLeaks in the first place. Formally, it's meat-and-potatoes nonfiction filmmaking, alternating archival footage — including, most interestingly, claustrophobic video from Assange's seven-year asylum in Ecuador's cramped London embassy — with talking-head contributions from an ensemble of Assange's associates, peers and journalistic descendants. The most offbeat stylistic imposition here is a series of tonally loaded chapter headings that begin with a 'Star Wars' theme ('A New Hope,' 'The Empire Strikes Back') before the conceit is oddly dropped two entries in. ('Return of the Jedi' would be a tough one to shoehorn into the subject at hand, admittedly; 'The Phantom Menace' less so.) Among the interviewees is cultural commentator Naomi Klein, who explains how WikiLeaks grew out of an early, more idealistic incarnation of the internet, prior to the rise of social media, in which its primary purpose was to make information available to all, for free. Many of the site's early journalistic coups — notably the damning 'Collateral Murder' video showing civilians and Reuters journalists being killed in U.S. airstrikes on Bagdad in 2007 — made waves by exposing unjust or corrupt acts by those in power. Yet the fallout from such scoops often shifted to shooting the messenger instead, as the U.S. government in particular sought to paint Assange as a criminal for refusing to overlook their errors in judgment. 'When we've been lied to, would we rather not know?' asks famed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in championing Assange's work. Snowden frames the question rhetorically, though as the film reaches the Trump era of fake news and bad-faith far-right propaganda, Jarecki grimly concludes that many people prefer a lie they can agree with to the truth. It's that cultural turn in the weather that hastened and worsened Assange's downfall, triggered by a pair of rape charges in Sweden — into which the alleged victims admit they felt railroaded by police. It was Assange's very real concerns about being extradited to the U.S., however, that saw him improbably seek refuge in the aforementioned Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, too, is subject to changing cultural tides: The film's title refers to the amount offered in 2019 by the Trump administration to a new, more allyship-inclined Ecuadorian government to give him up. Cue five years' incarceration instead, much of it solitary, in the U.K.'s notoriously punishing Belmarsh prison — where, insists UN human rights expert Nils Melzer, he was subjected to sustained psychological torture, and emerged as a frailer, more anxiety-ridden man for the experience. (Perhaps this is partly the reason for Assange's own limited first-hand presence in Jarecki's film.) Fighting his corner all the while is dogged Australian human rights lawyer Jen Robinson and Stella Moris, another loyal member of his legal team, who eventually became Assange's wife, and mother to two of his children. Their personally colored interviews lend a more intimate dimension to a film that often, not inaccurately, presents Assange as a larger-than-life cause célèbre — an emblem of straightforward truth-telling principles at a time when AI, political spin and stubborn bigotry are allowing many media consumers to choose their own reality. 'We have given up on the idea that facts matter,' sighs Klein, while Assange closes 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' with an admission of the compromise that finally got the U.S. government off his case: 'I'm not here because the system worked, I'm here because I pled guilty to journalism.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Six Billion Dollar Man' Review: Straight-Ahead Julian Assange Doc Looks Pessimistically Toward a Post-Truth World
The saga of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has dragged on long enough, and complicatedly enough, to render a number of past films about him, if not obsolete, clear period pieces. Documentaries like Alex Gibney's 2013 'We Steal Secrets' and Laura Poitras' 2016 'Risk,' both produced during the Obama era, are informed by a very different political climate from the one we're in now — while neither could have anticipated how the Australian editor and activist's legal difficulties would escalate in the years to come. (Bill Condon's technothriller-styled 2013 Assange biopic 'The Fifth Estate,' meanwhile, felt premature from the get-go.) With Assange finally freed last year after 12 years of confinement or outright imprisonment in the U.K., the time feels right for an expansive catch-up on the whole knotty affair: Enter Eugene Jarecki's plainly presented but detail-packed documentary 'The Six Billion Dollar Man,' which premiered at Cannes (with Assange himself present) in the festival's Special Screenings program. Beginning with the founding of initially modest startup WikiLeaks in the mid-2000s and the swift impact of its uncompromising journalism in media and political spheres alike, the film progresses in mostly linear fashion through attempts by various national administrations to stymie and silence Assange, and concludes with his 2024 return to Australia after five years in a high-security British prison, following a successful plea deal with U.S. prosecutors. There hasn't been another running news narrative quite like Assange's, in which secondary players range from Donald Trump to Pamela Anderson to a sociopathic teen hacker from Iceland: There's potential here for grandstanding, but Jarecki tells this tall true story with the same probing, drily enraged authority he brought to his 2005 military-industrial complex doc 'Why We Fight' or 2012's drug-war study 'The House I Live In.' More from Variety Paul Mescal Says Movies Are 'Moving Away' From 'Alpha' Male Leads, Calls It 'Lazy and Frustrating' to Compare 'History of Sound' to 'Brokeback Mountain' RAI Cinema Chief Paolo Del Brocco on Selling 'Heads or Tails' in Cannes and a New Victor Kossakovsky Doc Made With Italian Botanist Stefano Mancuso (EXCLUSIVE) 'Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk' Review: A Stirring Chronicle of a Gaza Journalist Who Was Killed Before Its Cannes Premiere As a work of journalism itself, 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' is a methodical assemblage of known facts rather than a revelatory investigation — though it may be an eye-opener to younger viewers who were less tuned into the news 15 years ago, and have become accustomed to a far more crowded and factionalized online media landscape than the one that gave rise to WikiLeaks in the first place. Formally, it's meat-and-potatoes nonfiction filmmaking, alternating archival