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Marta Balaga As its 56th edition – running July 1-9 – kicks off, Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival is ready to party like it’s 2019.“We can’t predict how many people will come, as some still don’t want to travel, but it’s supposed to be as close to [pre-pandemic] 2019 as possible,” says artistic director Karel Och, noting the audience is still one of the festival’s biggest assets.It’s their enthusiasm for cinema that has “enchanted even big Hollywood stars,” echoes president Jiří Bartoška, hoping for a great atmosphere in Karlovy Vary.But there have been significant changes at the festival, starting with the death of the longtime artistic advisor and former artistic director Eva Zaoralová in March.

For decades, Italian filmmakers dominated Cannes.If the 1960s saw Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti reign supreme, somehow the 1970s were even richer. Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi won shared top prizes in 1972, while for two consecutive years later that decade the Taviani brothers and then Ermanno Olmi hoisted Palmes across a border that sits just 40 miles away.This year’s lone competition title from an Italian director (the only other Italian language film, “The Eight Mountains,” comes courtesy of two Belgians), Mario Martone’s “Nostalgia” will probably not break that particular drought, but the Neapolitan director can take solace in another modest honor: Telling a story about mothers and sons, about gangsters and priests, and about a peculiar kind of longing for the past in a place where little has changed for hundreds of years, “Nostalgia” is a nigh perfect candidate to wave il Tricolore.Taking a thin amount of plot and stretching it as far and wide as it can go, the film itself is far from perfect, but it does benefit from “The Traitor” star Pierfrancesco Favino’s terrific lead performance as a man who learns the hard way that there’s no going home again.After forty years abroad, Felice (Favino, of course) returns to his native Naples a stranger in a familiar land.

Lise Pedersen Paris-based international sales company The Party Film Sales has nabbed the rights for Antongiulio Panizzi’s hybrid documentary “The Girl in the Fountain,” a double portrait of icons Anita Ekberg and Monica Bellucci, which opened at the Torino Film Festival last November.The story of an actress devoured by her own icon, the film alternates between archive footage of Ekberg and reenacted scenes by Bellucci, who retraces Ekberg’s weaknesses and choices, inviting the viewer to reflect on what it is like to be an icon, providing a fresh look at femininity, fame and media exposure.The famous scene in Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” in which Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg take a midnight dip in the Trevi Fountain, hides a much more chaotic life – that of an actress consumed by her own iconic image, says Panizzi. Speaking to Variety ahead of the Torino premiere, Panizzi said that the iconic scene turned out to be a burden for the actress, who got to experience what Rita Hayworth meant when she said that “they go to bed with Gilda; they wake up with me.”It was the director’s wish to have Bellucci tell the Swedish icon’s story, as he believed she would be the perfect match.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentSince Cinecittà Studios was founded in 1937, the sprawling facilities have driven the golden age of Cinema Italiano.The famed city of cinema has also, albeit intermittently, been a magnet for international productions and endured wild fluctuations in the country’s political climate, before recently reemerging as a new frontier for the country’s film and TV industry.Located in the heart of the Mediterranean basin, a short ride from the center of Rome and its airports, Italy’s top production hub has to date, hosted more than 3,000 films that have earned 53 Oscars.During the period following World War II, the studios forged close ties to Hollywood, which helped the Italian industry gain its international standing. The myriad Italian pics made at the studios range from Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and “8½” (1963) to Nanni Moretti’s “Sogni D’Oro” (1981), Sergio Leone’s epic “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), Giuseppe Tornatore’s “The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean” (1998) Paolo Sorrentino’s “Il Divo” (2008) and, more recently, his TV series “The New Pope” in 2019.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItaly’s iconic Cinecittà Studios turn 85 this year and it’s never looked so young.The famed facilities, which in their Hollywood-on-the-Tiber heyday hosted sword-and-sandals epics such as William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur” and were later home to Federico Fellini, are undergoing a major overhaul that now sees Europe’s largest LED wall situated on the lot near Fellini’s huge Studio 5.Known as Cinecittà’s T18 Virtual Production Stage, the 412-square-meter (4,434-sq.-ft.) semicircular screen made up of hundreds of high-def displays that serve as interactive backdrops for actors on a smart set, is one of more than a dozen state-of-the art soundstages being built there thanks to a multimillion-euro cash injection provided by the European Union’s post-pandemic recovery fund. The revamp is being spearheaded by Nicola Maccanico, managing director of Italy’s Istituto Luce-Cinecittà, the state film entity that operates Rome’s expanding Cinecittà Studios.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentCinecittà CEO Nicola Maccanico, who is a former Warner Bros. and Sky Italia senior exec, is implementing a major upgrade and expansion of the iconic Rome studios where he recently installed Europe’s largest LED Wall on the lot near the large Studio 5 that was once Federico Fellini’s second home.

