Studiocanal Signs Partnership With French Company WTFilms to Co-Produce, Distribute Genre Movies

Studiocanal has signed the person responsible for setting up Netflix production hubs around Europe as its new TV boss.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent The 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will kick off with Quentin Dupieux‘s “The Second Act,” a star-studded surreal French comedy headlined by Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel and Raphaël Quenard, Variety has learned. The anticipated movie is produced by Hugo Selignac at Chi-Fou-Mi, a Mediawan company, and is represented in international markets by Kinology.

Anna Marie de la Fuente While a number of films have been made about Panama’s Indigenous communities, few are by native filmmakers themselves. To date, perhaps only three Indigenous Panamanian filmmakers have ventured into filmmaking. Duiren Wagua, whose documentary feature debut “Bila Burba” plays at this year’s 12th Panama International Film Festival (IFF Panama), running April 4-7, is hoping to change the status quo.

Annika Pham On the eve of the global content market MipTV in Cannes, Viaplay Group’s Vanda Rapti, EVP Viaplay Select and Content Distribution, has offered a confident outlook on the Scandi streamer’s international activities and content sales. The sales executive, who joined the group in 2003, was able to announce exclusively to Variety a string of new deals on Viaplay’s premium Nordic scripted content.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Takashi Yamazaki, the Japanese filmmaker behind Oscar-winning smash hit “Godzilla Minus One,” has signed with CAA for representation. “Godzilla Minus One,” on which Yamazaki served as writer, director and VFX supervisor, earned the first-ever nomination and win for a Japanese production in the VFX category at the Academy Awards earlier this month. The film beat strong contenders such as “The Creator,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.

EXCLUSIVE: After smashing records in Vietnam, Tran Thanh’s hit romance drama Mai has now set a new milestone for an opening weekend at the international box office, becoming the first Vietnamese title to score a $1M debut outside the home market.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Arte has boarded “Reykjavik Fusion,” the first series produced by ACT4, an Icelandic banner launched by award-winning industry veterans, including Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (“True Detective”), Hörður Rúnarsson (“Black Sands”), Jónas Margeir Ingólfsson (“The Minister”) and Birkir Blær Ingólfsson (“Thin Ice”). The high-concept show will be distributed internationally by Wild Sheep Content, led by Erik Barmack, a former Netflix head of international.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent French public broadcaster France Televisions has commissioned a raft of new scripted shows, including “Lucky Luke,” an adaptation of the cult graphic novel, and “Rallye 82,” a 1982-set female-led racing show. “Lucky Luke” is an adventure comedy directed by Benjamin Rocher and penned by Mathieu Leblanc and Thomas Mansuy, based on the “Lucky Luke” comicbook. The eight-part half-hour series is produced by Geraldine Gendre and Lionel Uzan at Federation Studios, and co-produced by Rémi Préchac and Julien Vallespi at Un pour tous productions, and Alban Lenoir at Homerun.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Banijay Nordic’s banner Yellow Bird is set to produce “A Life’s Worth,” a drama series inspired by real events within the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s. The show is being produced by Arte France and Viaplay Content Distribution which will also handle global sales. “A Life’s Worth” is set in the fall of 1993, amid the devastating turmoil unfurling in Bosnia.

EXCLUSIVE: AGC Television is dropping a hot TV project into this week’s Series Mania market in Lille.

Studiocanal has announced a partnership with French production and sales company WTFilms (What The Films).

Naman Ramachandran Four African screenwriters will pitch stories spanning genres at the 15th edition of Series Mania in Lille, France. Pitching this year are Kelly-Eve Koopman (South Africa) with urban fantasy “Facing the Mountain”; Moreetsi Gabang (Botswana) with crime drama “Outreach”; Tiah Beye (Senegal/Côte d’Ivoire) with comedy-drama “Brouteure” (“The Yahoo Girl”); and Wanjiru Kairu (Kenya) with political satire “Serikali Saidia!” The shows are under the aegis of the AuthenticA Series Lab, a training program for African episodic screenwriters from Realness Institute.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Keshet Studios, the U.S. scripted arm of Keshet International, has acquired the U.S.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent French director Yann Gozlan is set to reunite with Pierre Niney, the French star of his two most successful movies “Un homme idéal” and “Black Box,” for his next film, “Gourou.” “Gourou” is being co-produced by Wassim Beji at WY Productions, the Paris-based company behind “Black Box and “Un Homme Ideal,” and Niney’s banner Ninety Films. While the plot is currently under wraps, the project is being teased as a deep dive into the world of coaching and follows the rise of a personal development guru who turns out to be toxic. One of France’s most bankable and busiest French actors, Niney won a Cesar Award for his performance as French fashion legend Yves Saint Laurent in Jalil Lespert’s biopic in 2015, and went on to work with Anne Fontaine (“Frantz”) and Michel Gondry (“The Book of Solutions”), among others.

EXCLUSIVE: France TV Distribution will be at Series Mania next week with Enjoy!, a drama series based on Benoit Marchisio’s novel Tout Complices!.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Memento International has closed a raft of deals on “Fremont,” a critically acclaimed film starring Anaita Wali Zada, an Afghan refugee and first-time actor, and featuring “The Bear” actor Jeremy Allen White. Directed by BAFTA-nominated Iranian-born director Babak Jalali, the black-and-white movie tells the story of Donya, a young woman working at a Chinese fortune cookie factory in the San Francisco bay. Formerly a translator for the U.S.

Naman Ramachandran Dubai-based sales agency Cercamon has acquired worldwide rights for Indonesian film “Crocodile Tears,” it was revealed at Hong Kong rights market FilMart. The film is a co-production between Indonesia’s Talamedia (producer Mandy Marahimin), Singapore’s Giraffe Pictures (producers Anthony Chen and Teoh Yi Peng), France’s Acrobates Films (producer Claire Lajoumard) and Poetik Film (producer Christophe Lafont) and Germany’s 2Pilots Filmproduction (producers Harry Flöter and Jörg Siepmann). The deal was negotiated by Sebastien Chesneau at Cercamon, Chen at Giraffe Pictures and Marahimin at Talamedia.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The 44th edition of genre film festival Fantasporto, which runs in Portugal’s second city Porto from March 1-10, has bestowed its best film award on Japanese sci-fi fantasy pic “From the End of the World,” directed by Kaz I Kiriya. The movie follows 10-year-old Hana, whose dreams transport her across various eras in Japanese history, and have the ability to save humanity. The jury’s special award went to “The Complex Forms,” Italian director Fabio D’Orta’s debut feature.

EXCLUSIVE: New York-based distributor Metrograph Pictures has acquired North American rights to French director Jérémy Clapin’s sci-fi drama Meanwhile on Earth following its world premiere in the Berlinale’s Panorama section last month.

A hike in subscribers for French pay-TV giant Canal+ Group as well as a successful year at the box office in France for Studiocanal helped drive positive 2023 results for parent company Vivendi, which were released Thursday evening after the close of the local stock exchange.