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The Cannes Film Festival and its iconic red carpet are officially open for business. And aside from the shadow of President Donald Trump looming large over this year’s festivities, the buzziest story to emerge so far this week has been the fest’s new red carpet dress code.

On the eve of this year’s opening ceremony, a Cannes rep confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that the festival updated its charter to ban full nudity and “voluminous outfits,” especially those with a large train, that “hinder the flow of traffic of guests and complicate seating in the theater.” The fest spokesperson clarified that the dress code is not meant to regulate attire “per se,” but that it did get refreshed to reflect certain rules “that have long been in effect.”

While that may be true, enforcement has definitely been, well, questionable. A quick scan of the Getty archives reveals...

Since it had a major redesign in 1984, when it took inspiration from the Academy Awards in Hollywood, the Cannes Film Festival has been synonymous with its famous red carpet, a 60-meter stretch of fabric that covers the 24 steps leading up to the Palais. Originally changed three times a day and nowadays just the more eco-friendly once, the carpet actually is two slightly different shades of red: Rosso in the center and Teatro at the sides. Fiercely patroled by French security guards, the red carpet is a micro-state within a city, complete with its own set of rules and regulations.

Photography

Cannes Do: Put your phone away.

Cannes Don’t: Take a selfie on the steps.

Festival director Thierry Frémaux first waged war on the selfie in 2015, before instituting an outright ban in 2018, referring to the practice as “touristy,” “ridiculous” and “vulgar.” He specifically cited the logjam effect that it created...

Now in its 28th edition, the European Shooting Stars platform run by European Film Promotion brings another 10 promising European acting talents to the Berlin Film Festival, with the goal to help them build their careers internationally. From Feb. 14-17, the selected performers will participate in workshops and panels, as well as meetings with international journalists, producers and casting directors. The program culminates in a ceremony at the Berlinale Palast where they will each receive the European Shooting Stars Award.

This year’s Shooting Stars were selected by a jury comprised of Romanian director and screenwriter Radu Muntean, Swedish casting director Pauline Hansson, Swiss producer Amel Soudani, French actress and former Shooting Star Ludivine Sagnier and Montenegrin journalist and curator Vuk Perović. They were selected from candidates nominated by their national film promotion institutes and film centers.

What this year’s group of Shooting Stars has in common besides the potential...

We meet a colorful cast of characters in Diva Futura, the women whose lives were shaped by the rise and fall of Italy’s pioneering pornography agency. There’s Ilona Staller, better known to fans as Cicciolina, a singer and free spirit whose collaboration with agency founder Riccardo Schicchi launched them both to notoriety.

Rising through the ranks was glamorous actress Moana Pozzi, determined to forge her own path after facing rejection from the mainstream film world. Riccardo’s secretary, Debora Attanasio, joined hoping the job would further her journalism career but found her outlook expanding. And Hungarian starlet Eva Henger, whose relationship with Riccardo would become both passionate and tumultuous.

Each woman brought unique strengths and backgrounds, yet all faced challenges pursuing careers in the adult industry during its controversial early years. While praised for her beauty, Ilona faced backlash for entering politics.

Moana strived to prove herself as more than a sex symbol,...

Italy’s Groenlandia, the Banijay Entertainment-owned and Rome-based company headed by directors and producers Matteo Rovere and Sydney Sibilia, is on a roll with three shows launching this month respectively on Disney+, Sky Italia and Netflix. They include crime drama “This Is Not Hollywood,” which bows Friday at the Rome Film Festival.

The four-part crime series is based on the true story of a 15-year-old named Sarah Scazzi, whose body was thrown into a well after she was strangled in the a small Southern Italian town of Avetrana. A massive media storm ensued over the 42 days it took to find her body. The show, directed by Pippo Mezzapesa (“Burning Hearts”), will premiere Oct. 25 on Disney+ in Italy and across European, Middle East and Africa territories, plus some other countries, and also on Hulu in the U.S.

Rovere says the show’s catchy title refers to the fact that...

New Italian distribution company PiperFilm is launching its international sales unit at Rome’s upcoming Mia Market with veteran sales agent Catia Rossi spearheading the potentially high-powered player’s sales side having secured a small but promising multi-genre film slate.

