‘Feathers’ Director Omar El Zohairy to Helm English-Language Drama ‘Mammals’

Jane Fonda found a way to get director Justine Triet’s attention after she left the stage without her award at the Cannes Film Festival over the weekend.

Ben Croll Launching out of Cannes Premiere, Valerie Donzelli’s “Just the Two of Us” is a feverish psychological thriller about a woman brought deeper and deeper into a toxic relationship. And if Donzelli had always intended to make the project ever since reading the source novel back in 2014, the lockdowns of 2020 helped push certain elements to the front of her mind.   “It’s really the story of a woman trapped under glass,” Donzelli tells Variety. “She’s confined with her husband, isolated and unable to see anyone, cut off from the world. I really wanted to explore how this hold makes you more and more disconnected from life.”

This article contains spoilers from the series finale of “Succession.”“This show has always been a tragedy,” said director Mark Mylod of “Succession” in a segment that aired after the series finale of the Emmy-winning HBO series Sunday night.Mylod, who has directed 16 episodes of the series, called the finale “perfectly painful,” as the Roys literally came to blows before completely losing control of their father’s company. He praised series creator Jesse Armstrong, saying, “Jesse stuck the landing with this climactic showdown between the three siblings,” referring to the brutal scene where Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv (Sarah Snook), lashed out physically and verbally over the decision to sell the company. “The final ripping off of the bandage to expose that terrible, terrible truth put so simply by Roman,” he said of the scene in which Roman proclaims, “We are bulls—t.

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains spoilers for the series finale of HBO’s Succession.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor In “The Old Oak,” which played in Competition in Cannes, Ken Loach portrays a village in the North-East of England where the indigenous white community comes into conflict with Syrian refugees – a conflict fuelled by the despair, deprivation and decline of the rust-belt region. Such conditions can be a seed-bed for far right groups, the director tells Variety. Such issues have not been explored sufficiently in film and television, Loach says, and he draws a parallel with the portrayal of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the mass media. “We have endless programs about the Second World War, about the horrors of Nazism and fascism, about the racism, about the Holocaust. Quite properly, we have endless programs about that, but what they refuse to point out is that that arose from alienation, anger, feeling cheated, and finding scapegoats. And that’s how we ended up with Hitler, and that’s the ground in which the far right flourishes. One of the points of the film is to say: This is the cause of fascism. This is where it comes from. This is its seed-bed, and it comes as an inevitable consequence of our economic system. Because if the neoliberal agenda was an essential development for capitalism, to use the old-fashioned word, then that’s where fascism comes from. Implicit in that is that the far right will rise because that’s how people will be heading. And they know that and yet the mass media, the press, just turn their backs on that. They’ll tell us all about the horrors of Hitler. Sure. But they won’t tell us how he came to power. And that’s the huge lesson. And we see it in essence now all the time.”

It’s a wrap for the 2023 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where French director Justine Triet’s courtroom thriller “Anatomy of a Fall” has won this year’s Palme d’Or for best film.

From the Palme d’Or for “Parasite” to a stint on the following jury to a Best Actor prize all of his own with last year’s “Broker,” Song Kang-ho has become a recent fixture at Cannes. This year he made a late-break for Croisette with “Cobweb,” a slight-but-entertaining film about the movies from director Kim Jee-woon.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent “The Pot Au Feu” from French-Vietnamese director Trần Anh Hùng may be one of the most radical films competing for a Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes. The sensorial movie, set in late-19th century France, opens with a mouthwatering cooking sequence that runs nearly 40 minutes and portrays a slow-cooking romance with a minimalist plot. Yet, Hùng, best known for his Cannes’ Golden Camera-winning “The Scent of Green Papaya” and Venice Golden Lion-winning “Cyclo,” tells Variety he’s always been confident “The Pot Au Feu” would strike a chord beyond the foodie niche, and it has. The movie earned some of the competition’s strongest reviews on the heels of its world premiere and a U.S. deal is currently being negotiated by Gaumont. Variety‘s Guy Lodge praised the film for holding its audience “entirely on the pleasures of beauty, vicarious indulgence and, eventually, the human care inherent in haute cuisine.”

