Strike Averted! Writers Guild Of Canada & Canadian Media Producers Association Reach Agreement

There will be no second season for The Spencer Sisters. CTV has opted not to pick up a second season of the Canadian drama series starring Lea Thompson and Stacey Farber.

EXCLUSIVE: Wscripted has unveiled the projects and talents selected for its fourth Cannes Screenplay List supporting scripts by women and non-binary writers.

Paul Schrader hit Cannes this weekend with Competition title Oh, Canada, reuniting him with American Gigolo star Richard Gere in the role of a terminally ill documentarian who reveals secrets as his life nears its end.

Diaries are written in secrecy, free-flowing thoughts anchored to the page as if the ink could stop memories from vanishing through the hands of time. Filmmaker Paul Schrader understands the lingering, often quiet desperation of journaling like few filmmakers do.

Paul Schrader revealed first details about his next feature project entitled Non Compos Mentis, at the press conference for his Cannes Competition title Oh, Canada on Saturday.

Paul Schrader had a special job on the set of his latest film, “Oh, Canada”: drawing on the jockstrap that Jacob Elordi wears in one of the Vietnam War drama’s pivotal scenes. There’s a choice at the heart of “Oh, Canada,” when the fictional filmmaker Leonard Fife (played as a young man by Elordi, and older man as Richard Gere) dodges the Vietnam draft and escapes to Canada. The script leaves breadcrumbs as to what exactly happens until very late in the film, but finally Elordi is seen reporting for an Army physical.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In the Canadian cities of Montreal and Winnipeg, a futile tension exists between French and English speakers — doubly silly, since the country is officially bilingual. In his gently satirical “Universal Language,” writer-director Matthew Rankin imagines a rather fanciful solution, where Farsi is now the region’s dominant tongue.

Christopher Vourlias South Africa’s Known Associates Group (KAG) is teaming up with Canada’s Inner City Films (ICF) and Circle Blue Entertainment (CBE) to launch a new venture that will produce African feature films and TV series for audiences around the world, the companies announced Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival. With offices in Johannesburg, Toronto and Los Angeles, the KIC Group will build on the track records of the three pioneering companies while also developing innovative financing models and capitalizing on an existing co-production treaty between their respective countries.

EXCLUSIVE: Level 33 Entertainment has acquired distribution rights for the United States and Canada to Ernest Hemingway adaptation, Across The River And Into The Trees, starring Liev Schreiber (Spotlight), Matilda De Angelis (The Undoing), Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games) and Danny Huston (Yellowstone). 

Paul Schrader shed tears as his new film “Oh, Canada” earned a four-minute standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival on Friday night. Jacob Elordi was notably absent from the premiere, possibly because he is filming Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” in which he stars as The Monster. After the ovation finished, Schrader addressed Elordi not being there, saying: “I’m very happy with Richard, Uma, Jake — not here with us –and it all worked out.

Richard Gere poses for a family photo while attending the 2024 Cannes Film Festival premiere of his upcoming film Oh, Canada held at Palais des Festivals on Friday (May 17) in Cannes, France.

Hard to believe it has been 44 years since Paul Schrader and star Richard Gere last worked together on 1980’s seminal American Gigolo, a film that became not just a keystone in Gere’s celebrated career but also one for one Schrader’s as one of his earliest directorial credits. Of course he has written some of the great screenplays, particularly in his collaborations with Martin Scorsese on Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and Taxi Driver. But it is what interests him now a half century later as a writer-director that continues to fascinate.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Straying from the hotheaded “Taxi Driver” style that has dominated much of his career, Paul Schrader pays ruminative and respectful tribute to his late friend, novelist Russell Banks, who gave the writer-director the raw material for one of his best films, “Affliction” — and now, for one of his best films in years. Adapted from Banks’ “Foregone” (and given the title the author told Schrader he wanted for the book), “Oh, Canada” presents a dying artist’s final testimony as a multifaceted film-within-a-film, honoring Banks while also revealing so many of Schrader’s own thoughts on mortality.

EXCLUSIVE: Sarah Drew – best known for playing fan favorite Dr. April Kepner on Grey’s Anatomy – is about to headline her own series for Hallmark Media.

Angelique Jackson Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi star in Paul Schrader‘s latest, highly anticipated film ‘Oh Canada,’ which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday. Based on the late Russell Banks’ 2021 novel “Foregone,” the film centers on Gere’s Leonard Fife, an acclaimed filmmaker and “one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam, shares all his secrets to de-mythologize his mythologized life.” Elordi plays the younger version of Leonard. In this first-look clip, Gere’s Leonard speeds up to someone’s home, gets out of a car and walks toward the gate.

Uma Thurman has been to Cannes more times than she can remember, either to pledge support for the glamorous annual charity event amfAR or with films as diverse as the genteel Merchant-Ivory period film The Golden Bowl (2000) and Quentin Tarantino’s ultraviolent Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), in which she reprised her badass role as The Bride. The film that propelled her to stardom, Pulp Fiction, won the Palme d’Or there, and Thurman hasn’t forgotten what it did for her. This year, she’s back with Paul Schrader‘s Oh, Canada, the kind of smart, character-based indie on which she earned her spurs.

Pat Saperstein Deputy EditorAlice Munro, the Nobel and prize-winning Canadian author of short story collections and novels including “Lives of Girls and Women” and “The Love of a Good Woman,” died Monday night at her home in Ontario, the New York Times reported. She was 92Munro won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2013 for her short stories, the Man Booker International prize in 2009 and the O’Henry award in 2012.

Paul Schrader was about to start shooting “Oh, Canada,” his adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel about a troubled artist taking stock of his life, when the major actors union went on strike. For a second, it looked like all that hard work, passion and planning might be for nothing — with performers on the picket lines and major studios holding out on their contract demands, it was hard to see how cameras would ever roll on the low-budget indie. “Everything shut down,” said Brian Beckmann, the CFO and COO of Arclight Films, which is selling international rights to the film.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent New Italian media company Be Water – which is in Cannes for the first time – has announced its full roster of partners and scope of business activities comprising film, documentary and scripted TV production as well as theatrical film distribution, podcasts and live events. The Rome-based potential powerhouse is operating with what is being described as a holistic approach to content production that is congenial to the digital age, which is certainly a novelty for Italy.

Paul Schrader absentmindedly builds installation art out of seven prescription bottles, two inhalers and an empty martini glass, as we sit in a restaurant for seniors in a Manhattan high-rise. Outside, lights twinkle on the Hudson. In 1975, Schrader went to bed with a pistol under his pillow while writing “Taxi Driver.” “Having the option to end things is the only way I could sleep,” Schrader says.