News

Disney+ has greenlit The Lions of Sicily, an Italian series based on Stefania Auci’s The Florios of Siciliy from Paolo Genovese.

The eight-parter tells the story of the Florio family. It follows brothers Paolo and Ignazio, two small spice merchants who have escaped from a Calabria stuck in the past and in search of social redemption. In Sicily they invent a future, turning a small, run-down shop into a flourish business activity that young Vincenzo, with his revolutionary ideas, will transform into an economic empire.

The series stars Michele Riondino, Miriam Leone, Donatella Finocchiaro, Vinicio Marchioni, Eduardo Scarpetta, Paolo Briguglia, Ester Pantano and Adele Cammarata.

The show is the latest to come from Disney+ Italy, which was also behind The Ignorant Angels.

“The Lions of Sicily confirms Disney+’s commitment to create Italian contents that enrich and make the already wide and varied offer of the platform unique,” said Daniel Frigo,...

Disney+ has commenced production on Italian original series “The Lions of Sicily,” a family saga based on Stefania Auci’s bestseller “The Florios of Sicily.”

Principal photography has started in Rome and will take place between there and Sicily. It is directed by Paolo Genovese (“Superheroes”).

Set between 1800 and 1861, the eight-part series follows the Florio family where brothers Paolo and Ignazio are two small spice merchants who have escaped from a Calabria stuck in the past and in search of social redemption. In Sicily they invent a future, turning a small, run-down shop into a flourish business activity that young Vincenzo, with his revolutionary ideas, will transform into an economic empire. However, overwhelming Vincenzo’s life and that of the entire family is the disruptive arrival of Giulia, a strong and intelligent woman who is in contrast with the rigid rules of the society of the time.

The series is...

The event launches in Cannes this April.

Canneseries, the international TV festival launching in Cannes this April (7-11), has revealed the ten series in its official competition selection.

Scroll down for full line-up

The titles include Killing Eve created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) and starring Sandra Oh and Fiona Shaw, and Aquí En La Terra, created by Gael García Bernal with Kyzza Terrazas and Jorge Dorantes.

The titles were selected by Canneseries artistic director Albin Lewi.

The festival was founded by David Lisnard, mayor of Cannes and presided by former French culture minister Fleur Pellerin. It will run alongside Miptv.

BBC America’s “Killing Eve” has been selected for this year’s first-ever Canneseries TV festival competition — making it the only U.S. show in a field of ten international productions. “Killing Eve” will be up for one of six awards handed out on April 11, along side new series from Belgium, Germany, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, and Spain.

The ten shows will be vying for Best Music, Best Screenplay, Special Performance Prize, Best Performance and Best Series trophies.

As previously announced, author and producer Harlan Coben has been named jury president for the competition, which takes place April 7 to 11. The U.S.-based Coben will be joined on the panel by actress Paula Beer (Germany), screenwriter and director Audrey Fouché (France), actress Melisa Sözen (Turkey), composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer (Chile/Canada) and actor Michael K. Williams (USA).

Coben’s new series “Safe,” which will air in France...

Title: La felicità è un sistema complesso (Happiness is a complex system) Director: Gianni Zanasi Starring: Valerio Mastandrea, Giuseppe Battiston, Hadas Yaron, Paolo Briguglia, Teco Celio, Maurizio Donadoni, Filippo De Carli and Chiara Martini. Criticism on capitalism is at the core of Gianni Zanasi’s new flick: La felicità è un sistema complesso (Happiness is a complex system). Enrico Giusti (Valerio Mastrandrea) has a very peculiar job: he convinces irresponsible entrepreneurs to sell their companies, in order to make them competitive again through arguable mechanisms he is not fully aware of. But he will start to question what he does through a Deus ex machina: the arrival of Achrinoam, an Israeli [ Read More ]

The post La felicità è un sistema complesso (Happiness is a complex system) Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

Title: Lo Scambio (The Exchange) Director: Salvo Cuccia Starring: Filippo Luna, Paolo Briguglia, Barbara Tabita, Vincenzo Pirrotta, Maziar Fioruzi, Orio Scaduto, Sergio Vespertino, Alessandro Agnello, Giovanni Cintura. Salvo Cuccia’s first feature film – Lo Scambio (The Exchange) - is set in a plumbeous Palermo in 1995. Nameless characters drift towards their ambiguous destiny. Nothing is what it seems. A couple opens the story. She is in her forties and tormented by the fact she can’t have children. Her husband appears to be a chief of police engrossed in his work. His driver takes him everywhere, also to interrogate a young man who was acquainted with two men that were killed [ Read More ]

The post Lo Scambio (The Exchange) Movie Review (Torino Film Festival) appeared first on Shockya.com.

