Taiwan’s VR Films and Interactive Projects at Venice Immersive – Competition Titles

Pablo Sandoval Set to be unveiled at this week’s San Sebastian Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, “Bajo el Mismo Sol” has secured a first co-production deal ahead of the festival.  Argentina’ Pucará Cine has boarded the project, reteaming with lead producer Wooden Boat Productions in the Dominican Republican on director Ulises Porra’s third feature. Both production companies co-produced Porra’s most recent movie, “Carajita” (2021), co-directed by Silvina Schnicer, which won the New Directors award at last year’s San Sebastián, swept Guadalajara, and collected hardware at Argentina’s Mar del Plata and the Miami Film Festival.

EXCLUSIVE: New York-based arthouse distributor KimStim has acquired all North American rights to Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s third feature film, Stonewalling, which recently premiered in the Giornate Degli Autori section of this year’s Venice film festival.

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Imax just cut a deal for six new big-screen installations in China this year — “a very positive development,” according to CEO Rich Gelfond. The company is a big player in the Chinese market, which is still strained by Covid lockdowns and in limbo for Western theatrical releases.

K.J. Yossman After triumphing at last year’s Venice Film Festival, the U.K. and Irish rights to Eric Gravel’s race-against-time social drama “Full Time” (À plein temps) have been snapped up by Parkland Entertainment. It is set to be released in the U.K. and Ireland in early 2023. The film, which stars “Call My Agent’s” Laure Calamy, had its world premiere at last year’s festival in the Orizzonti section before going on to win prizes for both Calamy, for best actress, and Gravel, for best director. In “Full Time,” Calamy stars as Julie, a maid in a luxury Parisian hotel while simultaneously carting for her two children in the French countryside. One day, she finally gets a break when she is offered an interview for a long-hoped for job. But, as luck would have it, the interview is on the same day as a national strike, which shuts down the city’s transport.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Netflix and Ubisoft have partnered on a new “Assassin’s Creed” mobile game and two other mobile titles that will be available exclusively on mobile to Netflix members globally with no ads or in-house purchases. The other two titles are a new “Valiant Hearts” game, which is a sequel to Ubisoft’s award-winning game “Valiant Hearts: The Great War,” directed by its original core team but featuring a new story, and a sequel to Ubisoft’s “The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot” mobile game, which was shut down in 2016. All three mobile games will be available to Netflix members in 2023.

Marta Balaga Greece’s Homemade Films has boarded Mahdi Fleifel’s upcoming feature “Men in the Sun,” currently in the final stages of development. The story, set in Athens, will deal with masculinity, exile and loss, showing young refugees in their 20s hustling to survive in the urban pressure cooker. The company is also ready to start shooting Sofia Exarchou’s “Animal,” co-producing with Nabis Filmgroup, Ars Ltd., Digital Cube and Felony Productions. Furthermore, its founder Maria Drandaki recently presented new projects at Venice Gap-Financing Market. “Arcadia,” directed by Yorgos Zois, will see Homemade Films joining forces with Foss Production and Red Carpet. “Titanic Ocean” by Konstantina Kotzamani will be shot in Japan and Singapore in 2023.

Canadian distributor Sphere Film has signed a multi-picture deal with A24 under which it will handle the release of nine of its titles in Canada.

Surprisingly, Nuclear is not one of Oliver Stone’s “devil’s advocate” documentaries, the spate of films he started making in the early 2000s that seemed to troll liberals everywhere by spending time with notorious human-rights abusers such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin. In the real world right now, nuclear power is about as toxic as those three men put together, but this intelligent and surprising film is an investigation into how that PR damage came about, which makes it arguably more of a piece with his famous conspiracy thriller JFK than any of those. At nearly two hours, it’s a hard watch, being dominated by Stone’s dense, monotonous voice-over and featuring scientists with next to no screen presence (this explains a lot about Adam McKay’s decision to shoot Don’t Look Up with A-listers). Nevertheless, it puts forward a lot of unexpected proposals about nuclear energy, debunking powerful myths along the way.

Carole Horst In 2013, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s documentary “Blackfish” uncovered the disturbing underbelly of SeaWorld wild-life park and subsequently brought about major changes to the organization. Nine years later, the director is at TIFF with “The Grab,” which exposes various governments, private investors and mercenaries from around the world that are working to seize food and water outside their borders to meet increasing shortages at the expense of entire populations. These groups are establishing themselves as the new Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), where the future world powers will be those who control not oil but food. The doc, which is seeking distribution, follows award-winning journalist Nathan Halverson and his team at the Center for Investigative Reporting as they crack open the land-grab story based on leaked documents.

Ed Meza @edmezavar “Musk vs Bezos: The New Star Wars,” about the space race between the two richest men in the world, is attracting plenty of attention from broadcasters in Europe, where new TV documentary has secured multiple sales. Commissioned by France 5 from French documentary production shingle Magneto, “Musk vs Bezos” examines the intense competition between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezo’s Blue Origin as they vie for the top spot in the U.S.’s burgeoning space travel business and the potential consequences for the world if the two billionaires develop the capacity to monopolize all future terrestrial communications. “When Musk first tried to buy a Russian rocket back in 2001, the chief engineer of the Russian Space Agency thought it was a joke,” Java Films notes. “By 2008 SpaceX had a contract with NASA to supply flights to the International Space Station.”

