Emmy Award-Winner Adam Bernstein to Direct Prime Video Italy Original ‘Costiera’ That Will Mark New Rights-Sharing Business Model

As she takes on the role of a criminal’s mom in Apple TV+’s new series “The Crowded Room”, Emmy Rossum is reflecting on another crime story: “Mystic River”.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian producer, director, and film and TV industry pioneer Renzo Rossellini is being honored with the Locarno Film Festival’s lifetime achievement award. The Swiss fest dedicated to indie cinema will pay tribute to the consummate filmmaker and renaissance man – who as a producer shepherded works by master directors such as Federico Fellini, Lina Wertmüller, Werner Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola – with a screening of Fellini’s 1980 work “City of Women” on its 8,000 seat open-air Piazza Grande venue on Aug. 10, followed by an onstage conversation the next day. Rossellini who also worked as assistant director for his father Roberto and, among others, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol – and is a director in his own right – “Has never ceased his quest to pass on his knowledge of the cinema, teaching generations of students and cineastes with passion and commitment,” the fest said in a statement.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days,” which won the best actor award for Koji Yakusho at the Cannes Film Festival, has sold out worldwide. The Match Factory is handling international sales. As previously announced, North American rights went to Neon and France went to Haut et Court. Further sales included U.K./Ireland/Latin America/Turkey (MUBI), Australia/New Zealand (Madman), Benelux (Paradiso), China (DDDream), Italy (Lucky Red), Spain (A Contracorriente), Switzerland (DCM), Baltics (A-One Baltics), Bulgaria (Art Fest), CIS (A-One), Czech Republic and Slovakia (Aerofilms), Former Yugoslavia (MCF), Greece (Feelgood Entertainment), Hong Kong (Edko Films), Hungary (Cirko), Israel (Lev Cinemas), Poland (Gutek), Portugal (Alambique), Romania (Bad Unicorn), Scandinavia (Future Film) and Taiwan (Applause).

Prime Video Australia is remaking The Office as a female-led comedy starring stand-up Felicity Ward in the role Ricky Gervais first made famous.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Eight months after Italy took a sharp turn to the right, the government headed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – whose Brothers of Italy party has neo-fascist roots – is wreaking havoc at state broadcaster RAI, prompting the abrupt exit of several executives and TV personalities and causing alarm within the country’s film and TV sectors. At RAI, where politics have always held sway, managing director Carlo Fuortes resigned earlier this month saying he was unwilling to “agree to changes” in the broadcaster’s content and programming “that I do not consider to be in RAI’s best interests,” he underlined. Fuortes has now been replaced by Roberto Sergio, a veteran RAI executive who is considered basically bi-partisan. The pubcaster’s new general director, instead, is former RAI board member Giampaolo Rossi, who is backed by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and is known for his controversial tweets and support of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Amazon Prime Video has been praised for 'dragging' rival Netflix following its crack down on password sharing. The American streaming giant has moved to stop multiple households using the same account, something which it previously encouraged.

Prime Video is not about to let rival Netflix forget about its previously benevolent attitude toward password sharing.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italy’s RAI Cinema, which has four titles in this year’s Cannes selection, has closed a deal on Ron Howard’s next movie “Origin of Species,” a hot project at the Cannes market starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Ana de Armas, Jude Law and Alicia Vikander. RAI Cinema chief Paolo Del Brocco said the company – which is the film arm of Italian state broadcaster RAI – has teamed up with Rome-based Lucisano Media Group to acquire Italian rights from CAA Media Finance on Howard’s survival thriller penned by Noah Pink (“Tetris”) about a a group of eclectics who turn their backs on civilization and head to the Galapagos. In Cannes, RAI Cinema also picked up Italian rights from Gaumont on family movie “Moon The Panda,” by French humans and animals adventures specialist Gilles de Maistre, known for “Mia and the White Lion”and “The Wolf and the Lion.” De Maistre’s latest, about the friendship between a boy and a panda, is set to shoot later this month in China’s Sichuan mountains.

Jesse Collins Entertainment has come on board as producer of this year’s Emmy Awards. The 75th Emmy Awards will air live coast-to-coast from Los Angeles on Monday, September 18 at 8 PM ET/5 PM PT on Fox.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International It’s (finally) official: Prime Video has greenlit Season 2 of “Citadel,” with Joe Russo set to direct the entire season. The first season of the spy drama, which premiered in April, had a number of directors attached, including Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Jessica Yu and Newton Thomas Sigel. On Season 2, however, it will be solely Joe Russo on directing duties, with David Weil returning as showrunner. Prime Video has also revealed that its big-budget original — which stars Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and features Lesley Manville and Stanley Tucci — is its second most-watched new original series outside the U.S. behind “Rings of Power” and its fourth most-watched program worldwide.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian auteur Marco Tullio Giordana, best known internationally for sweeping terrorism-themed epic “The Best of Youth” (2003) is set to soon return behind the camera on “La Vita Accanto” a psychological drama about a talented young woman contending with profound rejection due to her looks. Shooting is set to start on June 5 in Vicenza, Northern Italy, on “Vita Accanto,” (the title can be translated as “the life beside”) which is co-written and produced by Marco Bellocchio – the Italian master who is currently competing for a Cannes Palm d’Or with “Kidnapped.” Italy’s Intramovies has started launching pre-sales on “Vita Accanto” in Cannes.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Live sports streaming service DAZN and social analytics firm Videocites have forged a partnership to fight rampant sports content piracy in the social media sphere. Dubbed “The Netflix of Sports,” DAZN is a leading premium live sports platform with a footprint comprising Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Japan, Canada, U.S. and the U.K. The company boasts that Videocities’ cutting-edge technology will now enable DAZN to automatically remove 98% of the thousands of pirated streams detected on social media within minutes with unprecedented efficiency, it said in a statement. NBA Equity is an investor in Videocites which has several offices around the world, including in Tel Aviv and one recently opened in New York.  

