News

Germany’s Komplizen has boarded “Technically Sweet,” a drama based on the last screenplay by the late and legendary Michelangelo Antonioni (“Blowup”), which Brazil’s Gullane Filmes (“Senna”) and Italy’s Vivo Film (“Le Quattro Volte”) have been developing.

“We are committed to making a significant German contribution to the project,” said Komplizen’s Jonas Dornbach, Janine Jackowski and Maren Ade, who expressed their delight at joining the project.

The film is to be directed by Brazil’s André Ristum, the son of Antonioni’s A.D. Jirges Ristum, who died before he could take over the project that the maestro had entrusted to him. Antonioni’s widow, Enrica Antonioni, is an associate producer.

“Technically Sweet” follows a man in his forties whose sudden trip to Sardinia compels him to reevaluate his life. He navigates tense real estate dealings, grows entangled with a girl he can’t quite understand and...

Brazilian production powerhouse Gullane, which is behind Netflix’s “Senna” and Karim Aïnouz’s Cannes competition title “Motel Destino,” has closed international co-production pacts on new projects from Cao Hamburger (”The Year My Parents Went on Vacation”) and Sandra Kogut (“Three Summers”).

France’s Playtime Group and Portugal’s Ukbar Filmes will co-produce Hamburger’s “School Without Walls.” A Playtime Group company will also handle international sales on the true and inspiring story of Braz Nogueira, principal of a public school in Heliopolis, one of Brazil’s biggest slums.

Kogut will direct “New Cancun,” co-created by and starring Sundance actress winner Regina Casé. The film teams Gullane with Kogut’s regular producer in France, Gloria Films. It’s slated to shoot by the first quarter of 2025.

In the film, Casé plays Madá, who has never dwelled on her family’s tragedy in an environmental disaster. When chosen for a Christmas campaign,...

One of the greatest auteurs in cinema history, Michelangelo Antonioni, passed away fourteen years ago––on the same day of Ingmar Bergman’s death, no less––but it’s no question his body of work endures. It’ll now get further life as one of his unproduced scripts is being turned into a feature film.

Variety reports that Technically Sweet, a project the Italian master had planned to direct between 1970’s Zabriskie Point and 1975’s The Passenger, is being produced by Brazil’s Gullane and Italy’s Similar. Set in Sardinia and the Amazon jungle, the film follows a journalist who suffers an existential crisis on a sudden holiday, embarking on a complex relationship with an enigmatic girl as he becomes further detached from life.

When the director gave up on making it in the 1980s, the script was handed over by Antonioni to his assistant director Jirges Ristum, but...

Written when the Italian legend was at the height of his powers, the screenplay for Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Technically Sweet,” which he planned to shoot between “Zabriskie Point” and “The Passenger,” looks set to be finally brought to the big screen.

Set in Sardinia and the Amazon jungle, “Technically Sweet” is set up at Brazil’s Gullane, the shingle behind Netflix’s upcoming “Senna” series, and Italy’s Similar, headed by Match Factory founder Michael Weber and Simone Gattoni and Laura Buffoni.

Antonioni finally gave up on shooting “Technically Sweet” in the 1980s, entrusting it to his A.D., Jirges Ristum, who died at an early age before shooting the film. It will be now be directed by Ristum’s son André Ristum. Enrica Antonioni, the director’s widow, will serve as associate producer.

Antonioni spent two years between 1970’s “Zabriskie Point” and 1975’s “The Passenger” trying to make “Technically Sweet.

By Jove, here’s a real find: in the 1980s, Michelangelo Antonioni traveled with his partner, actress and filmmaker Enrica Fico Antonioni, to Japan with the intent of creating a documentary, Trip to Japan, that would chronicle “the social transformations undergoing in Japan through the experimental use of new film technologies,” specifically the Betacam. The material hasn’t been seen since — but it wasn’t lost, either, and is now coming to the Venice Film Festival as part of a free exhibit on September 2. Before that (i.e. for less than two days), the material is made available, for free, via the Fondazione Prada-supported collective Belligerent Eyes.

While lacking an embed, the videos, called Japan 1984 – 7 Betacam Tapes, are easily accessible at their site and deserve a look. To anyone interested in the director, eastern culture, the ’80s, or ethnography, they make for deeply fascinating bits of history. There’s Antonioni...

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

If you’re in Dublin on June 3rd, The Tree of Life is screening with a live score from a 100-piece orchestra.

Watch a video on the parallels between the original Star Wars trilogy and The Force Awakens:

With A Brighter Summer Day now on Criterion, producer Curtis Tsui discusses the making of the film (and read Godfrey Chesire‘s essay):

The inspiration for the film was the real-life murder of a teenage girl by a classmate, committed in Taipei on June 15, 1961—an event that deeply affected filmmaker Edward Yang and other members of his generation in Taiwan. In fact, A Brighter Summer Day’s Chinese title...

Ahead of the re-release of the 1962 film L’Eclisse, the director’s widow reflects on their anguished relationship, his personal demons and her enduring loyalty

It could have been one of those lingering shots of which Michelangelo Antonioni was so fond. And something like it does indeed appear in his 1995 movie, Beyond the Clouds. Enrica Fico, then 18, was sitting with a friend, an artist, Eugenio Carmi, at a table outside a cafe in the Piazza del Popolo in Rome.

“The square was deserted because it was winter,” she says, 43 years on. “I saw Michelangelo arrive from the Via del Corso in his car and walk across from the other side of the square. I saw him pay off the posteggiatore [self-appointed parking attendant] and set off towards me. He had a nervy walk, because he had a nervy physique – a very young physique. He had nervous tics, too. And a body full of creative energy.

Chicago – “Framing a shot?” asks Ida (Christine Boisson), the latest photogenic lover of Italian filmmaker Niccolò (Tomas Milian), in Michelangelo Antonioni’s hypnotic 1982 effort, “Identification of a Woman.” Like Guidio, the hero of Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, “8 1/2,” Niccolò has the desire to create but has no story to tell, just “an idea of the female form” that perpetually haunts his imagination.

Regardless of his efforts to move on, Niccolò’s past threatens to consume him. The alarm systems left by his paranoid ex-wife are still present in his apartment, forcing him to dodge cameras and sirens while entering his own residence. This sequence takes place at the top of the picture, and is rather amusing but also terribly sad. The same could be said about much of what follows in this voyeuristic meditation on sexual and artistic obsession.

Blu-ray Rating: 3.5/5.0

Moviegoers frustrated with Antonioni’s enigmatic explorations of ennui among...