Italy’s Eagle Pictures Swoops on Farah Nabulsi’s Palestine-Set ‘The Teacher’ As Goodfellas Launches Sales in Cannes (EXCLUSIVE)

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.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Marco Bellocchio’s drama “Kidnapped” that reconstructs the true tale of a Jewish boy who was kidnapped and forcibly raised as a Christian in 19th century Rome, has opened strongly in Italy following its Cannes launch. The revered Italian auteur’s film about Edgardo Mortara, who in 1858 was taken away from his family in Bologna to live in the Vatican – after it surfaced that the boy secretly been baptized a Christian – has also sparked debate and prompted the Vatican to comment the abduction for which Pope Pius IX has been held responsible. “Kidnapped” over the weekend bowed in third place at the Italian box office, placing itself after “The Little Mermaid” and “Fast X” and pulling a handsome more than €550,000 ($587,000) intake to date from roughly 300 screens.

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.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Martin Scorsese is on a post-Cannes tour of Italy where over the weekend the director, known for having a religious bent, met with Pope Francis and announced that he will make a film about Jesus. “I have responded to the Pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus,” Scorsese announced on Saturday during a Rome conference at the Vatican, according to multiple reports. “And I’m about to start making it,” the director added, suggesting that this could be his next film. Also on Saturday, before attending the conference – titled “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination” – Scorsese and his wife Helen Morris met Pope Francis during a brief private audience at the Vatican.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy, whose absurdist social satire “Feathers” won the Cannes Critics’ Week prize in 2021 and went on to make a major splash, is set to helm “Mammals,” an English-language drama that will be a reflection on Western capitalism and family ties. El Zohairy’s sophomore film, which will feature still unspecified actors from different countries, is being co-written by the buzzed-about auteur with British Egyptian writer-director Mohamed Adeeb, who wrote the hit Egyptian TV series “Bimbo,” directed by Amr Salama. “Mammals” is partly inspired by the biography of El Zohairy’s father, who died in 2016 in the United States, where he was an immigrant living under difficult conditions. In the film, a young man visits his distant father in one of the world’s most lavish resorts. When he arrives there he discovers that, unbeknownst to him, his father has locked him into a business deal that he cannot reject. The young man rebels, but also starts to like his new life and eventually loses his sanity. 

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.

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.

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 Alice Rohrwacher is in the Cannes competition for the third time with “La Chimera,” in which “The Crown” star Josh O’Connor plays a young British archeologist named Arthur who gets involved in an international network of stolen Etruscan artifacts during the 1980s. For Rohrwacher, the film is connected to growing up in Umbria, once the center of the Etruscan civilization. But it’s also the final piece of a triptych on a territory that she started with her previous Cannes entries: “The Wonders” and “Happy as Lazzaro.” Three works that, as she has put it, pose a central question: “What to do with the past?”  

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Adrian Wootton, CEO of Film London and the British Film Commission, will preside over the jury of the Malta Film Commission’s inaugural Mediterrane Film Festival celebrating movies from the Mediterranean Basin. The fest, which will take place in Valletta, Malta’s capital, and other locations on the island between June 25-30, will showcase films from each of the MED9 nations, an alliance of nine Mediterranean and Southern European Union member states. It comprises: Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. Besides Wotton the other jury members are “Triangle Of Sadness”actor Zlatko Burić; Cypriot filmmaker Tonia Mishiali; French actor and director Vahina Giocante; Greek producer Amanda Livanou; Italian journalist Boris Sollazzo; Maltese critic Mario Azzopardi; Portuguese journalist and programmer José Vieira Mendes; Slovenian journalist Tina Poglajen; and Spanish programmer Carlos Reviriego.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent CAA Media Finance has come on board to handle sales in North America on Mohamed Kordofani’s “Goodbye Julia,” the first film from Sudan to launch from the Cannes Film Festival. CAA will be working in tandem with Egypt-based producer Ali El Arabi’s Ambient Light Films, which holds North American rights for the timely drama that premiered on May 21 in Un Certain Regard. “Goodbye Julia” takes place just before the 2011 secession of South Sudan. It revolves around two women, one from the north, the other from the south, that are brought together by fate in a complex relationship that attempts to reconcile differences between northern and southern Sudanese communities.