Martin Scorsese’s nonprofit The Film Foundation is launching a free virtual screening room to showcase restored films starting May 9 with I Know Where I’m Going!.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItalian producer Massimo Cristaldi, who as a production manager worked with masters such as Federico Fellini and Francesco Rosi before setting up his own company and shepherding films including prizewinning drama “Sicilian Ghost Story,” has died. He was 66.Cristaldi’s death was announced over the weekend by his Rome-based company Cristaldi Pictures in a statement that did not specify the cause.Born in 1956, Massimo Cristaldi was the only son of prominent producer Franco Cristaldi, the triple Oscar-winner who made Pietro Germi’s “Divorce Italian Style,” Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord” and Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso.”In 1974 Massimo Cristaldi started cutting his teeth in the film business first as a production assistant and eventually, starting in the 1980s, becoming a line producer on many of his father’s productions, working with Fellini, Rosi, Tornatore, and many other Italian cinema greats.

Cate Blanchett (Nightmare Alley, Don’t Look Up) has been named as the latest recipient of Film At Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentAs we enter the final countdown to the Feb. 8 Oscar nominations announcement, Isabella Rossellini is clearly rooting for Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God,” which is Italy’s candidate for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and among the shortlisted titles.To help promote the pic with Academy voters, Rossellini engaged in an online chat with the director and young Italian actor Filippo Scotti, who plays Sorrentino’s alter-ego Fabietto in the pic. She also wore a gold horn amulet that belonged to her father, the late great Italian master Roberto Rossellini, for good luck.Here are edited excerpts of the conversation, to which Variety has been given exclusive access.

Marta Balaga Anita Ekberg, the Swedish star immortalized in Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” where her character decides to walk into the Trevi Fountain to the delight, and terror, of Marcello Mastroianni, has a “complicated” story, Italian director Antongiulio Panizzi tells Variety.In “The Girl in the Fountain,” produced by Dugong Films and Eagle Pictures, and presented at the Torino Film Festival alongside Panizzi’s documentary “Piano Lessons: The Life and Art of German Diez Nieto,” he

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentTwo decades after its launch, Italy’s National Film Museum in Turin is pushing out into VR and looking to boost its role as a magnet for global movie lovers and a catalyst for the local film industry.The venerable cinematic shrine housed in the iconic Mole Antonelliana domed tower, which is the Northern city’s main landmark, has long been known as a treasure trove of movie memorabilia, including pre-cinema magic lanterns and Federico Fellini’s red scarf

Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalog titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

Selome Hailu editorThe Museum of Modern Art and Cinecittà announced that Federico Fellini, a retrospective honoring the Italian director, will run from Dec. 1 to Jan.

Jessica Kiang An event like the Festival Lumière, with its wide remit that sees classic films and retrospectives rub shoulders with the very latest and chic-est new titles, is always going to boast a thicket of hidden connections and surprising collisions.

