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Exclusive: Lionsgate+ has renewed Señorita 89 for a second season and has added Dolores Heredia (El Galán) and Yoshira Escárrega (Toda La Sangre) as series regulars. Production will kick off on October 17 in Mexico City.

Heredia will portray La Madrina, mother of the cartels, who sees power and influence in Jocelyn (Leidi Gutiérrez), and Yoshira Escárrega as Maribel Montaño, who is known as La Santa because the night they found her with her victim’s eyes in her hands, they say the dead man could still see.

In the first season of Señorita 89, Isabel (Natasha Dupeyrón) was crowned; Dolores died (Bárbara López); Elena (Ximena Romo) went into exile and Concepción’s (Ilse Salas) La Encantada empire fell apart.

When Season 2 premieres, the ‘90s are in full swing and the two main TV networks in Mexico find themselves in a war to impose the next queen. While Miss Yucatan (Dupeyrón) tries to...

TelevisaUnivision is putting the polish on ViX+ for the premium streamer’s debut next month — and will try to persuade Spanish-speaking audiences to pay for another service in their monthly mix.

The Hispanic programming powerhouse, formed through the merger of Univision and Televisa, is launching ViX+ on July 21 in the U.S and across Latin America. Its will cost 6.99 per month in the U.S. and MX119 per month in Mexico.

TelevisaUnivision touts its entry into the premium streaming wars as the biggest dedicated Spanish-language service in the market: ViX+ is slated to feature more than 10,000 hours of ad-free entertainment programming in its first year and up to 7,000 hours of live sports, including live soccer matches and coverage in the U.S. and Mexico of world’s top leagues and tournaments.

ViX+ will include more than 70 original series and movies in the first year. Originals available at launch include premium series “María Félix,...

TelevisaUnivision’s fledgling streamer ViX Plus has ordered an untitled biographical series about the life of Mexican actor María Félix.

Produced by a mostly female team of creatives, the series is the first to tackle the story of Félix, also known as “La Doña,” who died in 2002. The icon will be played by three Mexican actresses — Sandra Echeverría (“La Usurpadora”), Ximena Romo (“Dime Cuándo Tú”) and Abril Vergara — who will each portray Félix at different ages.

“At ViX Plus, creating content that reflects our culture and illuminates our unique and diverse stories – all in Spanish, is our priority,” said Vincenzo Gratteri, senior vice president of development for ViX Plus. “We’re excited to tell the extraordinary story of María Félix. Her creative energy and indomitable spirit will be a source of inspiration for our audience.”

Written by Larissa Andrade, Alejandro Gerber, Tania Tinajero and Gabriela Rodríguez and directed by Mafer Suárez,...

En un mundo donde la belleza es lo más importante, nada es lo que parece. Señorita 89 estrena el 27 de febrero por Stream Pantaya en los Estados Unidos y Puerto Rico. Hablamos con Lucia Puenzo sobre su nueva seria con elenco que incluye Ilse Salas, Ximena Romo, Bárbara López, Natasha Dupeyrón, Leidi Gutiérrez and Coty Camacho. Señorita 89 is produced by Spencer director Pablo Larrain and Juan de Diol Larrain.

Content warning: The following story contains brief mention of sexual abuse and drug abuse.

Premiering Feb. 27 on the Spanish-language streaming service Pantaya, the new thriller "Señorita 89" dives deep into Mexican gender norms, using the 1989 Miss Mexico beauty pageant as its fictional setting. Filled with drugs, sex, and violence, the show has plenty of drama, with its main concern being feminine power, outdated beauty standards, and its love-hate relationships with beauty overall.

It starts as the year's 32 contestants sequester themselves in the pageant organizers' remote estate, "La Encantada." It's a mansion combining the vibes of the houses in "Mexican Gothic" and "The Bachelor." There, the power imbalance is immediately clear. The "girls," as everyone keeps calling them even though they're in their early twenties, have to sign super-intense contracts, giving away their legal rights as a precondition to participating. The pageant organizers, headed by Ilse Salas's Concepción in the part of the madame,...