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 Nanni Moretti’s “Il sol dell’avvenire” (“A Brighter Tomorrow”), a multi-layered love letter to filmmaking in the age of streaming giants, has scored a slew of sales ahead of it’s Cannes bow. French sales company Kinology has sealed deals to Moretti’s latest work with a slew of territories including Germany (Prokino); Spain (Caramel Films); Benelux (Cineart) and Switzerland (Xenix Filmdistribution).  Additional countries that have taken a shine to “Brighter Tomorrow” are Portugal (Midas Filmes); Austria (Filmladen); Ex-Yugoslavia (MCF Megacom Film) Greece (Feelgood Entertainment); Hungary (Circo Film); Israel (Lev Films and Cinemas); Latin America (Providences Films); Romania (Independent Film);  and Turkey (Filmarti).

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Veteran Italian auteur Silvio Soldini (“Bread and Tulips,” “Emma”) is set to direct “The Tasters,” which will reconstruct the true untold story of the women conscripted to be Adolf Hitler’s food tasters. The Nazi-era drama — which will mark Soldini’s first foray into German-language cinema — is based on the bestselling book “At the Wolf’s Table,” by Italian author Rosella Pastorino, about a group of women who were recruited by the SS in 1943 to make sure that food to be served to Hitler was not poisoned. Forced to eat what might kill them, the tasters start to split into two factions: those loyal to Hitler, and those who insist they aren’t Nazis, even as they risk their lives everyday for the Führer.  “At the Wolf’s Table” has been translated in 46 countries.

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 Cinema Italiano is on a roll, as reflected by the fact that this year Italy has scored three Cannes competition slots. Despite the persisting sore spot that sees the country still lagging behind other European territories in terms of post-pandemic box office returns, Italy “continues to produce and invest heavily in film and is overcoming the crisis,” noted Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux after announcing the lineup. The robust Croisette contingent marks the second time in 20 years that Italy lands three Cannes competition berths. Though the trio of selected directors — Marco Bellocchio, Nanni Moretti and Alice Rohrwacher — are all Cannes regulars “they represent three different generations of auteurs,” said Paolo Del Brocco, chief of state broadcaster RAI’s RAI Cinema arm that co-produced all three titles. And each of these films, he went on to point out, displays “very different ideas and cinematic visions.”

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Oscar-winning Irish director Terry George (“In the Name of The Father,” “Hotel Rwanda”) is set for Afghanistan-set actioner “Riverman” which will be shot in Saudi Arabia’s NEOM regional production hub. Inspired by true events that unfolded between 2001-2008 during the war in Afghanistan, “Riverman” revolves around a highly decorated Royal Marine named Max who after a series of devastating events goes to the dark side. He is recruited by a private arms dealer to supply weapons to private armies around the world. “Despite being trained to cope with the deadliest situations on Earth, nothing can prepare Max for the high-stakes world of arms dealing,” says the provided synopsis.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent “Killers of the Flower Moon” executive producer Niels Juul is in Cannes with several projects based on IP from the vault of Italy’s storied Cecchi Gori movie company that include a remake of the Dino Risi-directed classic “Il Sorpasso” and “Kafka,” a script about the turbulent love life of Franz Kafka by John Briley (“Gandhi”). The IP and some other assets of the movie company that once dominated Italy’s film industry and collapsed in the mid-1990s were acquired late last year by a group of Italian investors under the new management of Rome-based CEO Federico Canfora and U.S-based Javier Balliero Madrid. Madrid is president of the new company, which is backing a partial relaunch of the Cecchi Gori brand, which is behind such Oscar-winners as “Life Is Beautiful,” “Mediterraneo” and “Il Postino.”