Must of the MonthAfter creating gorgeous box sets celebrating the films of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, The Criterion Collection turns its attentions to one of the great auteurs who isn’t a dead white guy: World of Wong Kar Wai is a seven-Blu-ray set that features 4K restorations of contemporary masterpieces like “Chungking Express,” “In the Mood for Love,” “2046,” “Happy Together,” “Days of Being Wild,” “Fallen Angels,” and “As Tears Go By,” with a treasure trove of extras including a

auteur filmmakers who engage in Netflix-bashing, iconic director Martin Scorsese has eviscerated streaming platforms for supposedly devaluing the “art of cinema” due to a lack of “curation.”The legendary “Goodfellas” director — already a noted non-fan of blockbusters from Marvel — dropped the bombshell in an essay on filmmaking icon Federico Fellini published in the March 2021 issue of Harper’s Magazine.While admitting he owes a lot to online film purveyors (“The Irishman” was distributed to

MCU is not cinema, but the Oscar-winning filmmaker is now turning his ire to a much larger trend in Hollywood: the labeling of films as “content.”In a new essay for Harper’s Magazine reflecting on the career of Federico Fellini, Scorsese lamented how the new era of streaming has made that dreaded c-word far too common in discussion of movies, particularly within the film industry.“As recently as fifteen years ago, the term ‘content’ was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a

In a new essay for Harper’s Magazine, legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese doesn’t pull any punches as he has some harsh criticisms for the state of the movie industry. Tilted “Il Maestro”, the article focus is on director Federico Fellini but dives into so much more especially the current state of streamers and his issues with their effect on the movie going experience.

Over the past few years, Martin Scorsese has become the poster child for the debate over what qualifies as “cinema.” While we’re not here to relitigate comments he made about superhero films and the current state of the film industry, it’s clear that Scorsese longs for the bygone era of filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, Agnes Varda, and Ingmar Bergman.

Frank Moreno, who was known for screening films at Cannes for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures to purchase and distribute in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, died Wednesday in Florida. He was 82 and died after a brief battle with cancer, according to his daughter.

Giuseppe Rotunno, the cinematographer highly regarded for his collaborations with Federico Fellini, has died at the age of 97. Italian news agency ANSA reported that he passed away at his home in Rome yesterday, February 7.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentAce Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, who was instrumental to the making of masterpieces such as Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” and Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord,” but also worked in Hollywood and was an Oscar nominee for Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz,” has died.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItaly’s storied Titanus studio, producers of myriad golden era works from Cinema Italiano, has inked a global distribution deal with pubcaster RAI’s sales unit RAI Com for its entire library of roughly 400 titles.The landmark agreement, besides distribution, entails a collaboration to restore and preserve the Titanus library, which is a treasure trove comprising early works by Italo masters such as Federico Fellini and Francesco Rosi, and Luchino

Alberto Lattuada, the Italian filmmaker who generously supplied Federico Fellini’s first director’s credit for 1950’s “Variety Lights,” once claimed that he “invented Fellini.” His peer, Massimo Mida, disputed this, noting that if anyone invented il Maestro, it was legendary Italian auteur Roberto Rossellini. Respectfully, they’re both wrong.

The Criterion Collection could easily take a month off in 2020, maybe two, and rest easy at winning the title for best cinephile DVD/Blu-Ray company (how many years in a row they’ve already won that title is something we’ll leave you to debate with friends).

The pandemic might be killing us and all our businesses, but you know who seems unaffected? The Criterion Collection who are having a killer 2020 so far. Not only have they made moves like scoring Neon’s Academy Award Best Picture winner “Parasite” just a few short months after it won the Oscar, but they’re having a field day with box sets like the Agnes Varda complete set and the upcoming Federico Fellini set.

To say that Federico Fellini is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time is an understatement. Even though all art is subjective and maybe there exists someone that doesn’t enjoy his films, when you just look at the accolades, it’s clear that Fellini is in a class all his own.