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Updated: Cecchi Gori, the movie company that once dominated Italy’s film industry and collapsed in the mid 1990s, is being revived by a group of Italian investors that are backing a partial relaunch of the storied brand behind Oscar winners “Life is Beautiful,” “Mediterraneo” and “Il Postino.”

Cecchi Gori Group was officially ruled bankrupt in 2006 by a Rome court after being awash in red ink for a decade after its owner, movie mogul Vittorio Cecchi Gori, branched out from film into television and acquired the A.C. Fiorentina soccer club in a bold expansion attempt that put him in competition with Silvio Berlusconi and went horribly wrong.

But even after the company’s various Italian sides went bust, its U.S. branches – Cecchi Gori U.S.A. and Cecchi Gori Pictures – continued to operate, headed by producer Niels Juul. Operating out of Los Angeles, Juul has been instrumental to...

The Venice Film Festival will honor Oscar-winning Italian actor/director Roberto Benigni with its 2021 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

Benigni, whose “Life Is Beautiful” – which he co-wrote, directed and starred in – won three Oscars in 1999, including best actor, recently returned to the big screen playing Geppetto in Matteo Garrone’s live-action adaptation of “Pinocchio.”

“Pinocchio,” which was a box office champ in Italy in 2019, has been recently released in the U.S. by Roadside Attractions and is nominated for 2021 Oscars in the best costume design and makeup and hairstyling categories.

Benigni’s last directorial effort is “The Tiger and the Snow,” in 2005, in which he also starred. In recent years the beloved Italian showman has been active with his stage adaptation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which toured in Italy and around the world.

In praising Benigni Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera noted that “few artists have equaled his ability to combine explosive comic timing,...

Paolo Villaggio, a comic actor whose invented workplace characters interpreted Italians' foibles, died Monday in Rome. He was 84.

His children said Villaggio had been debilitated by complications from diabetes for some time.

Widely popular in Italy, he expressed his comic qualities through slapstick, satire and irony.

Fellow comic actor Roberto Benigni said Villaggio's iconic character, accountant Ugo Fantozzi, "represented us all." Villaggio invented the Fantozzi character, first in a book, then as the main character in 10 films.

"He was a pitiless child, revolutionary and liberating" and the "greatest clown of his generation," Benigni said of Villaggio's most celebrated...

TAORMINA, Italy -- Turkish cinema was in the spotlight at the Taormina Film Festival on Thursday, with director Ferzan Ozpetek kicking things off with a special cinema roundtable discussion and Zeki Demirkubuz's "Kader" (Destiny) among the day's key screenings.

Ozpetek made his first major appearance of the festival Wednesday, when he was pulled onto the stage at the Green Theater to act as an impromptu Italian-to-Turkish translator for Paolo Villaggio, the 75-year-old Italian comic actor.

Friday will be the heaviest day for Turkish films, with screenings of half a dozen Turkish films including the world premiere of Ozay Fecht's short "The Touch" and Fatih Akin's Lola winner "The Edge of Heaven", part of the Turkish gala in the Greek Theater hosted by Turkish actress Serra Yilmaz.

The world premiere of Mary McGuckian's "Inconceivable" was the main event Thursday evening at the festival's 3,000-year-old Greek Theater.