Charna Flam Early into Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ Bollywood career, the Indian-born actress paid back a film production after she backed out of filming within days, due to the “dehumanizing” director on site. In a recent interview with The Zoe Report, the actress explained how nearly two decades ago, as an actress new to the industry, she took money out of her own pocket to remove herself from a set with a degrading crew. Chopra Jonas recalled in the interview that she portrayed a character who was going undercover, and how the unnamed director spoke about her and her appearance to the other crew members.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Broadway designer Dane Laffrey and director Michael Arden often dive into conversations about projects long before a show is greenlit. Says Laffrey, who is nominated for best scenic design for “A Christmas Carol,” “We are extensively consistent collaborators.” Having worked on shows including “Once on This Island” and the Broadway revival of “Parade” — about the lynching of Jewish American Leo Frank in 1915 — the two often discuss visual research and organizing space through “snatches of conversations.” For “Parade,” which earned Arden a Tony nod for best direction of a musical, the duo was looking at visual reference points and political rallies from the period. Says Laffrey, “We looked at grandstands or viewing stands, and things that were constructed hastily. There were also contemporary reference points from Jan. 6, touch points that mean something to us because then they will mean something to an audience.”

Gary Kent, an actor, director and, most notably, stuntman whose career is thought to have been an inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, died Thursday at an assisted care facility in Austin, Texas. He was 89.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent “Bikini Blue” director Jarek Marszewski will direct the 1920s-set euthanasia drama “Iron Ribbon,” for which Los Angeles-based Egyptian actor Mohamed Karim is attached and Tom Hughes (“The English”) is in advanced talks.  The English-language romantic thriller, which is being produced by London-based Daniella Gonella and Jay Michaelson’s DG Productions, is based on the true story of rising Polish stage star Stanislawa Uminska, who in 1924 killed her cancer-stricken fiancé (the dashing painter, critic and writer Jan Zynowski) in Paris upon his request as an act of euthanasia. She then stood trial, but was set free by the French court.

, the limited true-crime series about Candy Montgomery, Lesli Linka Glatter is returning to the world of spies and political thrillers with. The upcoming Netflix drama marks Robert De Niro's first-ever TV role, with the 79-year-old playing George Mullen, a former U.S.

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.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Álvaro Morte, immortalized by his performance as the Professor in “Money Heist,” has inked a multi-year producing deal with Sony Pictures Television through his Madrid-based production company 300 Pistolas, which he founded alongside Blanca Clemente. The accord sees 300 Pistolas, a theater company, making the transition into producing scripted TV, with Morte developing English-language scripted series exclusively with SPT, which he and Clemente will serve on as producers via 300 Pistolas.  Morte and Clemente will have access to SPT’s development teams. SPT will serve as exclusive production and distribution partner to any projects produced under the deal, SPT confirmed Wednesday.

Love is in the air on Netflix, as two of the steamer’s most popular romance franchises dominated the English-language television charts for the week of May 15 to May 21.

Ben Croll When director Elene Naveriani first read the book upon which “Blackbird Blackbird Blueberry” is based, they immediately recognized a whole community. “It was the story of my mom, the story of my aunt, the story of my neighbor,” Naveriani tells Variety. “I could name so many women around me that they were really going through the same interior kind of struggle, and I found it very important to bring this character to life on screen.” Playing in Directors’ Fortnight, “Blackbird Blackbird Blueberry” follows 48-year-old Etero (Eka Chavleishvili – the filmmaker’s first and only choice for the character) as she discovers her sexuality and enters into her first relationship later in life. In the film’s startling opening sequence, shopkeeper Etero survives a brush with death, returns to her small corner store, and seduces the first man who walks in – having her initial sexual relation on a momentary whim.

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.

Gregg Goldstein Weston Razooli is far more than just a writer, producer and director. He’s a world-builder, as evidenced by his feature debut, “Riddle of Fire.” The faux-’70s children’s fantasy adventure, which premieres May 20 in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight program, follows three tweens (Charlie Stover, Skyler Peters and Phoebe Ferro) on a quest for ingredients to bake a blueberry pie, all to coax the boys’ mother into letting them play a stolen video game. Danger arrives when they meet the “Enchanted Blade Gang” led by a witch (Lio Tipton). Its deadpan comedy and surreal feel — somewhere between “Escape to Witch Mountain,” “Scooby-Doo” and “Napoleon Dynamite” — make it equally appealing to kids, Gen Xers, stoners, Adult Swim watchers and fans of cult indie cinema.

Elizabeth Taylor’s middle-aged married woman after she has full-body plastic surgery. In Joseph Losey’s The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) he was Glenda Jackson’s paramour, while in Tinto Brass’s X-rated “erotic-war-drama” Salon Kitty (1976), he played a Nazi SS commandant who recruits a group of female SS auxiliaries in order to plant them as prostitutes in a high-class brothel to collect intelligence on patrons of the establishment. After Visconti’s death, Berger’s acting career dwindled to mainly small roles.