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Exclusive: Married actors Harry Hadden-Paton and Rebecca Night on Friday morning announced the launch of Symphony Films, a new production company that they’ve co-founded.

Based out of London, the company will be active across a variety of genres, in both film television, pursuing projects that embody the values of diversity, inclusion, sustainability and equality.

Symphony Films’ first project is Legacy, a dramatic comedy short starring James Purefoy, Luke Norris and Amelia Gething, which marks Hadden-Paton’s first as writer-director, and Night’s first as a producer. In it, a girl brings her fiancé home to meet her father for the first time. But… home is not merely a home. And her father is from a very different world. Social classes and generations clash in this black comedy of manners set in the stunning English countryside, where the responsibility of conserving the family legacy is not for the faint-hearted.

Already completed,...

It is fitting to find Fanny: The Right to Rock broadcast on PBS. The channel thrives on educational material, and director Bobbi Jo Hart’s documentary teaches many lessons. The film chronicles the career, and captures the reunion of Fanny, a group of musicians who changed the dynamics of rock in the 1970s. The lineup was unique, labels and management executives dubbed them the “female Beatles.” They made history as the first all-women rock band to release an LP with a major record label.

Originally called The Svelts and rebranded as Wild Honey, Fanny was formed in the mid-1960s in Sacramento, Calif., by three Filipina American musicians: sisters June and Jean Millington, on guitar and bass, and drummer Brie Darling. All three sang. When Darling had her daughter, Brandi, in 1968, Fanny added drummer Alice de Buhr, and roving keyboardist Nickey Barclay.

As was the fashion of the time, they lived in a band house.

Fanny should have entered the history books immediately. They were, as longtime supporter Bonnie Raitt puts it, “the first all-woman rock band that could really play, and really get some credibility in the musician community.” They also released several major-label albums, toured extensively and were a principally Filipina American act in the primarily white-male landscape of early 1970s rock. Yet somehow they went from also-rans to a footnote, then a reclamation project that even champions of pioneering women in music tended to overlook.

Fortunately, the original members are still alive and more or less kicking 50 years later, making Canadian documentarian Bobbi Jo Hart’s “Fanny: The Right to Rock” an overdue appreciation that its subjects clearly relish. They’ve since become mentors to young female musicians, and this tribute should have considerable appeal to latter-day artists and fans who value such trailblazing role models — but believed there weren’t any,...