Creator José Junior, ‘Under Pressure’s’ Julio Andrade Unpack Activist-Inspired Globoplay Original ‘Living On A Razor’s Edge’

EXCLUSIVE: Last month, when Brandt Andersen’s debut feature film The Strangers’ Case won the Amnesty International Film Award at Berlinale, it marked the recognition of a long and impassioned journey for the writer, director and long-time producer as he sought to marry film with his extensive activism background. 

EXCLUSIVE: Nicholas Braun, Tommy Dewey and Nicholas Podany have joined the cast of Sony Pictures’ SNL 1975, which will be directed by Jason Reitman and based on the real-life behind-the-scenes accounts of the opening episode of Saturday Night Live.

Activists from the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) disrupted Victoria Beckham’s show at Paris Fashion Week.

EXCLUSIVE: William Spetz, writer, creator and star of the critically acclaimed Swedish series Tore, has signed with TFC Management.

Twenty One Pilots have announced a new album ‘Clancy’ and shared its lead single, ‘Overcompensate’.The Columbus duo’s sixth LP – the follow-up to 2021’s ‘Scaled and Icy’ – will drop on May 17 via Fueled By Ramen.The band had been teasing their new era in recent weeks, with fans noticing that across Twenty One Pilots’ digital platforms, all of the artwork for their previous albums now featured strips of red tape covering all the eyes on each cover on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.Some fans also received cryptic messages in the post with the letters coming from the Sacred Municipality of Dema. As highlighted by Kerrang!, the clues build on the lore explored across 2018’s ‘Trench‘ and 2015’s ‘Blurryface’.Last week, the band released a trailer foreshadowing what’s to come, seemingly teasing a new character and location.“I am trapped, stuck in a cycle I have never been able to break,” narrates frontman Tyler Joseph at the trailer’s beginning.

Joe Otterson TV Reporter Paramount+, Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios, and 101 Studios are teaming for a new series loosely based on the hit Showtime series “Ray Donovan.” Titled “The Donovans,” the series will be fully written by Ronan Bennett with Guy Ritchie attached to direct and executive produce. It will be available to Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers later this year.

Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon MGM Studios, and James Farrell, the L.A.-based VP of international originals at Prime Video, flew to Madrid this week, with the world premiere of “Red Queen” (“Reina Roja”), the series adaption of the first book in Juan Gómez-Jurado’s hit trilogy, taking place on Monday night. The streamer is rolling off the record-breaking finale of its first weekly live entertainment show “Operación Triunfo,” and has revealed that the top three of the the ten most-watched Spanish Originals of 2023 – “My Fault,” “Awareness” and “Los Farad” – have received on average 80% of streams outside of Spain, reaching a milestone for the international reach of Prime Video’s non-English language content.

Gisele Bündchen seems to be moving on following her divorce from Tom Brady. The supermodel has been living in Miami with her kids, and traveling to Brazil to spend quality time with her family.

Christopher Vourlias Following on the heels of a successful post-pandemic reboot one year ago, the Joburg Film Festival kicks off its sixth edition on Feb. 27, with the glitzy capital of South Africa’s media and entertainment industry showcasing a selection of top talents from the host country and across the African continent.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent “A True Novel,” directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, manga-inspired “Issak,” written by Itaru Mizuno (“Double Booking”) and “4 Blocks” Richard Kropf, look like potential highlights at this year’s Co-Pro Pitching Sessions, the centerpiece at Series Mania’s Forum, as its projects expand ever more their geographic compass, here welcoming their first titles co-produced by Japan. They are joined by titles from around the world such as Argentinean Daniel Burman’s “Witness 36,” which won the Series Mania Award at the Berlinale Series Market on Tuesday, and a slice of Vatican noir and which reunites the team of “De Grace,”and The Forum runs March 19-21 during Series Mania, Europe’s biggest dedicated TV festival, which will unspool this year over March 15-22 in Lille, Northern France.

Joe Otterson TV Reporter “True Detective” has been renewed for Season 5 at HBO. Issa López, the creator of “True Detective: Night Country,” will helm the fifth season under her new overall deal with HBO. The renewal comes as little surprise, given the success of “Night Country,” which saw Jodie Foster and Kali Reis star in the fourth installment of the HBO anthology series.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Sebastian Stan, whose “A Different Man” screens in the Berlin Film Festival, Christoph Waltz and Tom Wlaschiha, the “Faceless Man” in “Game of Thrones,” were among the guests at Studio Babelsberg Night, the historic Berlin film studios’ party at Soho House Berlin held to celebrate the 74th edition of the festival. The event was supported by Mexican tequila brand Don Julio, the Motion Picture Assn. and Little Moons.

Russian Pussy Riot Dissident Nadya Tolokonnikova has welcomed a pledge by Alexei Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya to carry on his fight for democracy, following his death in an Arctic penal colony last week.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “From Hilde, With Love,” which world premiered Saturday in competition at the Berlinale, has debuted its trailer (below). The film, directed by Andreas Dresen, centers on a group of young anti-Nazi activists in Berlin during World War II. (Read Variety‘s review here.) The film, which is being sold by Beta Cinema and is produced by Claudia Steffen and Christoph Friedel for Pandora Film, stars “Babylon Berlin” breakout Liv Lisa Fries and Johannes Hegemann.

EXCLUSIVE: After we broke news of the studio acquiring Margot Robbie starrer Big Bold Beautiful Journey, we can reveal that Sony Pictures has boarded another of the European Film Market’s most in-demand projects: Past Lives director Celine Song‘s next movie, Materialists, which A24 is selling.

There is a sense of a running gag in Hors du Temps (renamed Suspended Time for the English-language market). In his complex, autofictional 2022 TV series Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas cast as the director of a film called Irma Vep — a film he had, in fact, made in real life 20 years earlier — the actor Vincent Macaigne, who cheekily developed a version of Assayas that not only picked up on his distinctively reedy voice, but also nobbled his quirky irritability and sensitivities.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The arid area of the West Bank known as Masafer Yatta, which in the 1990s was designated as a live-fire training zone where the Israeli military exercises full control, is home to Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist who has been fighting the mass expulsion of his community by the Israeli authorities since childhood. “No Other Land,” which screens in Berlin’s Panorama section, documents the gradual demolition of houses and entire villages by the military in the region using bulldozers. The documentary was made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists: Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor and Adra.

Jaka Bizilj, the founder of the Berlin-based Cinema for Peace Foundation which organized the airlift from Russia of opposition activist Alexei Navalny after his poisoning in 2020, has responded to his sudden death in an Arctic Circle jail on Friday.

Jessica Kiang The kids in Ilkay Idiskut’s third grade class are, as they let you know within about five minutes of Ruth Beckermann‘s delightful Berlin Encounters documentary “Favoriten,” very much their own people. These 25 boisterous, funny, clattering seven-year-olds attend the largest elementary school in Vienna and for the most part hail from migrant family backgrounds from Turkey or Syria or Serbia. Diminutive in form but outsized in personality, they are also, however, eminently recognisable and relatable, and you can find all the various versions of your own grade-school self in one or other of them at some point.

Naman Ramachandran “A Head Full of Ghosts,” an adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s Bram Stoker Award-winning novel, will be directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. The horror feature will be adapted and directed by Franz and Fiala, the filmmaking duo best known for horror-thriller hit, “Goodnight Mommy,” which was selected as Austria’s 2014 Oscar entry, and the Riley Keough-led “The Lodge,” which premiered at Sundance and was acquired by Neon in 2019. Their next film, “The Devil’s Bath,” is competing for the Golden Bear at the ongoing Berlin Film Festival.