Rossi is a former head of international sales at Vision Distribution, True Colours, and Rai Com. She launched True Colours and the sales unit at Vision. She’s now joining PiperFilm as director of international sales and will be unveiling the brand new PiperFilm lineup of Italian movies to buyers in Rome.

Domestically, PiperFilm is adopting an innovative distribution model having struck an agreement with Netflix under which the streaming giant will have the first exclusive post-theatrical window for Italy on their titles, while Warner Bros. Entertainment Italia will handle the operational distribution of their lineup in Italian movie theatres.

In Italy, the first PiperFilm to be released is Paolo Sorrentino’s “Parthenope,...

Porn king Riccardo Schicchi was, according to Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s bubbly, shallow “Diva Futura,” named after Schicchi’s now-defunct multimedia adult-entertainment enterprise, a really sweet guy. Moreover, the film insists, his vision for pornography was similarly wholesome: a means to liberate prudish late-20th century Italian society by celebrating the beauty of women as he saw it — with the dazzled, goofy gaze of the permanent adolescent peering through an uncurtained bedroom window.

But what may have been charmingly unworldly in a man becomes disingenuously simplistic in a film that refuses to really look into the forces that propelled his giddy rise and blameless fall, just as Schicchi, gifted a peeping-Tom telescope by his porn-positive dad as a kid, could look away when the women were clothed, or the curtains were closed.

Confusingly, and with no real reason, the movie hops about in time, so we begin in the middle...

Harking back to a simpler, more innocent time, when porn stars got elected to Parliament and the “sexual revolution” was still shiny and new, the comic-tragic feature Diva Futura pays tribute to the Italian adult entertainment empire of the same name and the colorful characters who founded and worked for it. Comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s similarly themed Boogie Nights (1997) will be inevitable and probably not flatter the much messier, less bravura Diva Futura. Nevertheless, writer-director Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s (Settembre) sophomore effort definitely has its moments and some standout performances.

Moreover, most of the characters met here — such as La Cicciolina (Lidija Kordic), aka Ilona Staller, the porn-star politician, and her tragic fellow star Moana Pozzi (Denise Capezza) — correspond to real-life figures. Only insiders from that time will know exactly how much of this movie (and the memoir by Debora Attanasio on which it’s based) is true.

There are two kinds of pornography, according to movie mythology. One kind is sordid, exploitative, and supported by shady money and even shadier characters. Then there is the cuddly, family kind, as fluffy and innocently randy as a burrow full of bunnies, that flourished on video before the horrible internet spoiled everything and made porn rapey. Italian director Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s Diva Futura returns us to this Eden of sex tapes and strippers in a scattergun biopic of Riccardo Schicchi, impresario of club, talent farm and film production house Diva Futura. You can decide how much to believe.

As a boy in the 1960s, Schicchi tells his new secretary Debora (Barbara Ronchi) that he never grasped the first principles of machismo. Bullied by other little boys, by day he enjoyed giggling with the girls at school. By night, his father would lend him his binoculars to spy on women through their windows,...

Alessandro Melazzini approaches the subject of 80s pop dance music from a particular perspective.

Born in Sondrio, Lombardy, the Italian documentarian, who has filmed both nuns and porn stars, is based in Germany and was trained as an economist and philosopher, and also worked as a cultural journalist and translator.

“My previous documentary was about Cistercians,” says the director of “Italo Disco,” which just screened in its world premiere at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. “My second-last one was on porno star-turned-politician Ilona Staller, a.k.a. Cicciolina. ‘Italo Disco’ was a perfect fit in between, don’t you think?”

The founder of Alpenway Media, Melazzini has produced films from “The Italian Character” to “Our Stone” while also often working as a director.

Music unites but it can also highlight differences, Melazzini says. His film, meanwhile, has been called “an excursion to another time and place, maybe to another planet,...

Exclusive: Interest also building on arms trade expose Shadow World ahead of buyers-only screening.

Paris-based documentary specialist Wide House is reporting strong interest in Carmine Amoroso’s documentary Porno e Liberta, exploring the growth of the Italian porn industry from the 1970s onwards.

