‘Grasshopper Republic’ Picked Up by Taskovski Films Ahead of World Premiere at Visions du Réel (EXCLUSIVE)

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Los Angeles-based sales agency MultiVisionnaire Pictures has acquired worldwide rights, outside of Japan, to “Samurai Ninja Onimanji.” The picture is a gory-fantasy-action film by Japanese VFX master, artist, and director Nishimura Yoshihiro. Nishimura is a prolific special effects artist with over 100 film credits ranging from effects work to writing and directing. Credits across the J-sploitation genre include “Tokyo Gore Police,” “Meatball Machine Kodoku” and the recent “Tokyo Dragon Chef.”

The world premiere of Disney’s The Little Mermaid live-action remake just took place and the first reactions from critics have been revealed.

The Cannes Film Festival will pay tribute to iconic late director Jean-Luc Godard, following his death last September, with a trio of works in its Cannes Classic cinema heritage line-up.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “Inkas the Ramferinkas,” a story about a small flying dinosaur, is being adapted into an animated feature film. Independent film producer Niels Juul and Sherman Theatrical Entertainment have teamed up to develop the project, which is inspired by music from the Sherman Brothers. It’s the first and final musical from the late Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman, the songwriting duo behind Walt Disney classics from “The Jungle Book,” “Winnie the Pooh,” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” and “Mary Poppins.” The Sherman brothers won Oscars for their work on “Mary Poppins,” including best song for “Chim Chim Cher-ee” and best score. They went on to earn nine Oscar nominations, two Grammy Awards, 23 gold and platinum records and have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Perhaps their biggest contribution to the pop culture landscape, however, is writing the song “It’s a Small World (After All).”

Homeland co-creator Howard Gordon will receive the 62nd Monte-Carlo Television Festival’s Honorary Golden Nymph, an award that honors renowned professionals for their extraordinary contributions to the entertainment and television industry.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer for Marco Bellocchio’s “Kidnapped” (Rapito), which has its world premiere in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The film starts in 1858 in the Jewish quarter of Bologna, when the Pope’s soldiers burst into the home of the Mortara family. By order of the cardinal, they have come to take Edgardo, their seven-year-old son. The child had been secretly baptized by his nurse as a baby and the papal law is unquestionable: he must receive a Catholic education. Edgardo’s parents, distraught, will do anything to get their son back. Supported by public opinion and the international Jewish community, the Mortaras’ struggle quickly takes a political dimension. But the Church and the Pope will not agree to return the child, to consolidate an increasingly wavering power.

West Ham United manager David Moyes has revealed defender Kurt Zouma will be sidelined for "a few weeks" as they prepare to face Manchester City on Wednesday night.

Manchester United will be looking to go one step closer to securing their place in the Champions League next season when they welcome an Aston Villa side who are in resurgent form under Unai Emery. The visitors have now emerged as late contenders for a place in the European places along with Brighton & Hove Albion, Tottenham and Liverpool.

Manchester City can go top of the league with a game-in-hand over title rivals Arsenal if they can bring home three points from Craven Cottage when they face Fulham. The reigning league champions have capitalised on Arsenal's dip in form which included the midweek win at the Etihad Stadium against the Gunners.

The prestigious Visions du Réel film festival in Nyon, Switzerland wraps up this weekend, after hosting the world premiere of dozens of documentaries.

K.J. Yossman Sally Greene, the woman who appointed Kevin Spacey artistic director of The Old Vic theater in London, has stepped down as a director of the theater’s trust, Variety can confirm. Greene’s husband, property entrepreneur Robert Bourne, has also resigned as a director of The Old Vic Theatre Trust. Her decision to step down as a founding trustee after spending more than 20 years at the London theater company comes ahead of Spacey’s trial for sexual assault, which is due to start at the end of June. The Old Vic found itself at the center of the Spacey storm in 2017 when, following claims made by actor Anthony Rapp, a cascade of allegations about Spacey’s behavior emerged, including a number of claims about inappropriate conduct pertaining to his time at The Old Vic.

