Ukrainian Filmmakers to Participate in European Development Program Less is More (EXCLUSIVE)

Nia Vardalos dished on the third film in her successful franchise and why she thinks her co-star, John Corbett, may be stripping down for season 2. When asked if she knows anything about Corbett's return as Aidan Shaw to the franchise, Vardalos played coy, revealing to ET that she knows «a little about that.» «He told me something right before he went to film,» she told Cassie DiLaura, before suggesting that he may be getting naked in the upcoming episodes. «He got in really good shape.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent The blockbuster French cast of Amazon Prime Video’s third season of “LOL: Qui rit, qui sort” speaks volumes about the Japanese variety format’s tremendous popularity in France. The Amazon Original series, adapted from the format “LOL: Last One Laughing,” scored its biggest launch to date on Prime Video in France since bowing on March 10. The show is one of the streamer’s first unscripted originals in France and has been a major coup as a brand exercise that’s succeeded with limited resources — certainly in comparison to scripted comedy. Adaptations of “LOL” have also thrived in Italy and Germany where they have ranked as the most watched local titles on the service, respectively. Local versions are also available in Spain, Canada, Mexico and Australia (hosted by Rebel Wilson).

As the old saying goes, write what you know and for Women Talking filmmaker Sarah Polley whose up for an Adapted Screenplay Oscar tonight, she’s been through so much of the campaign process that her next movie is set around awards season.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Mk2 films has enlisted leading distributors around the world for “Reality,” Tina Satter’s feature debut starring Sydney Sweeney, on the heels of its buzzy world premiere at the Berlinale. The movie, which bowed in the Panorama section, stars Sweeney (“White Lotus,” “Euphoria”) as Reality Winner, a 25 year-old whistleblower who spent five years in prison during the Trump administration. A former U.S. Air Force member and National Security Agency translator, Winner was convicted for leaking a confidential report on Russian election interference to the media. The film is based on Satter’s 2019 stage play “Is This a Room” and contains verbatim dialogue from the unedited transcript of a FBI audio recording. “Reality” captures the tense and surreal 90 minutes of FBI’s interrogation with Winner at her home in 2017.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Daniel Brühl (“All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Captain America: Civil War”) is set to star as late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld in “Kaiser Karl,” the anticipated Disney+ original series which Gaumont (“Lupin”) is currently producing. The show is currently shooting in France, Monaco and Italy. The six-part series will chronicle the rise of Karl Lagerfeld through the world of 1970s Parisian high fashion. In 1972, a 38-year-old Karl Lagerfeld aspired to become the most famous French fashion designer, at a time when Yves Saint Laurent reigned supreme. Lagerfeld went on to become the head designer and creative director of Chanel, Fendi and his own label.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Denmark has finally started addressing the lack of diversity in local movies and TV series. From afar, the country is the epitome of liberalism and home to provocative filmmakers like Lars von Trier and a new wave of directors with foreign origins, such as Ali Abassi (“Holy Spider”) and Milad Alami (“The Charmer”). But up close, the Nordic country has been sliding to the far right and enacting Europe’s harshest anti-immigration laws, pushing the local film community to react. The alarm was recently rung by A Bigger Picture, a female-led advocacy group spearheaded by Laura Allen Müller (“Borgen”), Sandra Yi Sencindiver (“The Wheel of Time”), Malaika B. Mosendane (“Chosen”), Siir Tilif (“Fatal Crossing”) and Dorcas Joanna Hansen (“Elvira”).

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Sideshow and Janus Films have bought North American rights for “Orlando, My Political Biography,” Paul B. Preciado’s film which won four awards at the Berlinale. In “Orlando, My Political Biography,” Preciado sheds light on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” the first novel in which the main character changes sex in the middle of the story.  A century later, Preciado, who is a trans writer and activist, decides to send a film letter to Woolf, telling her that Orlando has come out of her fiction and is living a life she could have never imagined. Preciado organizes a casting and gathers 26 contemporary trans and non-binary people, from 8 to 70 years old, who embody Orlando.

Francisca Alegria is an award-winning filmmaker who’s short film “And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow’s Eye” received the award for Best International Fiction Short at Sundance Film Festival. Her debut feature “The Cow Who Sang A Song Into the Future” premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2022 and was supported by the 2017 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Lab along with the Catalyst Forum.Rita Baghdadi is an Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker known for the intimacy of her bold, character-driven films.