Following its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) in January, Munich-based Donau Films has acquired German and Austrian rights and Scandinavian rights have gone to Swedish Njuta Films.

Amoroso’s documentary traces the growth of Italy’s porn industry from the 1970s onwards, interviewing pornographers such as Riccardo Schicchi and touching on issues such as censorship, sexual revolution and popularisation of some of its stars such as Ilona Staller, aka Cicciolina, who was elected to parliament in 1987.

In other deals, Johan Grimonprez’s arms trade exposé Shadow World, based on Andrew Feinstein’s factual best-seller The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, has sold to...

Lady Gaga may occupy four different covers of V Magazine's September issue, but it's Miranda Kerr who steals the show with her steamy fashion editorial. In the issue, which hits newsstands today, Miranda channels Ilona Staller - better known by her stage name, Cicciolina - who is the former wife and muse of famed American artist Jeff Koons. Not only was she married to Jeff for seven years, but the buxom Hungarian-born beauty was also a prominent politician and porn star in Italy for close to three decades. Miranda nails Cicciolina's signature look in the V spread, as her style consisted of bleached blond hair, gauzy, hippie-chic dresses, and girlie flower crowns (which she made cool way before Coachella). Cicciolina's story is a pretty incredible one: she began a career in pornography in the early 1970s and quickly gained notoriety for her curvaceous figure and, ahem, acting ability.

Wellington, August 29: Australian model Miranda Kerr reportedly donned white lace, long blonde hair and flowers everywhere for a photo shoot in V magazine's September issue to pay homage to hardcore porn star Cicciolina.

According to V magazine, the 30-year-old Aussie supermodel embodies the Arcadian essence of the singer and adult film star who was also a member of the Italian parliament in the 70s and 80s, and she sends a "message of exposure" in the delicate lace and soft, sheer statement pieces, Stuff.co.nz reported.

Hungarian-born Italian, Ilona Staller, known by her stage name 'Cicciolina' was Italy's most iconic.

Miranda Kerr has suffered another nip slip, but this one looks totally intentional! The 30-year-old Aussie model recently flashed her bare breast during a super sexy photo shoot for V Magazine. In the shoot, Kerr poses as Hungarian-born Italian porn star and politician Cicciolina (real name Ilona Staller), who was formerly married to artist Jeff Koons. In one black and white shot, Kerr flashes her entire right boob (apparently, a classic Cicciolina move) in a slinky Louis Vuitton floral-printed dress, Saint Laurent sweater and flower crown. The blond beauty stares seductively into the camera while posing. In another pic, Orlando Bloom's other half stands in a grassy field, holding cartons of eggs while...

Former Guggenheim director Thomas Krens went hog wild with his motorcycle club.Behind its inviting façade of colorful paintings and ritzy galas, the art world can be an incestuous realm of volatile relationships and rapacious personalities. In light of the recent drama involving Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation board member Janna Bullock's abrupt return to Russia, Vf Daily dug up several art-world scandals that nearly rival Thomas Crown's stealing that Monet painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. • In March 2008, the Italian politician and porn star Ilona Staller sued her ex-husband Jeff Koons, claiming that he owed her $2.3 million in child support. In 1990, during their first year together, Koons devoted himself to the production of “Made in Heaven,” a series of graphic pictures and sculptures that depict him making love to Staller, whose stage name is La Cicciolina. After a few rocky years, he and Staller decided that they were in...

Italian porn star-turned-politician Cicciolina is suing her ex-husband for $2.3 million (GBP1.15 million) in child support for the son she kidnapped from him 10 years ago.

In 1998, the 56-year-old former Italian member of parliament smuggled Ludwig, her son with multimillionaire Jeff Koons, from New York to Italy - before their custody battle over the then five-year-old had been concluded.

A subsequent court battle in Italy granted Cicciolina - real name Ilona Staller - custody. Her lawsuit claims Koons was ordered to pay $22,000 (GBP11,000) a month to support his child, but has contributed a total of just $250,000 (GBP125,000) in 10 years.

Staller found fame in 1987 after swapping hardcore pornography for politics when she was elected to the Italian parliament.