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Revered Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio is returning to Cannes with “Kidnapped,” a drama that reconstructs the true tale of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy who was kidnapped and forcibly raised as a Christian in 19th century Italy. It’s a story that Steven Spielberg had his eye on, having announced in 2016 that he would make a drama about Mortara for which he began scouting locations in Italy. Last year, Bellocchio was in Cannes with another kidnapping drama, the limited TV series “Exterior Night,” about the abduction and assassination of former Italian premier Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists. The veteran auteur’s first foray in TV has had the rare distinction of playing well in Italian cinemas — in two installments — before airing on RAI and selling globally. Earlier this month it also scored a slew of statuettes, including best director, at Italy’s David Awards, the country’s top film prizes.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italy’s Intramovies has acquired global rights outside of Israel and France on Israeli director Dani Rosenberg’s Gaza-Strip conflict drama “The Vanishing Soldier.”  “Vanishing Soldier” is Rosenberg’s second feature after “The Death of Cinema and My Father Too,” which was in the official selection in Cannes 202O and won the Jerusalem Film Festival’s top prize. The film is about an 18-year-old Israeli soldier who flees the Gaza battlefield and heads back to his girlfriend in Tel Aviv only to discover that the military elite is convinced he was kidnapped in the fog of war. What ensues is a tragicomic journey and takes place over a period of 24 hours on the streets of Tel Aviv.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Yes, the Cannes Film Festival has only just started. But Hollywood is already quietly planning for the Venice Film Festival lineup, as the unofficial launch of awards season in late August is starting to shape up with several high-profile titles, Variety has learned. Among the films in contention to bow on the Lido: Luca Guadagnino’s sexy tennis comedy “Challengers,” starring Zendaya and Josh O’Connor, and Yorgos Lanthimos’ surrealist science-fiction romance “Poor Things,” with Emma Stone and Marc Ruffalo, among entries believed to be locked-in for a Venice launch. Zendaya was last in Venice in 2021 with “Dune,” but Denis Villeneuve’s sequel, which has an early November launch date, is not expected to follow suit to the fest.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian director Gabriele Mainetti, known internationally for genre-bending titles “They Call Me Jeeg” and “Freaks vs. the Reich,” is shooting a kung fu movie set in Rome’s multi-ethnic Piazza Vittorio quarter. Cameras have just started rolling in Rome on Mainetti’s yet-to-be titled third feature that will see him riff on martial arts movie tropes, following his fresh takes on a 1970 Japanese cartoon series in “Jeeg,” and then on the Nazi hunter film genre in “Freaks.”   Vision Distribution will be launching sales on the film at the Cannes Marché du Film.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent It’s 7:30 a.m. on a sunny May morning in Rome on a side street outside the studios of Italian state broadcaster Rai. A live audience standing behind metal fencing is watching a lithe group of nuns, one with a mustache, who slowly creep out from a row of white closet doors.  They start dancing, hugging and pirouetting to a ballad belted out by a young Tuscan pop singer. Then the dancers, dressed in Catholic sisters garb, begin playing basketball. Welcome to “Viva Rai 2!,” Italy’s answer to America’s morning shows. It’s a local ratings phenomenon conceived and conducted by volcanic Sicilian megastar Rosario Fiorello, who is breathing new life into Italian television at a time when doomsayers are sounding the death knell of public TV around the world.

Stranger Things‘ fourth season was split into two parts and the first part fell into the eligibility window for the 2022 Emmy Awards while the second part is in the eligibility window for the 2023 show.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent “The Eight Mountains,” Belgian directors Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s Italian-language drama about friendship, mountains and growing up, scored the top prize at Italy’s 68th David di Donatello Awards. Besides winning best picture, the film also scooped statuettes for best non-original screenplay, photography and sound. Given that the directors are not Italian, it was a particularly significant victory for “Mountains,” which was praised as “quietly magnificent” by Variety critic Jessica Kiang. The film, which is currently playing well on the U.S. arthouse circuit, tracks the decades-long friendship between two Italian boys named Pietro and Bruno — one from the city, the other a shepherd boy from the Alps.

Comedy thriller The Outlaws will be back for a third season. Prime Video and BBC One today announced the renewal of the series from Stephen Merchant (The Office) and co-creator Elgin James (Mayans M.C.).