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Cairo-based film marketing and distribution outfit MAD Solutions has acquired rights for Arab territories to Venice competition entry “Les Miens” (“Our Ties”), directed by French actor and filmmaker of Moroccan descent Roschdy Zem. “Our Ties” is co-written by Zem with actor/director Maïwenn (“Polisse,” “Mon Roi”), who co-stars. Zem is a French cinema fixture, having starred in pics including “Other People’s Children” and directed several films including 2019’s “Persona Non Grata.” “Ties” is a drama about family dynamics centered around a man played by Sami Bouajila whose personality changes radically after he suffers a head injury. Zem plays his TV presenter brother.

Maureen Kearney’s story is unbelievable. It is a story of unbelief, in fact — of denial, cover-ups, corruption and injustice directed at a small woman who was just doing her job. She’s played with an electric stillness by the great Isabelle Huppert in Jean-Paul Salome’s Venice Film Festival Horizons title The Sitting Duck (La Syndicaliste). There are still plenty of people who openly doubt her story, including people on her own side of politics. Perhaps it would be easier all round if it weren’t true.

Naman Ramachandran Prolific Singapore-based production company Akanga Film Asia, led by producer Fran Borgia, has revealed a robust film slate, including several global co-productions. Borgia and filmmaker Yeo Siew Hua teamed on 2018 film “A Land Imagined,” which reaped a rich haul of awards around the world including top prizes at Locarno, Golden Horse, El Gouna, Pingyao, Singapore and Valladolid. They have now re-teamed on “Stranger Eyes,” which is selected at the ongoing Venice Production Bridge’s gap financing market. The film follows master of surveillance Inspector Goh, who, as he keeps a close eye on a suspected credit card thief, is drawn into the suspect’s world and starts to see himself in the skin of the perpetrator. As it sets him to question the true meaning of his work, Goh is tasked to track down a serial voyeur on the loose who has been videotaping people’s most private moments.

During a Venice Film Festival masterclass today, Better Call Saul and Nobody star Bob Odenkirk told the audience he “wants to do more action.”

EXCLUSIVE: Tennis great Michael Chang, who became the youngest winner of a major tournament singles championship when he beat Ivan Lendl in the 1989 French Open at age 17, will be the subject of a ’30 for 30′ documentary by ESPN Films.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Venice Film Festival’s market is kicking off with an attendance level close to its 2019 pre-pandemic days and strong interest in feature films and VR works being pitched at its gap-financing platform “We already have a total of more than 2,400 industry professionals registered to attend, which is close to pre-pandemic levels since in 2019 the number was 2,700 [at the end of the market],” says Pascal Diot, head of the Venice Production Bridge, as the informal mart is known. Of these, 1,700 are accredited with the VPB’s Golden Trade pass, while the remaining 1,000 are registered as part of film delegations.

Vivienne Chow Venice Production Bridge – Venice Gap-Financing Market  “Mirror” – Director: Wu De-Chuen“Mirror” is a story of three men from different generations of the same family. They live in different eras and have starkly different jobs —as an engraver, a tailor and a trader. But their lives are oddly similar. They share the same ambition to attain the definition of man, but at the same time, they each take their significant others for granted and undermine their own values, thus reliving the paths of their predecessors. “Fathers’ Video Tapes” – Director: Baboo LiaoTaiwan might be one of the most liberal societies in Asia today, especially in the matter of gay rights and was the first territory in the region to legalize same-sex marriage. But there was a time where homosexuals on the island struggled for acceptance. “Father’s Video Tapes” gives a nod to this forgotten past of Taiwan’s LGBT community through a three-part narrative that inserts audiences between real space and VR, through bodily interactivity. 

Vivienne Chow Taiwan’s ambition to impress has not dwindled despite its being the center of geopolitical struggle following Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit. The island is still generating large amounts of content on the technological cutting edge. It returns to the Venice Film Festival with a slate of productions ranging from the restored version of the late Edward Yang classic film “A Confucian Confusion,” work-in-progress film projects, as well as new VR, XR, and immersive content. These straddle the competition section and the Venice market. Having demonstrated potential in previous years, this year’s Taiwan presentation in Venice is intended to move to another level.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent MK2 Films has unveiled a clip of Rachid Hami’s “For My Country,” a politically minded family drama which will world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in the Horizons section. A personal movie, “For My Country” is based on the life of Hami, whose brother tragically died in a French military school during a hazing rite. Produced by Mizar Films, the searing drama tells the story of Aissa, a brilliant young officer of Algerian origin who dies during a fresher initiation ritual at the prestigious French military academy of Saint-Cyr. Refusing to take responsibility for his death, the French army insists to have Aissa buried in the Muslim plot of a suburban cemetery instead of the military one. Appalled by the obvious discrimination, Aissa’s older brother, Ismael, brings the family together to reclaim justice for Aissa.