MAD Solutions Acquires World Sales Rights to OSN’s First Original Feature ‘Yellow Bus’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Dave Chappelle is back on Netflix with a new comedy special that drops on Dec. 31 and features Morgan Freeman.

Amazon is teasing Prime Video’s offerings for 2024 and released the first looks of projects starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Camila Mendes and more.

Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) has hired an original productions chief for Max in Italy and Iberia, an intriguing move that completes the local content team ahead of the streaming service’s launch in Europe next year.

Andrew Wallenstein President and Chief Media Analyst Perhaps no consumer-electronics product had a more audacious launch in 2023 than Telly, a TV set that was given out for free to thousands of U.S. consumers.

K.J. Yossman Danny A. Abeckaser is directing and starring in a new World War II drama, “Bardejov” from a screenplay by Shmuel Lynn.

Football is heading to South America. Earlier this week, the NFL announced plans to play its first match in South America. The game will be played in Brazil, and follows various NFL matches hosted in European countries.

Nick Holdsworth A young boy is fleeing war after his father is killed. All alone in the world, he finds a treasure map that will change his life — and give him the chance to heal from trauma. The plot of “Saleem” — Jordan’s first feature-length animation — is a universal story of the horrors so many children around the world face today, its producers say.

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Global Content Distribution has acquired worldwide rights to movie Depravity (previously known as Sic), the directorial debut of The Fighter and The Finest Hours screenwriter Paul Tamasy who also wrote the script.

“He’s changing the narrative.” The new comedy, “American Fiction,” features a wickedly sharp and bitingly funny premise. The feature-length directorial debut of Cord Jefferson, a producer and writer on acclaimed series such as “Watchmen,” “Station Eleven” and “Master Of None,” the film is adapted from Percival Everett’s “Erasure,” a brilliant indictment of the way modern culture handles race, a pointed satire about the commodification of marginalized voices and a writer forced to confront himself and his own creative integrity.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor London-based international documentary sales and production outfit Dogwoof has boarded world sales for Shiori Ito’s feature documentary, “Black Box Diaries,” which will receive its world premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The film follows director and journalist Ito’s courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender.

EXCLUSIVE: London-based sales and production outfit Dogwoof has boarded world sales for Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes, which will get its world premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. 

A Dragon Market will take over Chinatown on Sunday for the first time ever - featuring a range of stalls from independent makers and local businesses.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor MAD Celebrity — the talent management subsidiary of the pan-Arab film and TV company MAD Solutions — has signed Tunisian actor and writer Majd Mastoura, French Lebanese actor Isabelle Zighondi, and Saudi actor, producer and director Amawri Ezayah to the roster of its MAD Rising Celebrity unit, and visual artist, producer and DOP Mostafa El Kashef, who will be joining MAD Crew Celebrity. Mastoura is best known for his work on Mohamed Ben Attia’s “Hedi” — for which he received a Silver Bear for best actor from the Berlin Film Festival, making him the first-ever Arab actor to receive the award — and Léonor Serraille’s “Mother and Son,” which world premiered in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Indian filmmaker and TV personality Karan Johar has become the first Indian director to receive the Variety Vanguard Award, recognizing industry leaders who have significantly contributed to the global entertainment business. On Saturday, Variety’s executive editor of film and media, Tatiana Siegel, handed Johar his award at the third edition of the Red Sea Film Festival, followed by a career-spanning conversation. The director-producer-TV host came out of a seven-year directing hiatus with the highly successful “Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani.” The pause, the filmmaker says, was due to his busy schedule as head of the production company Dharma Productions and the host of “Koffee With Karan,” one of India’s longest-running and most popular talk shows.

Ben Croll World premiering out of the Marrakech Film Festival ahead of a wider and promising festival run, Luck Razanajaona’s “Disco Afrika: A Malagasy Story” will offer the cinema of Madagascar its most prominent international showcase in nearly three decades. The feat didn’t come easy — or quickly — for the Malagasy filmmaker, who graduated from Marrakech’s ESAV film school in 2011 and then spent more than a decade crafting award-winning shorts while developing his first feature.

Angelique Jackson Mario Van Peebles has set his latest film “The Price for Freedom,” which tells the story of civil rights pioneers and NAACP organizers Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore, who were instrumental in advancing the cause for Black voters in Florida.

Callum McLennan ZDF, one of Germany’s leading broadcasters, has announced its co-production involvement ,via ZDF–Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, in the upcoming feature “Marriage by Abduction” (“Brautraub”). The film is directed by Sophia Mocorrea and builds on her short “The Kidnapping of the Bride” which took accolades at both Berlin and Sundance. It is now one of the high profile projects at Ventana Sur’s Proyecta lineup, its main arthouse project platform.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor MAD Solutions — the Middle East and North Africa region’s leading sales agent and distributor of Arabic-language films — has acquired the world sales rights for Tunisian director Nada Mezni Hafaiedh’s debut feature “Take My Breath,” which world premiered in the International Competition of the Warsaw Film Festival this fall. Hafaiedh’s film, which has found great success in Tunisian cinemas over the past month, follows the life of a young seamstress named Shams, whose tranquil life unravels when their intersex identity is exposed.

Stuart Ford’s AGC International has picked up world rights to two Arab-produced titles, HWJN by Yasir Al-Yasiri and To My Son byDhafer L’abidine, ahead of their debuts at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival. 

Anna Marie de la Fuente Madrid-based Sideral, a production-distribution-sales label launched by Spain’s Elamedia Estudios early this year, has boarded Uruguayan Ventana Sur-Blood Window project “Capital Variable,” the feature debut of Uruguayan helmer-scribe Marco Caltieri. Elamedia Studios CEO Roberto Butragueño will produce the thriller/dark comedy with Sideral’s Paola Botrán and Uruguay’s Clara Charlo of To Je To serving as executive producers. Sideral will be handling international sales on the project, which was pitched at genre forum Blood Window at Ventana Sur, the preeminent annual film-TV market in Buenos Aires, co-organized by Cannes Festival and Marché du Film and by Argentina’s INCAA film institute.