Manchester City legend Sergio Aguero believes his former side's meeting with Arsenal will be played with more intensity because of the latter's recent dropped points.

Lise Pedersen American director Daniel McCabe and his team have opened up to Variety about the making of “Grasshopper Republic” at Swiss international documentary film fest Visions du Réel, where the pic is nominated in the main competition. Based on a book of photographs by Michele Sibiloni, a photographer and long-time friend of McCabe, who co-shot the film with him and his brother Michael, “Grasshopper Republic” takes viewers on an immersive vérité style journey alongside Uganda’s grasshopper trappers as they set out to make the catch they hope will make them rich: prices and demand for grasshoppers are high in Uganda, where they are considered a delicacy.

Manchester City will be looking to close the gap on the Premier League title race when they welcome league leaders Arsenal to the Etihad Stadium. Pep Guardiola's side are five points behind but have two games-in-hand over Mikel Arteta's team so this match is a huge six-pointer.

The world premiere of The Passion sung and spoken in Scots was a sell-out success in Dalry Parish Church on Easter Saturday.

A new 'exhibition experience' at Manchester's Science and Industry Museum is set to bring the hit CBBC show Operation Ouch! to life.

Lise Pedersen “Knit’s Island,” the sophomore feature by French trio Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse and Quentin L’helgoualc’h, competing in the Burning Lights sidebar at Swiss international doc fest Visions du Reél, has been picked up by Vienna-based film sales company Square Eyes. It is entirely shot in the online post-apocalyptic world of DayZ, a multiplayer survival video game set in the fictional post-Soviet Republic of Chernarus, where a mysterious plague has turned most of the population into violent zombies. Under the guise of avatars, the three-member film crew entered this world and made contact with its players. Their goal was to show how the gaming world can be a place where players become part of a strong community, they tell Variety.

Lise Pedersen Sales company Deckert Distribution has boarded “Pure Unknown,” by Italy’s Mattia Colombo (“Il Posto”) and Valentina Cicogna, and Venezuelan filmmaker Iván Simonovis Pertíñez’s debut feature “My Father’s Prison,” both selected in the main International Competition at Swiss international documentary film festival Visions du Réel. “Pure Unknown” follows the story of Italian forensic pathologist Cristina Cattaneo in her battle to put a name to each nameless body that lands in her autopsy room. She calls them the Pure Unknown. Many belong to the fringes of society: they are homeless, sex workers or runaway teenagers. More recently, they have been mostly migrants drowned at sea trying to reach Europe’s shores.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Match Factory has boarded Sean Price Williams’s “The Sweet East,” which has its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival in May. It is the first feature film directed by Price Williams, the cinematographer of Owen Kline’s “Funny Pages” (2022), Abel Ferrara’s “Zeros and Ones” (2021), Michael Almereyda’s “Tesla” (2020), Alex Ross Perry’s “Her Smell” (2018) and the Safdies’ “Good Time” (2017). The screenplay is by film critic and programmer Nick Pinkerton. “The Sweet East” is a picaresque journey through the cities and woods of the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. undertaken by Lillian, a high school senior from South Carolina, who gets her first glimpse of the wider world on a class trip to Washington, D.C.

Naman Ramachandran XYZ Films has unveiled New Visions, an initiative designed to spotlight bold new voices alongside established talent striking a new path in the international cinema space. The initiative will serve as a curated collection of films that “exists to discover and support the next generation of great filmmakers at the inception of their career, and to give established talents room to do something smaller, more intimate, or challenging outside of the usual box of independent filmmaking,” XYZ said in a statement. The slate will launch in Cannes with Directors’ Fortnight selection “In Flames,” a Pakistani-Canadian horror film directed by Zarrar Kahn and executive produced by Shant Joshi. As revealed by Variety, XYZ had boarded the title last year. In the Karachi-set film, after the death of the family patriarch, a mother and daughter’s precarious existence is ripped apart by figures from their past – both real and phantasmal. They must find strength in each other if they are to survive the malevolent forces that threaten to engulf them.