My Brilliant Friend is coming to an end at HBO. But not quite yet.
05.03.2022 - 22:23 / deadline.com
Paolo Sorrentino won the Foreign Language Oscar, as it was known then, in 2014 with his film The Great Beauty. He returns to the frame this year with The Hand of God, perhaps his most personal picture, which is nominated for Best International Feature. This lightly fictionalized tale of Sorrentino’s own youth in Naples, as he grappled with family tragedy, celebrated Diego Maradona’s arrival at his local football team, and took his first steps into his love of cinema, stars newcomer Filippo Scotti as Fabi Schisa, a teenager struggling to find his place in the world.
For Sorrentino, that love of cinema is important now more than ever. Joining Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event with Scotti, Sorrentino said that cinema was a universal, accessible language that needed to be preserved. “Cinema has this big power to connect people and let them feel more united,” he said. “Whatever the culture of the movie, there are elements people can recognize in all of the places of the world. Like feelings, fear, love, pain. And let’s not forget that cinema is a popular art. It’s not an art for the elite, it’s for everybody.”
The Hand of God won the Silver Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival, where it made its world premiere last summer. The film was made with Netflix, and Sorrentino praised streamers for helping make cinema more accessible. “Thanks to the platforms, cinema can arrive everywhere to everybody. Cinema has a big, big power, and that’s the reason why the people who make movies have a responsibility for what we say and what we think, and how we put it on the screen.”
For Scotti, who leads the movie in almost every scene, playing a version of the young Sorrentino was a big responsibility. “I realized that I was the
My Brilliant Friend is coming to an end at HBO. But not quite yet.
In “The Hand of God,” the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino conjures memories of his formative years in picturesque Naples. Capturing both the sun-dappled summer days he passed in the company of his larger-than-life family and the profound tragedy that set him on a path toward filmmaking, this partly autobiographical drama focuses on Fabio Schisa (Filippo Scotti), a teenager growing up in southern Italy during the 1980s.
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Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentThe upcoming Los Angeles-Italia Film Fashion and Art Festival will be honoring Italian directors Paolo Sorrentino (“The Hand of God”) and Enrico Casarosa (“Luca”) as well as costume-designer Massimo Cantini Parrini (“Cyrano”) all of whom have scored nominations for the upcoming Academy Awards. The 17th edition of the pre-Oscars event will be held March 20-26 at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theatre and also online.This year’s opening ceremony will be hosted by veteran Italian-American actor Robert Davi, who is also this year’s president of the event. Sofia Milos (“CSI: Miami”) and Hollywood acting coach Bernard Hiller will co-host.Consul General of Italy Silvia Chiave and Italian Institute of Culture chief Emanuele Amendola will also be introducing honorees both at the Chinese Theatre and during a separate March 25 event being held at the Italian Institute of Culture.
Bob Verini Of the five 2021 Academy Award nominees for best international film, Italy’s entry, “The Hand of God,” most directly combines two of cinema’s most treasured themes: intensely personal autobiography that is able to speak to a wider audience, and the art of filmmaking itself.Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino uses the character of 16-year-old Fabietto Schisa — played by newcomer Filippo Scotti — to examine the real-life experiences that led to his own growth as a man as well as his eventual birth as a filmmaker.Watching audiences connect so deeply with a character that is drawn so closely from his own experiences has hit Sorrentino deeply. “Now that it’s more than one year that I shot the movie, I have to say that it’s strange, because now I am sharing my pain with a big audience,” he shares.
Read more: Man gives Belfast one star review after not realising it's in black and white Accepting the award, writer and director Kenneth Branagh said: "Thank you to British cinema audiences for watching in tonnage a UK and Irish cinema film at UK and Ireland cinemas. "All hail the streaming revolution, but all hail the big screen too. It's alive, and long may they live together.
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Deadline has launched the streaming site for Contenders Film: The Nominees, this past weekend’s showcase of 24 Oscar-nominated films and their stars, creatives and craftspeople talking about their roads to the Academy Awards.
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Thirty-four years after the original Coming to America was released starring Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall, a sequel, Coming 2 America, finally arrived — and like the first film has been Oscar-nominated for its makeup and hairstyling. Tasked with bringing it all up to date and making the various guises and multiple roles Murphy and Hall take on really work for a new audience are Mike Marino, who did Special Effects Makeup, as well as Hair Department heads Stacey Morris and Carla Farmer. They all joined me on Amazon Studios’ panel for Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees.
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With his film Flee, which recently scored a historic trifecta of Oscar nominations in the categories of Animated Feature, Documentary Feature and International Feature, Jonas Poher Rasmussen cleverly fused two cinematic mediums to help his longtime friend tell a painful, personal story that for decades he kept to himself, while maintaining his anonymity.
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“I believe that a big reason why this ambitious idea of throwing a music festival in Harlem in which somewhere between 70,000 to 90,000 people every weekend would see performances was so that there was something joyous and hopeful for people at that point were kind of at the end of their rope,” Summer of Soul (Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson says about the importance the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival had to a Black America ravaged by violence and assassination.