Spanish Animation Woos Marché du Film Buyers

the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival is back with a trove of diverse and innovative fare. There are character-driven indies with Hollywood stars, a documentary about one of the world’s greatest sports figures of all time and an entire mini-festival celebrating Tribeca co-founder Robert De Niro.

Ankama-backed animation company Studio Unagi has officially launched in Montreal after setting up under the radar over the first half of 2024.

Sean Baker’s “Anora,” a comic but devastating Brooklyn odyssey about a sex worker who marries the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch, has won the Cannes Film Festival’s top award, the Palme d’Or.Baker accepted the prize with his movie’s star, Mikey Madison, watching in the audience at the Cannes closing ceremony Saturday. The win for “Anora” marks a new high point for Baker, the director of “The Florida Project.” It’s also, remarkably, the fifth straight Palme d’Or won by indie distributor Neon, following “Parasite,” “Titane,” “Triangle of Sadness” and last year’s winner, “Anatomy of a Fall.”“I don’t really know what’s happening right now,” said Baker.While “Anora” was arguably the most acclaimed film of the festival, its win was a slight surprise.

CANNES – After 12 days of screenings, the Cannes Film Festival has drawn to a close. That means it’s time for Greta Gerwig and her jury to reveal the winners of the competition section of the festival.

Kelly Rowland stole many red carpet headlines from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with a visible confrontation with a female security officer as she made her way up the famous steps and into the Palais.

It has been a big week for the beloved 1964 musical, The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the 1964 Palme d’Or and went on to international acclaim and five Oscar nominations, plus served as one of the key inspirations for Damien Chazelle’s Oscar winning La La Land.

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired the North American rights for Gints Zilbalodis’s animated feature Flow, following an enthusiastic standing ovation at its world premiere in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard on Wednesday.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Cannes Film Festival president Iris Knobloch said she learned about the “power of cinema to carry messages, liberate speech and accomplish a duty of remembrance” from her parents, who are Holocaust survivors. Speaking at the Kering Women in Motion Talks at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday, the Munich-born Knobloch said her parents took her to the movie theater several times a week.

appeared to scold security at the red carpet premiere of the French-Italian film “Marcello Mio” during the Cannes Film Festival.Photos from the event showed Rowland pointing her finger towards a female security guard during their heated exchange.But according to insiders, Rowland was not the instigator in the incident.“The people who are assigned to helping stars walk the red carpet were being aggressive and Kelly was trying to ignore it,” a source claimed to the Daily Mail Wednesday.They continued: “By the time she got to the last woman she had had it because she scolded Kelly and told her to move when she was trying to wave to fans and help the paparazzi get their shot.”Rowland appeared to be enjoying herself at the glitzy premiere before the incident. As the source noted, she was initially smiling and waving to fans in her gorgeous red gown with a long train as she made her way up the red carpet steps.But according to the insider, the former Destiny’s Child member isn’t bothered about being in the center of drama.“She doesn’t care if she comes across like a diva if she knows that she is advocating for herself,” said the source.

Christopher Vourlias RAI Cinema International Distribution (RCID) has taken international sales rights for “Of Dogs and Men,” an upcoming drama directed by Dani Rosenberg (“The Death of Cinema and My Father Too,” “The Vanishing Soldier”) and produced by AR Content. RCID is introducing the film to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival‘s market, where Variety has been given exclusive access to a first-look image. Written by Rosenberg, Ori Avinoam and Itai Tamir (“To Take a Wife,” “Love Life”), “Of Dogs and Men” is produced by two-time Academy Award nominee Alexander Rodnyansky (“Loveless,” “Leviathan,” “Beanpole”) of AR Content and Itai Tamir (“Under a Blue Sun”) of Laila Films.

Paolo Sorrentino has done a wide range of films but until his most personal, The Hand Of God two years ago (a prize winner in Venice) he had not returned to Naples, the land of his youth except for the very first feature he made, 2001’s One Man Up. Since then though he has been to Cannes with his films 6 times, and his impressive list of movies have included The Consequences Of Love, Il Divo, Loro, and his Oscar winning The Great Beauty. There have been more mixed reactions for his starry English language films as well like Youth and This Must Be The Place, but Italy seems to drive his creative mojo and may be closest to his heart is the current phase of his filmmaking career when he has found new inspiration by going back to his youth, first in The Hand Of God which closely reflected his own coming of age in Naples, and now his latest, Parthenope which reflects the youth he wished he had experienced. Instead he moved away to a whole new career in film (that was indicated at the end of Hand Of God). It had its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival Tuesday night.

