‘How to Survive a Pandemic’ Director David France: ‘I Despaired for America’ When COVID Swept the Country

Kirill Serebrennikov, the prominent Russian director of film and theater, has had his widely-condemned fraud sentence commuted and has subsequently left the country.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentRussian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov — the director of Cannes competition titles “Leto” and “Petrov’s Flu” — has left the country following the end of a three-year travel ban, and has arrived in Paris.A picture of the iconoclastic Russian helmer popped up on social media on Wednesday. In the pic, Serebrennikov wears a T-shirt that reads “I turn the TV off,” which alludes to the propaganda flooding Russian TV since the invasion of Ukraine on Feb.

EXCLUSIVE: An influx of U.S. studios and streamers heading to next week’s Mip TV should mitigate the loss of some of the bigger European distributors, according to Lucy Smith, who runs the annual market.

Sian Heder brought the Oscar audience to its feet winning her first Academy Award for adapting CODA (Child Of Deaf Adult), from the 2014 French film  La famille Bélie written by Victoria Bedos. This is the first Oscar and nomination for Heder.  

Former Food Network host and celebrity chef David Ruggerio has come out with a startling revelation – he had a secret life as a made man in the mafia, participating in several murders, drug dealing, extortion, fraud and other crimes.

“When I really love someone, I don’t notice others,” utters Anais (Anais Demoustier) to her affair partner while laying in bed together. It’s ominous wording for what’s to come for the protagonist in writer/director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new romantic comedy Anais In Love. It is similar to Jochum Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, but while that film feels grounded, Anais has its head in the clouds. However, that isn’t a massive ding on the movie as the over-optimism is used to its advantage as the character breaks numerous boundaries and hearts in her quest to find the one person who will become her everything. 

Ed Meza @edmezavarDespite expectations to the contrary, the share of Europe’s audiovisual market controlled by U.S. players grew by only four percentage points from 1996 to 2020, reaching 31%, according to the European Audiovisual Observatory’s 2022 Key Trends report.It’s one of a number of surprising results identified by the study, which the Observatory presented on Thursday at a special event at Series Mania in Lille, France.When excluding European public broadcasting rivals, the share held by U.S.-owned companies climbs to 44%, with heavyweights Sky, Netflix, Amazon and Dazn accounting for two-thirds of that figure.Looking specifically at all SVOD subscriptions in Europe, however, Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney dominate, accounting for 72% in 2020, with 40 other players making up the remaining 28%.

Guy Lodge Film CriticA decade ago, when his documentary “How to Survive a Plague” rode a wave of festival acclaim to an Oscar nomination, journalist-turned-filmmaker David France probably didn’t imagine that a similarly titled quasi-sequel was in the cards. A superb overview of the early years of HIV-AIDS activism in the face of political indifference and ineptitude — ultimately leading to game-changing medication and pharmaceutical policy change — that film has given France a solid grounding for another feature-length study of very different if somewhat comparable global health crisis, centered on the COVID-19 pandemic and the extraordinarily accelerated scientific race for a solution.Researched and assembled with his characteristic intelligence and thoroughness, “How to Survive a Pandemic” serves as both a valuable potted history of the last two years of medical tumult and relief, and a critical progress report marking work yet to be done. Hardly the first high-profile documentary on the pandemic, but the most substantial yet to focus specifically on the trajectory of the vaccine, France’s film is assured a receptive audience when it bows on HBO next week, following docfest premiere slots in Thessaloniki and Copenhagen.

Ed Meza @edmezavarIn his latest work, which was being singled out for praise on the first day of Malaga’s Spanish Screenings, Imanol Uribe recounts the fateful story of Lucia Cerna, the only witness to the 1989 massacre in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests and two other people by a U.S.-trained death squad at a university residence in San Salvador.“What Lucia Saw” (“Llegaron de Noche”) focuses on the story of Lucia and her husband Jorge, who, with the help of church officials and Spanish and French diplomats, are spirited out of the country to Miami, where they hope to find safe haven. Once in the U.S., however, they fall into the clutches of the FBI and a Salvadoran colonel, who interrogate the couple in an effort to discredit Lucia’s testimony.