Looking to March, it might be easier to talk about what isn’t premiering this month instead of what is. It’s a testament to how buried in the new and returning series we are. Pedro Pascal continues his move towards television domination with the returning “The Mandalorian” overlapping with HBO’s “The Last of Us,” which nears its Season 1 finale. HBO and Apple TV+ are both having solid months of returning favorites with “Succession” and “Ted Lasso,” respectively.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Music Box is unveiling the trailer for “Revoir Paris,” a French drama boasting a Cesar-winning performance by Virginie Efira. The movie, which bowed at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight and played at Toronto, will have its New York premiere on June 23 at Film at Lincoln Center and IFC Film Center. A meditation on healing, the film tells the story of Mia (Efira), a married translator who survived a mass shooting in a Paris restaurant, and feels haunted by the trauma, yet unable to recollect memories of the tragic attack. Determined to reconstruct the sequence of events and reestablish a sense of normalcy, Mia finds herself repeatedly returning to the bistro where the shooting happened. In the process she forms bonds with fellow survivors, including banker Thomas (Benoît Magimel) and teenager Félicia (Nastya Golubeva). Efira, who just won a Cesar Award for her role in the film, stars opposite Magimel, the Cesar-winning actor of “Pacifiction,” as well as Grégoire Colin (“Both Sides of the Blade”) and Golubeva (“Annette”).

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from Episode 7 of “The Last of Us,” now streaming on HBO Max. “The Last of Us” production designer John Paino’s biggest challenges is bringing the much-beloved world of the video game to life and populating the HBO show with easter eggs. This week, Paino delivers one of his most significant nods yet in a “blink-and-you-miss-it moment.” Named after the game’s downloadable expansion pack, Episode 7, titled “Left Behind,” explores Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) backstory before she meets Joel (Pedro Pascal) and reveals what happened the night she discovered she was immune to cordyceps infection. In the present, Ellie is desperately trying to save Joel’s life after he was stabbed last episode. In doing so, she remembers one of the happiest, and saddest, days of her life. The episode flashes back to when Ellie’s friend and crush Riley (Storm Reid) snuck her through an abandoned mall. Tragically, the two are attacked and bitten by clickers after a night of fun. It was that night that Ellie discovered she was immune, but Riley was sadly not as lucky.

Jon Burlingame editor “The Fabelmans” music is up for an Oscar and the score for “Indiana Jones 5” is completed, but 91-year-old John Williams is far from retired. He is mulling new concert works for leading classical soloists and preparing for a series of conducting gigs in the coming months that will take him from Chicago to Tokyo. Williams celebrated his birthday on Feb. 8 quietly, just dinner with his wife and daughter, he tells Variety in a rare interview. “When you finally get to be 90, you think, ‘This is great, I made it.’ It’s wonderful. I recommend it to everybody.” Nonagenarian status hasn’t slowed down the five-time Academy Award winner, who is on his 53rd Oscar nomination for Steven Spielberg’s film about his childhood and the trauma of his parents’ divorce. It’s their 29th film together, and three of his five Oscars are for Spielberg films (“Jaws,” “E.T.,” “Schindler’s List”).

Sheryl Lee Ralph and Lisa Ann Walter are a dynamic duo made for television! The  stars stopped by ET to talk about their instant connection behind the scenes of ABC's hit comedy series, reflect on the show's wild rise to fame and spill the tea on what fans can expect in upcoming episodes.ABC announced last month that the workplace comedy is returning for a third season, just as the series is in full swing with season 2. Star and creator Quinta Brunson previously revealed that fans will see a new side of their favorite onscreen characters as the show ventures beyond the elementary school and into their personal lives, which is particularly reflected as viewers see more of the friendship between Barbara Howard (Ralph) and Melissa Schemmenti (Walter). According to the stars, the onscreen friendship isn't far off from their real-life relationship.«Honestly, I thought, 'This could be a friend for life,'» Walter shares when asked about her first impression of Ralph.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent “Lie With Me,” a romance drama headlined by French stars Guillaume de Tonquebec and Victor Belmondo, has lured a raft of theatrical distributors at the Berlinale’s EFM. Represented in international markets by Be For Films and directed by Olivier Peyon, the movie is based on Philippe Besson’s book “Arrête avec tes mensonges.” The autobiographical novel was originally published in France by Editions Julliard in 2017 and won pair of awards including the Maison de la Presse prize in 2017. After selling several key territories earlier this year, Be For Films has now closed deals for the U.S. (Cinephobia Realising), Germany/Austria (24 Bilder), Brazil (Imovision), Poland (Tongariro), Greece (Cinobo) and Turkey (Bir Films).

