News

“Primavera,” a film about Antonio Vivaldi, the Italian Baroque composer and violinist who penned “The Four Seasons,” has been bought by a flurry of major distributors.

Represented by Memento International, the movie shot in Rome and Venice, and marks the feature debut of Damiano Michieletto, a leading opera director.

Warner Bros. will release the movie in Italy while Diaphana Distribution will release it in France. The pre-sales closed by Memento International are Benelux (Cineart), Germany and Austria (X Verleih), Spain (A Contracorriente Films), Switzerland (Frenetic) and Poland (M2 Films). Several other territories are in negotiations.

“Primavera” was penned by Ludovica Rampoldi, the award-winning screenwriter of movies such as “The Traitor” and “Gomorrah – the series,” among others. The script is loosely adapted from Tiziano Scarpa’s critically acclaimed novel “Stabat Mater.”

Set in 18th century Venice, “Primavera” follows Cecilia, a 20-year-old violin virtuoso who lives at the Pièta orphanage. Despite her talent,...

Antonio Vivaldi, the Italian Baroque composer and violinist who penned “The Four Seasons,” will be portrayed in “Primavera,” the feature debut of Damiano Michieletto, a leading opera director. Memento International has boarded the film which begins shooting this month in Rome and Venice.

“Primavera” was penned by Ludovica Rampoldi, the award-winning screenwriter of movies such as “The Traitor” and “Gomorrah – the series,” among others. The script is loosely adapted from Tiziano Scarpa’s critically acclaimed novel “Stabat Mater.”

Set in 18th century Venice, “Primavera” follows Cecilia, a 20-year-old violin virtuoso who lives at the Pièta orphanage. Despite her talent, Cecilia remains confined within the orphanage, knowing that marriage is the only way out. Yet, her life takes a turn after she meets Antonio Vivaldi, a brilliant and ambitious composer who becomes the new violin teacher. Guided by Vivaldi and his music, Cecilia “finds the strength to challenge the destiny that once seemed inevitable,...

by Nathaniel R

Pedro Almodóvar and his actresses Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton working on The Room Next Door which is now a Golden Lion winner

The 81st annual Venice Film Festival has ended and the two perceived frontrunners The Brutalist and The Room Next Door took home major prizes, as did Babygirl, The Quiet Son, and Brazil's possible Oscar submission I'm Still Here. The "Competition" films are the headlining titles of course but they aren't the only films that get major mileage from applause and kudos as any festival wraps up. Outside of the main competition films like Familiar Touch (US), Familia (Italy), Iddu (Italy),  Mon Inséparable (France), Paul and Paulette Take a Bath (UK) and The New Year That Never Came (Romania) all won fanbases if the awards that flew around this week are indication.

The prizes went like so... ...

There is a disconcertingly ambivalent tone to Sicilian Letters, a very handsomely presented game of cop cats and mafioso mice flying the Rai quality-drama banner. On the one hand, there is the mob movie’s requisite number of murders, betrayals, overnight widows and irredeemably corrupt public officials. There is the expected childhood flashback showing the nastiest honcho in the Cosa Nostra learning his trade by doing something horrible to an animal. All this, and yet Sicilian Letters, directed by Favio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, is more of a romp than a revengers’ tragedy.

In part, this can be shored home to the central presence of the great Tony Servillo, whose resting expression of ironic amusement gives everything around him a touch of levity. Servillo plays Catello Palumbo, who has just emerged from six years behind bars. Given to quoting the classics, Palumbo was, until his incarceration, the headmaster of the...

Though doubtless a crucial aspect of many of the most dramatic occurrences in human history, letter-writing is not the most cinematic of activities. And so it unfortunately proves once again in Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza’s “Sicilian Letters,” a heavily fictionalized riff on a real-life mafia tale, which sets up a battle of wits between a ruthless mob boss and the family friend working with the authorities to bring him down, but struggles to maintain any kind of momentum when the duel is merely a case of epistles-at-dawn.

Elio Germano plays Matteo, a character based on notorious Sicilian mafioso Matteo Messina Denaro who was the subject of a 30-year manhunt which only ended in 2023 when he was finally caught. Toni Servillo plays the more heavily fictionalized Catello Polumbo, whose 2004 correspondence with Matteo gets the authorities closer to his apprehension than ever before. As the film begins, Catello, a well-read,...