The Italian Film Festival 2011 will kick off on 1 March 2011 with a concert at London’s Cadogan Hall by Nicola Piovani, winner of the Academy Award for the score of Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful in 1998. The festival, due to become an annual event, is organized by the Italian Cultural Institute in London and Cinecittà Luce in Rome.

The festival’s programme includes ten new Italian films: a selection of eight titles made by Italian film critic Irene Bignardi and a special choice of two by Adrian Wootton of Film London. The screenings at Ciné Lumière will be followed by Q&A sessions with directors and actors.

The event will offer an opportunity for London audiences to see Italian films most of which have yet to be screened in the UK, and a rare opportunity for British film distributors to catch up with brand new, cutting edge Italian cinema. The...

Today we have a poster, trailer and photos from Giuseppe Tornatore’s latest movie “Baaria,” an epic tale spanning three generations from the 1930s to modern times, has the rise of fascism, World War II and Italy’s postwar political jockeying as its backdrop.

“Baaria” synopsis:

Baaria is Giuseppe Tornatore’s lush and romantic reimagining of the path of one person, a Sicilian who grows, marries, has children, matures and ages, compiling a rich breadth of experiences along the way. It is also the tale of a typical village and the entertaining dynamics of small-town life where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Tornatore is a master at recreating memories and the sensations that accompany them. His eye for detail and the magic moment is on full display in a film that will remind many of his magnificent Cinema Paradiso.

Peppino, the nickname of the boy at the story’s heart,...

Screened

Toronto International Film Festival

TORONTO -- In "Good Morning, Night" (Buongiorno, Notte), Marco Bellocchio dramatizes one of the most traumatic events in recent Italian history -- the kidnapping and murder of its former prime minister, Aldo Moro, by a Red Brigade faction in 1978. The writer-director's inquiry into this tragedy makes for a moving and intelligent film, but the dark story never feels fully realized. Bellocchio experiments with a number of fictional methods to penetrate the minds of his characters, but not all work -- and some add confusion rather than clarity.

Nevertheless, this film will be a must-see in its native land, while festival exposure here and in Venice should lead to theatrical releases in many international territories. The film is certainly one of the better attempts by a European filmmaker to grapple with the terrorist activity that plagued Western Europe in the '70s.

The film's early moments depict two of the kidnappers, Ernesto Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, the director's son) and Chiara (Maya Sansa), posing as a married couple to rent a large Roman apartment with an underground garage. Here they plan to sequester their victim. Under the leadership of Mariano Luigi Lo Cascio), Primo (Giovanni Calcagno) and the other two design and construct a hiding place behind a bookshelf wall.

The bloody shootout and kidnapping in broad daylight occur off camera. Chiara learns about it from a TV news bulletin, which alerts her to her colleagues' success and to the imminent arrival of a houseguest.

Moro (Roberto Herlitzka) languishes in the flat for 55 days. During this time, his kidnappers conduct fruitless negotiations with authorities. Moro even writes to the pope to gain concessions that would win his release.

While all of this is happening, Bellocchio imagines conversations between Moro and his communist kidnappers, chiefly their ideologue leader Mariano, a dialogue in which the two parties talk past each other. The story is told from the point of view of Chiara, the cell's only woman. Her doubts about the group's action grow with each passing day. She experiences flashbacks (in black-and-white) to the struggle against fascism during World War II, which lead her to wonder whether her colleagues' radical ideology is uncomfortably akin to the fascists'.

At her job in a library, she develops a relationship with a young man (Paolo Briguglia) who just happens to have written a screenplay about a similar terrorist kidnapping. What Bellocchio wants to achieve here is never clear, nor is the police arrest of her colleague ever explained.

Having trouble sleeping at night, Chiara experiences dreams when she does fall asleep in which Moro roams freely about the apartment, checking out books in the bookshelf, and later, a fantasy in which she frees him before her pals can kill him.

As the film moves back and forth between these hallucinations and the tense boredom of the waiting period, during which the cell's members start to suspect one another, the movie loses some of its grip on the audience. Bellocchio's impressionistic approach never quite jells with the more realistic account of the terrorists' methodology. One also wishes that at least one terrorist would offer a cogent rationale for their actions. Indeed, only Chiara seems able to question their motives and goals.

A movie about the Moro incident should be unsettling, and this one is. The failure of ideology to justify such a crime is clearly dramatized by Bellocchio. The actors convey the blindness of much of the European radical left of that era to the consequences of such acts. In the way Bellocchio lights and shoots the claustrophobic flat, he makes clear that everyone is a prisoner there, not just Moro.