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Elsa Zylberstein, one of the most famous – and bankable — faces of French cinema, known for her Cesar-winning performance in “I’ve Loved You For So Long,” is preparing to emerge as a major film producer. Having recently set up banners in France and the U.S., Zylberstein is actively developing a raft of films and series, working with the likes of Oscar-winning Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad (“The Cave”), Ted Braun (Darfur Now”) and Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher Hampton (“The Father”), among others. These include “Kingdom of Hope,” a movie about Elise Boghossian, a French acupuncturist and humanitarian worker in a war zone who has healed children victims of ISIS . The movie will be directed by Fayyad, who is based in Berlin, and is being penned by Braun, based on Boghossian’s autobiographical book “Au royaume de l’espoir, il n’y a pas d’hiver.”

Shoppers have praised supermarket giant Aldi for a £4 Special Buy that can transform any room in the house almost instantly.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Atlas V, the Emmy-award winning VR company, is expanding into the U.S. with the strategic appointment of Michael Masukawa. The banner has just been signed by CAA and is aiming to build a presence in the U.S. Atlas was just nominated for three Emmy awards and won one with its interactive animation “Madrid Noir.” Atlas V’s track record in the North American festival circuit also includes multiple selections at Sundance’s New Frontier, Tribeca and SXSW (where it won two awards). The company also previously won two Peabody prizes and two Webby awards. Masukawa is joining Atlas V from Secret Location, an immersive content studio owned by Hasbro and eOne. At Atlas V, he will be in charge of developing partnerships, raising project financing, producing projects and negotiating distribution deals for Atlas V’s content. He will also find opportunities for sister companies Astrea and Albyon, the first being focused on distribution and the second one on development of immersive experiences.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent DR Sales has boarded “Always Be Closing,” a drama series about the dynamics, dominance, and discrimination within the telemarketing industry. The youth-skewing series will premiere on DRTV, the Danish broadcaster’s streaming service, on Feb. 24. “Always Be Closing” is created by Frederik Dirks Gottlieb, Kasper Lundberg, and Andrea Moyo, who themselves were part of the telemarketing industry in their youth. The cast is led by Danish star Anders Heinrichsen (“Follow the Money,” “Borgen — Power & Glory”) and upcoming talent Andreas Bruun Pedersen and Tarek Zayat. The series is directed by Svend Colding and produced by Laura Valentiner-Bohse for DR.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Emily Atef, who is presenting her latest film, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, just moved to Paris to direct “La Maison,” a series depicting a fictional family-owned French luxury fashion empire. While discussing “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” ahead of its world premiere, Atef told Variety that “La Maison” will be filled with a lot of drama and tragicomedy. “It’s very Shakespearean. There’s so much beauty and luxury with old mansions in Brittany, Parisian ‘hotel particuliers,’ and then behind all that there’s so much human poverty, and you see them ripping each other appart for power,” said Atef, who will direct the pilot and three more episodes.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent The César Awards are characterized as France’s answer to the Oscars. And just like their awards show cousin halfway across the world, the Césars are embroiled in controversy after failing to nominate any women directors.  This year’s Academy Awards were slammed by advocacy groups after ignoring the likes of Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Woman King”) and Sarah Polley (“Women Talking”) in favor of an all-male contingent of auteurs. The Césars have followed suit with an all-male group of directing nominees, despite a banner year for French female filmmakers. It’s one that saw directors from Alice Diop (“Saint Omer”) to Claire Denis (“Stars at Noon”) dominating the festival circuit and scoring prizes, only to come up short when the Césars unveiled their contenders on Jan. 25. The omission has sparked a debate about gender equity and sexism in the French film business, as well as social media protests emblazoned with the hashtag #CesarsSoMale, an allusion to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign that erupted in 2015 when the Academy nominated an all-white group of acting nominees.