Italy’s Fandango Film Sales has taken world rights outside Italy on Andrea Segre’s “The Great Ambition,” a biopic of late Italian political leader Enrico Berlinguer, who during the 1970s was secretary of Western Europe’s largest Communist Party.

The film, which is lead-produced by Rome-based indie Vivo film has been set as the Rome Film Festival opener, as previously announced.

Elio Germano, who won the actor top honors in Cannes with Daniele Luchetti’s “Our Life,” plays Berlinguer, who led the Italian Communist Party (Pci) from 1972 until his death in 1984. Berlinguer nearly brought the Pci to power in the Italian parliamentary elections of 1976.

Germano is currently at Venice Film Festival with the Mafia drama “Sicilian Letters.” Segre was last at Venice with the 2021 drama “Welcome Venice,” which played in Venice Days.

“When a way forward seems impossible to everyone, do you have to stop? Enrico Berlinguer did not,...

The Zurich Film Festival has lined up world premieres of Constantin Film’s fantasy drama Hagen and western The Unholy Trinity starring Pierce Brosnan and Samuel L. Jackson as part of its Gala programme.

Two Swiss productions - Frieda’s Case by Maria Brendle and Aiming High - A Race Against The Limits by Flavio Gerber and Alun Meyerhans – will also world premiere in the ten strong Gala section.

Produced by Constantin, Hagen is a reimagining of the medieval Nibelungen folk saga directed by Cyrill Boss and Philipp Stenner. As well as a feature, it has been made as a six-part series.

Directorial duo Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza (“Sicilian Ghost Story”) tell the true tale of Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro – who was dubbed “the last godfather” – in their new drama “Sicilian Letters,” launching on Thursday from the Venice Film Festival.

“Sicilian Letters” pairs two top Italian actors — Elio Germano, who plays Messina, and Toni Servillo as his antagonist Catello, a shady secret services operative who is trying to catch him — working in tandem for the first time. The title refers to a surreptitious correspondence between them using “pizzini,” small slips of paper that the Sicilian Mafia used for high-level communications.

The film looks at a time during Denaro’s three decades as a fugitive from Italian justice, when he was at the peak of his nefarious powers. After being on the run for three decades, Messina Denaro was arrested in mid-January 2023 outside an upscale medical facility in Palermo, where...

Screen can unveil the first trailer for Mafia drama Sicilian Letters ahead of its world premiere in Competition at the Venice Film Festival.

It is the third film from directors Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza (after Salvo in 2013 and Sicilian Ghost Story in 2017), and the duo’s first at Venice.

Titled Iddu at home (‘Him’ in Sicilian dialect), their latest feature is inspired by the story of fugitive Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro.

Elio Germano plays the godfather in hiding, with Toni Servillo as the smalltime local politician who became his pen pal.

The Italy-France co-production pairs Indigo Film and...

Screen can unveil the first trailer for Mafia drama Sicilian Letters ahead of its world premiere in Competition at the Venice Film Festival.

It is the third film from directors Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza (after Salvo in 2013 and Sicilian Ghost Story in 2017), and the duo’s first at Venice.

Titled Iddu at home (‘God’ in Sicilian dialect), their latest feature is inspired by a cache of letters discovered after the 2023 arrest of fugitive Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro.

Elio Germano plays the godfather in hiding, with Toni Servillo as the smalltime local politician who became his pen pal.

The...

The lineup for the 81st Venice International Film Festival is here. Artistic director Alberto Barbera and Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco revealed the complete list of titles across sections early on Tuesday, July 23. Watch the live stream here or on YouTube.

Competition highlights included, as expected, Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Pablo Larraín’s “Maria” with Angelina Jolie, Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” with Daniel Craig, and Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door.” Other gems in the lineup include “April,” from Georgian “Beginning” director Dea Kulumbegashvili; Brady Corbet’s “Fountainhead”-inspired epic “The Brutalist,” which runs a whopping 215 minutes and will present in 70mm; Aussie auteur Justin Kurzel’s thriller “The Order”; “Chevalier” director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s “Harvest” with Caleb Landry Jones; and Halina Reijn’s psychosexual thriller for A24, “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.

Out of competition across series and features, there’s new work from Harmony Korine,...