Belgian Comedy Duo Behind Sundance Movie ‘Mother Schmuckers’ to Direct ‘Heads or Fails’; Best Friend Forever Boards Sales (EXCLUSIVE)

Marta Balaga Please don’t stop the music: Anne Fontaine isn’t done with it just yet. Following “Boléro” — world premiering at International Film Festival Rotterdam — the noted director is developing another melodic project. “It’s about a character who was a star at 10 years old.

Naman Ramachandran Award-winning artist Justin Anderson’s debut feature “Swimming Home” has its world premiere in competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam. Variety has secured access to the first clip from the film. The film, an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, centers on poet Joe (Christopher Abbott) and war photographer Isabel (Mackenzie Davis), whose marriage is dying when Kitti (Ariane Labed), a naked stranger found floating in the pool at their sunny holiday villa in Greece, is invited to stay.

Kate Middleton 'could be your best friend one minute' and 'your worst enemy' the next, according to one royal expert.

Halle Berry‘s movie The Mothership is sadly not going to see the light of day!

Marc Malkin Senior Editor, Culture and Events It was recently announced that Joel Kim Booster was teaming up with Searchlight Pictures again following the awards-nominated success of his 2022 queer rom-com “Fire Island.” This time around, Booster’s new script is about the gay best friend (Booster) of a bride-to-be who’s in charge of making sure his bestie’s wedding goes off perfectly. However, Booster says he’d like to start moving away from playing the “gay best friend.” “I know how the industry works,” Booster tells me on this week’s episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. “I know that there are a couple more gay best friends in my future.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent By now, even the most hardcore fans of French cuisine and “Chocolat” star Juliette Binoche can agree that Justine Triet‘s “Anatomy of a Fall” – rather than Tran Anh Hung’s “The Taste of Things” — was the one movie that could have given France its first Oscar win for best international feature in over 30 years, since Régis Wargnier’s “Indochine.” Over the last three decades, a number of French movies have earned Oscar recognition, but none have been the official French Oscar submission. Michael Haneke’s “Amour” earned five Oscar noms in 2013 and even won the best foreign-language Oscar but it represented Austria.

The Academy has confirmed to Deadline that this is the first time two international foreign-language movies have been nominated for Best Picture in the same year and the first time that two foreign-language movies have received five Oscar nominations apiece in the same year.

Nadia Romdhani, former Screen International and The Drum executive, is joining Deadline as Sales Director, International.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Justine Triet‘s Palme d’Or winning “Anatomy of a Fall” picked up top accolades at the 29th Lumiere Awards, France’s equivalent to the Golden Globes, at a ceremony held Monday at the Forum des Images in Paris. While Triet lost the best director nod to Thomas Cailley for his supernatural family drama “The Animal Kingdom,” “Anatomy of a Fall” won best film, actress for Sandra Huller, and screenplay for Triet and Arthur Harari.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Camila Cabello swapped the Grammy and VMA stages for the snowy streets of Park City to promote her new indie drama “Rob Peace,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. In the movie, Cabello plays the girlfriend of Rob Peace (“Tulsa King” actor Jay Will), a promising Yale student who grew up in a crime-ridden New Jersey neighborhood. But his bright future dims after he’s forced to sell drugs to support his incarcerated father’s legal battles.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Will Ferrell touched down at the Sundance Film Festival to world premiere the new documentary “Will & Harper,” which centers on the relationship between the beloved comedian and his best friend Harper Steele as they take a road trip. The two met during their days on “Saturday Night Live,” which Harper wrote for from 1995 to 2008.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Already one of France’s most beloved and bankable actors (“The Stronghold”), Gilles Lellouche is about to graduate as a big-shot filmmaker five years after delivering his sophomore outing, “Sink or Swim,” a B.O. hit which lured more than four million moviegoers (over $35 million) in theaters.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Writer-director Sean Wang is tough on himself in “Dìdi,” a fresh and funny summer-before-freshman-year flashback that provides an Asian American angle on that Sundanciest of indie-film genres: the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age movie. In what feels like a cross between Bing Liu’s “Minding the Gap” and Jonah Hill’s “mid90s” — courtesy of the young director’s teenage desire to make skate videos — Wang serves up some of his most wince-inducing adolescent memories, from an aborted first kiss to the realization that he’d been trying to downplay his Taiwanese heritage.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter It took a lot of time — and hair — to transform Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough into Bigfoot. They spent several hours in the makeup chair to don the elaborate prosthetics needed to play two of the eponymous creatures in “Sasquatch Sunset,” a surreal comedic drama that premieres on Friday at the Sundance Film Festival.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Mongrel,” a Taiwan-set drama film that has done the round of project markets, will appear at the International Film Festival Rotterdam as a work in progress. In addition to the screening of 15 minutes of footage, Taiwan-based Singaporean director Chiang Wei Liang has confirmed the film’s cast as being headed by Thai actor Wanlop Rungkumjad (“Eternity,” “Manta Ray”) alongside Taiwanese female actor Lu Yi-ching (“The River”, “Stray Dogs”) and rapper Hong Yu-hong (“Bad Education”, “Miss Shampoo”) from Taiwanese hip-hop group Nine One One. Other key cast include Atchara Suwan (“By the Time It Gets Dark”), and Guo Shu-wei in his debut role.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Leading Asian film directors including Josh Kim, Fukada Koji and Patiparn Boontarig line up to pitch their in-development projects at the March edition of the Hong Kong – Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF). Leading directors Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Lu will also be on the ground at HAF, operating as producers. So too will established producers Yamamoto Teruhisa (“Drive My Car”) and Michael J.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Jean-Claude Van Damme, the global martial artist turned action hero whose 2021 movie “The Last Mercenary” was a hit on Netflix, has another film on the horizon. He will star opposite Michaël Youn (“BDE”) in “Le jardinier,” another high-voltage action-comedy reuniting him with “The Last Mercenary” director David Charhon.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor September Film has acquired all rights for Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg for “In the Land of Brothers,” which has its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section. The film is written and directed by Iranian filmmakers Raha Amirfazli and Alireza Ghasemi. Alpha Violet is handling world sales.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent After dropping on Netflix on Jan. 4 to the U.S. streaming giant’s second-biggest bow ever for a non-English language movie in hours watched, Spaniard J.A.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent European production powerhouse Mediawan has bought a majority stake in Misfits, the prestige U.K. company whose anticipated documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” will play at the Sundance Film Festival.