News

Media giant Mediaset has acquired Italian distribution rights to Spanish writer-director Benito Zambrano’s drama “Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake,” produced and sold by Barcelona-based studio Filmax.

News of the deal comes just before Filmax screens “Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake” to buyers at this year’s online European Film Market.

Described as high-quality cinema for adults and predominantly female audiences, “Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake” adapts the novel of the same title by screenwriter and casting specialist Cristina Campos. It has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide.

A member of Spain’s generation of directors that broke out in the 1990s, helping Spanish movies find far larger favor with audiences at home, Zambrano’s breakout debut, 1999’s “Alone,” won the Panorama Audience Award at Berlin.

He has gone on to make three more features – 2005’s “Havana Blues,” 2011’s “The Sleeping Voice” and 2019’s “Out in the Open” – earning two screenplay Goyas,...

‘The Good Boss’ leads Icíar Bollaín’s ‘Maixabel’ and Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Parallel Mothers’.

The Good Boss, directed by Fernando León de Aranoa and starring Javier Bardem, led the Goya nominations from the Spanish Film Academy with 20 nods, an all-time record.

The satire, also Spain’s entry for the Oscars, is ahead of Icíar Bollaín’s Maixabel and Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, on 14 and eight nominations respectively.

The Good Boss is the fifth highest-grossing film in Spain this year with €2.6m. Written and directed by León de Aranoa, it follows the petty boss of an industrial scales factory, played...

Already selected as this year’s Spanish Best International Feature Film submission for the Oscars, Fernando León de Aranoa’s dark workplace comedy “The Good Boss,” starring Javier Bardem, has set a new record for most Spanish Academy Goya Award nominations with 20, ahead of Icíar Bollaín’s standout Basque drama “Maixabel” with 14 and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers,” which secured eight.

The 20 nominations include: Best picture, director, original screenplay, original music, lead actor, three nominations for supporting actor, supporting actress, two nominations for best new male actor and one for best new female actor, production design, cinematography, editing, art direction, costume design, makeup, sound design and special effects. It’s a total which breaks an almost 30-year-old record held by Imanol Uribe’s “Numbered Days,” which received 19 nominations in 1994.

León’s latest, produced by The Mediapro Studio and Reposado PC, is a return to a fruitful partnership between the director and his leading man.

The Seville-born helmer is turning the best-selling Cristina Campos book into a film, which he is currently shooting on the Balearic and Canary Islands. On 25 October, filming got under way for Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake, a big-screen adaptation of the acclaimed novel of the same name by Cristina Campos, who took on the task of writing the film’s screenplay together with its director, Benito Zambrano. The Seville-born filmmaker is thus preparing to paint another portrait of courageous, determined women after previously doing so in his feature debut, Solas (which scooped five Goya Awards in 1999), and The Sleeping Voice (2011). Principal photography, which will last a total of eight weeks, is taking place in Valldemossa (Majorca) and on Gran Canaria. The cast of this tale about friendship, motherhood and the secrets concealed within a forgotten recipe, revolving around a group of women who, courageously and with no inhibitions,...

Barcelona-based studio Filmax has acquired world sales rights to “Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake,” an uplifting second chance in life drama from Spain’s Benito Zambrano, writer-director of critically admired features that have scored festival and Goya awards and broken out to sales abroad.

Also handling local distribution in Spain, Filmax will bring “Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake” onto the market at November’s online American Film Market.

Produced by Filmax and Luxembourg’s Deal Productions, whose credits include Berlin Festival’s 2019 Panorama opener “Flatland” and 2017’s “High Fantasy,” which screened at Berlin, Toronto and Rotterdam, “Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake” turns on two sisters, Anna and Marina.

Separated as teens, they re-meet to sell a bakery in Majorca that they’ve inherited from a mysterious benefactor. Neither are happy in life. Anna is locked in a loveless marriage; Marina travels the world as an Ngo doctor, a lonely existence.

Much as we'd like to, we can't always get to Every festival that happens. That's why we have friends like Ari Lehman, who travels extensively and who can bring us a blow-by-blow of the events as they happened. Here, then, is Ari's exclusive journal from his recent trip to Spain, where his band, First Jason, played the Festival de Cine de Terror de Molins de Rei, which is a really long name for one hell of a festival dedicated to horror movies and music. So without further ado...

Firstjason Festival de Cine de Terror de Molins de Rei Journal

Day 1 -

As we looked out of the airplane window, Barcelona lay sprawled out before us like an overflowing Pirate's chest that had been tipped into the shiny blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. I looked up to the north where I saw a dark, craggy mountaintop looming in the distance.