footage — including, most interestingly, claustrophobic video from Assange's seven-year asylum in Ecuador's cramped London embassy — with talking-head contributions from an ensemble of Assange's associates, peers and journalistic descendants. The most offbeat stylistic imposition here is a series of tonally loaded chapter headings that begin with a 'Star Wars' theme ('A New Hope,' 'The Empire Strikes Back') before the conceit is oddly dropped two entries in. ('Return of the Jedi' would be a tough one to shoehorn into the subject at hand, admittedly; 'The Phantom Menace' less so.) Among the interviewees is cultural commentator Naomi Klein, who explains how WikiLeaks grew out of an early, more idealistic incarnation of the internet, prior to the rise of social media, in which its primary purpose was to make information available to all, for free. Many of the site's early journalistic coups — notably the damning 'Collateral Murder' video showing civilians and Reuters journalists being killed in U.S. airstrikes on Bagdad in 2007 — made waves by exposing unjust or corrupt acts by those in power. Yet the fallout from such scoops often shifted to shooting the messenger instead, as the U.S. government in particular sought to paint Assange as a criminal for refusing to overlook their errors in judgment. 'When we've been lied to, would we rather not know?' asks famed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in championing Assange's work. Snowden frames the question rhetorically, though as the film reaches the Trump era of fake news and bad-faith far-right propaganda, Jarecki grimly concludes that many people prefer a lie they can agree with to the truth. It's that cultural turn in the weather that hastened and worsened Assange's downfall, triggered by a pair of rape charges in Sweden — into which the alleged victims admit they felt railroaded by police. It was Assange's very real concerns about being extradited to the U.S., however, that saw him improbably seek refuge in the aforementioned Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, too, is subject to changing cultural tides: The film's title refers to the amount offered in 2019 by the Trump administration to a new, more allyship-inclined Ecuadorian government to give him up. Cue five years' incarceration instead, much of it solitary, in the U.K.'s notoriously punishing Belmarsh prison — where, insists UN human rights expert Nils Melzer, he was subjected to sustained psychological torture, and emerged as a frailer, more anxiety-ridden man for the experience. (Perhaps this is partly the reason for Assange's own limited first-hand presence in Jarecki's film.) Fighting his corner all the while is dogged Australian human rights lawyer Jen Robinson and Stella Moris, another loyal member of his legal team, who eventually became Assange's wife, and mother to two of his children. Their personally colored interviews lend a more intimate dimension to a film that often, not inaccurately, presents Assange as a larger-than-life cause célèbre — an emblem of straightforward truth-telling principles at a time when AI, political spin and stubborn bigotry are allowing many media consumers to choose their own reality. 'We have given up on the idea that facts matter,' sighs Klein, while Assange closes 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' with an admission of the compromise that finally got the U.S. government off his case: 'I'm not here because the system worked, I'm here because I pled guilty to journalism.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Perfect Strangers' Director Scores Smash Hit With New Comedy ‘Madly' With Raft of Remake Deals to Close at Cannes Market (EXCLUSIVE)
'Perfect Strangers' director Paolo Genovese has done it again with a new concept comedy titled 'Madness' that is set to hit the global market after scoring mightily in Italy. 'Madness' – which is titled 'FolleMente' in Italy – depicts a first date between a man and a woman in Rome and features all the voices that live in their brains which oscillate between embarrassment and laughter, each played by a different actor. The romance-tinged comedy has scored more than 2 million admissions and grossed more than $18 million at the Italian box office since it's Feb. 20 local release via RAI Cinema's 01 Distribution — and is still going strong. More from Variety Old World, New Power: The Unexpected Ways Europe's Entertainment Business Could Benefit From Trump's Re-Election Italy's Right-Wing Government Dithers and Delays Production Tax Incentives, Prompting Industry Uproar Dale McRaven, 'Mork & Mindy' and 'Perfect Strangers' Creator, Dies at 83 Genovese co-wrote the screenplay with Isabella Aguilar, Lucia Calamaro, Paolo Costella and Flaminia Gressi. 'We are getting remake requests from all over the world,' producer Raffaella Leone tells Variety, adding that this time around 'we want to manage things a bit differently' from what happened with 'Perfect Strangers,' meaning that her Leone Film Group is 'looking to coproduce the film's remakes in European countries such as Spain, France, and Germany,' she said, adding that 'we are discussing the possibility with Paolo that he could direct the U.S. adaptation.' Leone Film Group will be 'taking an office in Cannes,' she said, where they expect to close a slew of deals on 'Maybe.' RAI Cinema International Distribution is handling sales on the readymade Italian version of the new Genovese film on which Leone says a slew of deals are already being negotiated that will also officially be sealed in Cannes. 'Perfect Strangers,' which launched in 2016 and was sold by Medusa, holds the Guiness Book of World Record for the most remade movie in cinema history, having spawned remakes in 24 territories including France, Germany, Spain, Greece, and South Korea. According to Leone these remakes have grossed some $400 million, excluding the U.S. where the The Weinstein Company held the rights that were long put on hold after the company went under. Raffaella and Andrea Leone are the lead producers on 'FolleMente' – which stars an A-list Italian cast featuring Edoardo Leo and Pilar Fogliati as the leads and Claudia Pandolfi, Vittoria Puccini, Emanuela Fanelli, Maria Chiara Giannetta and Marco Giallini, Maurizio Lastrico, Claudio Santamaria and Rocco Papaleo. The hit film is co-produced by Leone Film Group's Lotus Production with RAI Cinema and in association with Disney+, which has streaming rights for top European territories, and Vice Pictures. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week What's Coming to Disney+ in April 2025 The Best Celebrity Memoirs to Read This Year: From Chelsea Handler to Anthony Hopkins