GOOD MORNING, NIGHT

A Filmalbatos/RAI Cinema production in association with Sky

Credits:

Screenwriter-director: Marco Bellocchio

Producer: Marco Bellochio, Sergio Pelone

Director of photography: Pasquale Mari

Production designer: Marco Dentici

Music: Riccardo Giagni

Costume designer: Sergio Ballo

Editor: Francesca Calvelli

Cast:

Chiara: Maya Sansa

Mariano: Luigi Lo Cascio

Aldo Moro: Roberto Herlitzka

Enzo: Paolo Briguglia

Ernesto: Pier Giorgio Bellocchio

Primo: Giovanni Calcagno

Running time -- 108 minutes

No MPAA rating...

Screened

Toronto International Film Festival

TORONTO -- In "Good Morning, Night" (Buongiorno, Notte), Marco Bellocchio dramatizes one of the most traumatic events in recent Italian history -- the kidnapping and murder of its former prime minister, Aldo Moro, by a Red Brigade faction in 1978. The writer-director's inquiry into this tragedy makes for a moving and intelligent film, but the dark story never feels fully realized. Bellocchio experiments with a number of fictional methods to penetrate the minds of his characters, but not all work -- and some add confusion rather than clarity.

Nevertheless, this film will be a must-see in its native land, while festival exposure here and in Venice should lead to theatrical releases in many international territories. The film is certainly one of the better attempts by a European filmmaker to grapple with the terrorist activity that plagued Western Europe in the '70s.

The film's early moments depict two of the kidnappers, Ernesto Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, the director's son) and Chiara (Maya Sansa), posing as a married couple to rent a large Roman apartment with an underground garage. Here they plan to sequester their victim. Under the leadership of Mariano Luigi Lo Cascio), Primo (Giovanni Calcagno) and the other two design and construct a hiding place behind a bookshelf wall.

The bloody shootout and kidnapping in broad daylight occur off camera. Chiara learns about it from a TV news bulletin, which alerts her to her colleagues' success and to the imminent arrival of a houseguest.

Moro (Roberto Herlitzka) languishes in the flat for 55 days. During this time, his kidnappers conduct fruitless negotiations with authorities. Moro even writes to the pope to gain concessions that would win his release.

While all of this is happening, Bellocchio imagines conversations between Moro and his communist kidnappers, chiefly their ideologue leader Mariano, a dialogue in which the two parties talk past each other. The story is told from the point of view of Chiara, the cell's only woman. Her doubts about the group's action grow with each passing day. She experiences flashbacks (in black-and-white) to the struggle against fascism during World War II, which lead her to wonder whether her colleagues' radical ideology is uncomfortably akin to the fascists'.

At her job in a library, she develops a relationship with a young man (Paolo Briguglia) who just happens to have written a screenplay about a similar terrorist kidnapping. What Bellocchio wants to achieve here is never clear, nor is the police arrest of her colleague ever explained.

Having trouble sleeping at night, Chiara experiences dreams when she does fall asleep in which Moro roams freely about the apartment, checking out books in the bookshelf, and later, a fantasy in which she frees him before her pals can kill him.

As the film moves back and forth between these hallucinations and the tense boredom of the waiting period, during which the cell's members start to suspect one another, the movie loses some of its grip on the audience. Bellocchio's impressionistic approach never quite jells with the more realistic account of the terrorists' methodology. One also wishes that at least one terrorist would offer a cogent rationale for their actions. Indeed, only Chiara seems able to question their motives and goals.

A movie about the Moro incident should be unsettling, and this one is. The failure of ideology to justify such a crime is clearly dramatized by Bellocchio. The actors convey the blindness of much of the European radical left of that era to the consequences of such acts. In the way Bellocchio lights and shoots the claustrophobic flat, he makes clear that everyone is a prisoner there, not just Moro.

GOOD MORNING, NIGHT

A Filmalbatos/RAI Cinema production in association with Sky

Credits:

Screenwriter-director: Marco Bellocchio

Producer: Marco Bellochio, Sergio Pelone

Director of photography: Pasquale Mari

Production designer: Marco Dentici

Music: Riccardo Giagni

Costume designer: Sergio Ballo

Editor: Francesca Calvelli

Cast:

Chiara: Maya Sansa

Mariano: Luigi Lo Cascio

Aldo Moro: Roberto Herlitzka

Enzo: Paolo Briguglia

Ernesto: Pier Giorgio Bellocchio

Primo: Giovanni Calcagno

Running time -- 108 minutes

No MPAA rating...