Marta Balaga Israeli director Rama Burshtein-Shai focuses on an unlikely attraction in her eight-episode series “Fire Dance,” now debuting at TV festival Series Mania in Lille, France. Faigie (Mia Ivryn) is just 18 when she starts paying closer attention to Nathan, thirtysomething married son of their ultra-Orthodox community’s leader. Produced by Yes TV, Firma Productions and Kuma Studios, it has Yes Studios handling international sales.“I don’t think it’s a story about impossible love.

Marta Balaga Just in time for the 20th anniversary of “The Wire,” celebrated during the opening of French TV festival Series Mania currently unspooling in Lille, David Simon returns to Baltimore with HBO’s miniseries “We Own This City.”Co-created with George Pelecanos and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, it focuses on true events described in Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book, chronicling the inner workings of the Gun Trace Task Force: the Baltimore Police Department unit charged with racketeering, robbery, extortion and overtime fraud in 2017.Jon Bernthal and Baltimore native Josh Charles star – as disgraced Sgt. Wayne Jenkins and GTTF detective Daniel Hersl respectively – as well as “Succession’s” Dagmara Domińczyk, McKinley Belcher III, Jamie Hector and Wunmi Mosaku.

Series Mania boasts a plethora of riches, including, just for starters, the latest series from “The Wire’s” David Simon, and “Vikings’” Michael Hirst and “The Responder,” starring Martin Freeman, which is already being talked up as the European series of the year. And it bowed on BBC One in January. The following selection may well not rep the best 10 titles at this year’s Series Mania. Some of those will only be revealed in a final jury verdict, if then.

Shalini Dore Features News EditorThe Danish film “Flee,” with Oscar nominations in animated, documentary and international film categories, tells the tale of Amin, a gay refugee from Afghanistan who is separated from his family.Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen says that when his school friend opened up about his childhood, the helmer had intended to make a short, which grew to feature length as more details were spilled. “It really started out as a conversation between two friends,” he says.“We are exposed to so many of these stories in the media so I think a lot of people, me at least, I have a tendency to block things out because it becomes too much,” he says.

EXCLUSIVE: The Amazing Spiderman, 500 Days of Summer and Disney’s Snow White director Marc Webb has been set to direct supernatural thriller Day Drinker.

K.J. Yossman Film Mode Entertainment has inked a multi-project distribution deal with Australian director/producer Luke Sparke’s company Sparke Films.Among the titles Film Mode will represent worldwide are Sparke’s upcoming projects “Weapons of Choice,” a television adaptation of John Birmingham’s World War Two trilogy “Axis of Time” and “Primitive War,” a horror feature franchise based on Ethan Pettus’ book series.Film Mode will also handle worldwide sales rights for “Occupation: Rainfall 2” and “Occupation: Rainfall 3” – the third and fourth films in Sparke’s franchise – as well as a number of other projects still in development.

Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we’ve already seen quite a large number of documentaries tackle the subject. But the upcoming HBO documentary, “How to Survive a Pandemic,” takes a fairly unique angle on the situation.

Deltacron has now officially been declared a COVID-19 strain. Concerns about a mutation combining features of both the Delta and Omicron variants first arose earlier this year, following an investigation that took place in a Cyprus lab. Virologists in Paris have now confirmed its existence.

an existing deal between Fox and Warner Bros. that extends through 2022, and similarly saw Guillermo del Toro’s Best Picture-nominated “Nightmare Alley” come to both streaming services at the beginning of February.Based on the 1937 Agatha Christie novel, “Death on the Nile” sees Kenneth Branagh reprise his role as detective Hercule Poirot as another murder is committed – this time on a ship. Branagh directs the 20th Century Studios film just as he directed “Murder on the Orient Express,” and the ensemble cast includes Tom Bateman, Annette Bening, Russell Brand, Ali Fazal, Dawn French, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Rose Leslie, Emma Mackey, Sophie Okonedo, Jennifer Saunders and Letitia Wright. The film is written by Michael Green, adapted from Christie’s novel, and is produced by Ridley Scott, Kenneth Branagh, p.g.a., Judy Hofflund, p.g.a.