Cannes Film Festival Tuesday. Photos from the event show Rowland smiling at the crowd as she walked up the red carpet steps to go into the theater — before she seemingly got into a heated exchange with a female security guard. The former Destiny’s Child member looked upset and angry as she pointed her finger toward the woman.

Ghost Cat Anzu is an intriguing conceptualization for an animated film, existing in a realm similar to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away yet also standing as its antithesis.

Now a Cannes veteran, French filmmaker Christophe Honoré has returned to the Competition with the world premiere of Marcello Mio, his French-Italian comedy that stars longtime collaborator Chiara Mastroianni — who, in the film, adopts the persona and appearance of her late father, Marcello Mastroianni. The movie received applause that lasted a touch over eight minutes during its unveiling this evening.

Jamie Lang As part of this year’s Variety Global Conversations at the Cannes Film Festival, representatives from the Czech Republic engaged in a lively discussion about the industry’s state of affairs and celebrated 20 years of involvement at the Marché du Film. Markéta Šantrochová, head of the Czech Film Center at the Czech Film Fund; Pavlína Žipková, head of the Czech Film Commission at the Czech Film Fund; and Petr Tichý, CEO of Barrandov Studio, participated in the talk, moderated by Variety’s Leo Barraclough. According to Zipkova, the Czech delegation wanted to make one key point clear to everyone in attendance: “If there is only one thing you need to remember from this session, it is that the Czech Film Fund production incentives scheme is open.

le town.The controversial movie “The Apprentice,” depicting the former president’s rise to fame in New York high society during the 1970s, premiered Monday at the Cannes Film Festival in France to a glamorous crowd including Cate Blanchett and Bella Hadid.The movie received a standing ovation ranging from eight to 11 minutes, according to accounts.In the drama, Sebastian Stan plays a younger Trump as he meets power lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong of “Succession”) and first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”).While his political ambitions are said to be hinted at, “The Apprentice” does not cover the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections or Trump’s four years in the White House. It also has nothing to do with the NBC reality TV series he hosted.What it does have, according to viewers, are shocks aplenty.During one cringey scene, Trump is said to get liposuction and a hair transplant.And, in another jarring moment, he violently rapes Ivana.

Jamie Lang Barcelona-based production, sales, and distribution company Filmax has secured global sales rights to the upcoming kids and family animated feature “The Treasure of Barracuda,” and is presenting the film to potential buyers at the Marché du Film. Having pitched at several international animation project events, “The Treasure of Barracuda” is one of the buzziest Spanish titles on the market right now. Just last year, the production received €500,000 ($545,700) in financial backing from the 2023 Eurimages Project Evaluation Sessions.

Jamie Lang Spanish animation is experiencing a historic boom. Shorts and features from the country are achieving notable success at festivals and the box office, while Spanish artists are contributing to some of the most influential film and TV productions coming from Hollywood today. The question now is what steps should be taken to build on recent success.

When Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea) is beaten up outside the one dance club in the village where he grew up, his father takes up the cudgels, chivvying the local police chief into finding out who did it. It would be obvious enough to anyone but dad Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache) that this is a straight-up case of gay-bashing, which would seem to signal that Emanuel Parvu’s Cannes Competition title Three Kilometers to the End of the World, a slice of Romanian life, will be a worthy but familiar story of a boy’s coming out to a hostile world. Indeed, bloodied Adi with his black eyes and traumatic lesions is soon being punished, locked in his room by his parents as his desperate mother prays to the icons on the wall for guidance. We have undoubtedly been down this donkey-track before. 

Rithy Panh has dedicated the lion’s share of his career to interrogating the genocidal Khmer Rouge era in his native Cambodia, and it is no trivial obsession. Panh fled Phnom Penh when he was just 11, and after his family was devastated in the Killing Fields, he escaped to a Thai refugee camp at 15. Now 60, Panh has been committed to keeping the memory of the impact of Pol Pot’s tyrannical regime alive in documentary, narrative and animated film.