Quickly swerving from any expected paths, Senorita 89 looks to be an atypical series, at least judging from its trailer, which you can watch below. Ilse Salas, Ximena Romo, Bárbara López, Natasha Dupeyrón, Leidi Gutiérrez and Coty Camacho star in the series, which comes from director and writer Lucia Puenzo (La Jauria). Per the official synopsis: "Set in the glamour of 80's Mexico, [the series] follows Concepción (Ilse Salas), the matriarch of the most important beauty pageant in the country, who, together with a team of expert makeup artists, trainers, and even surgeons, welcomes the 32 finalists to her estate, La Encantada. There, the contestants will experience a 3-month hard training until they reach the Miss Mexico pageant. "The truth is that underneath the appearances,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

One of the most anticipated of series from Latin America in 2022, Lucía Puenzo’s “Señorita 89” will premiere in the U.S. on Feb. 27, bowing on Spanish-language streaming service Pantaya which has also dropped official teaser key art and a first-look teaser trailer.

Produced by Academy Award winners Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín and Fabula, Pantaya, Starzplay and Fremantle, “Señorita 89” is showrun by Puenzo who is rapidly emerging as one of the Latin America’s foremost film and TV writer-directors after “La Jauría,” first fruit of a first-look deal between Fabula and Fremantle.

“La Jauría” drilled down on multiple forms of sexual abuse, powered by a thriller format. “Señorita 89’ look as if it might do the same but in a far different context, exposing the unseen and unseemly reality behind the glamor of a 1989 Miss Mexico beauty pageant.

As the teaser trailer shows, the drama thriller is set in a seeming paradise,...

Exclusive: Pantaya has signed a deal with Fremantle and Fabula to develop a slate of eight new series. The agreement folds into Pantaya’s plans of aggressively ramping up production capacity of original content for the service.

The companies recently collaborated on the Spanish language series Señorita 89 slated as marquee properties in early 2022 and El Refugio which recently wrapped production.

“We are delighted to continue working with our friends at Fremantle and Fabula after two successful productions,” said Paul Presburger, CEO of Pantaya, in a statement. “Señorita 89 and El Refugio are unique and exciting premium series that are exceptionally well made. We’re excited for our subscribers to be able to watch the series soon and for new viewers to discover this high-end content on the Pantaya platform. We’re eager to expand this partnership and create even more exceptional projects that audiences will love.”

Added Ángela Poblete, Head of Regional Television at Fabula,...

L.A.-based Spanish-language streaming platform Pantaya and global streamer Starzplay have revealed that production is underway on the period new drama series “Señorita 89” from Fremantle and the Larraín brothers’ Fabula, the latest co-production stemming from a first-look deal between the two, dating back to 2019.

The first fruit of that combined labor was global hit series “La Jauria,” available on Amazon Prime Video in Latin America and HBO Max in the U.S. Selected as one of Variety’s best international series of 2020, “La Jauria” stars “A Fantastic Woman” lead Daniela Vega and is directed by one of Latin America’s most prominent film and TV writer-directors Lucia Puenzo.

Sticking with a talent alliance that worked so well for Fabula and Fremantle the first time around, Puenzo also co-wrote and is directing “Señorita 89.” She is joined by co-screenwriters María Renée Prudencio and Tatiana Mereñuk, and co-directors Nicolás Puenzo...

Headed by Alberto Müffelmann and Gerardo Gatica, Mexican indie production house Panorama Global has boarded Luis Javier Henaine’s feature “Desaparecer del todo,” a Moonlight Pictures production co-produced with Pablo Zimbron’s Varios Lobos.

The supernatural thriller, based on true events, explores witchcraft in Mexico through the eyes of a tabloid crime photographer.

Varios Lobos and Panorama previously co-produced Henaine’s popular comedy “Ready to Mingle,” and it’s a relationship Müffelmann was eager to rekindle.

“It is not just a business thing either,” he elaborated. “We understand one another well in a creative manner as well as for the economic and financial aspects. We work hand-in-hand. I think we’ve grown together. They came to us as a smaller company, but they are growing at the same time that we are.”

Also announced at Los Cabos, “Moonwalker,” is co-directed by Rodrigo Guardiola (“Zoé: Panoramas”) and Gabriel Nuncio (SXSW player “Cumbres”) of production house Bengala,...

Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood crosses $150m at international box office.

Universal’s Fast franchise spin-off Hobbs & Shaw was in dominant mood again, beating the Hollywood competition to deliver an estimated $45.4m weekend worldwide box office and propel the running total to $684.2m.

If numbers are accurate, Hobbs & Shaw will become the only film so far this year to hold the global number one position for four weeks – overtaking Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: Far From Home and Captain Marvel on three.

Disney’s The Lion King climbed to $1.562bn at the global box office and has overtaken Furious 7...

Opening your film with a quote from Marcel Proust is certainly a choice, and “This Is Not Berlin” does its best to back the bold move. In his fourth narrative feature, Mexican filmmaker Hari Sama paints a vivid, if dizzying, portrait of his hometown, Mexico City circa 1986: There’s a steady stream of music, art, and literary references; broadly painted caricatures of youth searching for identity; hypnotic montages of political performance art; and full-frontal male nudity.

Using the underground avant-garde art scene as its backdrop and a wayward teenage boy as its protagonist, “This Is Not Berlin” renders the follies of youth through a kaleidoscopic phantasma of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Despite all the compelling decoration, however, there are few surprises.

The story follows Carlos (Xabiani Ponce De León), a fatherless teen who watches his little brother as his mother (“Roma” star Marina de Tavira) stays in bed hungover all day.

Hari Sama’s “This Is Not Berlin” is a memory movie set in the art world and punk scene of Mexico City circa 1986, a world that is packed with visual detail and moments that are trapped in time by the camera.

The film moves very fast and takes in as much of this world as possible for us, offering it up both lovingly and satirically. There are many characters, but somehow what stands out are shots of Tabasco sauce poured on eggs, a cartoon program playing on a television set and smoke drifting in the air from cigarettes.

In one charged and lyrical scene here, best friends Carlos (Xabiani Ponce de León) and Gera (José Antonio Toledano) are seen from above smoking cigarettes together, with a paper cup framed in back of them so that we can see the cigarette butts that have been discarded. Their faces are open to the pleasure of the moment,...

"I'm more of a spiritual guide." Samuel Goldwyn Films has debuted an official trailer for an indie film from Mexico titled This Is Not Berlin, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It also won a number of major awards, including a Special Jury Award and Best Cinematography, at the Málaga Spanish Film Festival this year. From Mexican filmmaker Hari Sama, This Is Not Berlin is described as a "thrilling and sexy clash of art, drugs, and punk music". Seventeen-year-old Carlos doesn't fit in anywhere, not in his family nor with the friends he has chosen in school. But everything changes when he is invited to a mythical nightclub where he discovers the underground nightlife scene: punk, sexual liberty and drugs. This stars Xabiani Ponce de León, José Antonio Toledano, Mauro Sanchez Navarro, Klaudia Garcia, Ximena Romo, Américo Hollander, and Marina de Tavira (seen in Roma). Looks vibrant & sincere.

There have been a lot of coming-of-age-in-the-punk-scene movies, not least because indie cinema really took off in the years immediately following the heyday of punk and New Wave, when the kids raised on that music were fresh out of film school. Still, Hari Sama’s fourth feature as writer-director is something special, and one of the best of its particular subgenre.

“This Is Not Berlin” deploys the wisdom of the director’s now-middle-aged perspective to provide what’s not just a portrait of adolescent liberation, but a snapshot of a moment in middle-class Mexican life whose larger sociopolitical context is both present yet mostly kept in the background (as in Alfonso Cuarón’s recent “Roma”). In the foreground is a vivid, often giddy, but also perilous world of hedonism for art’s sake in which the emerging threat of AIDS is seldom openly addressed yet omnipresent. With a coolness factor off the charts,...

It opens in slow motion with teenage bodies wrestling and punching inside chaotic dust swirls, one boy (Xabiani Ponce de León’s Carlos) caught isolated in the middle of the frame. He’s not looking to hit any of the others. In fact he’s barely dodging out of the way when they come too close. It’s almost as though Carlos isn’t even there, his mind and body separated as two halves of the same conflicted whole. He knows he should be present with his friends to show his machismo and do Mexico proud like the soccer team soon to hit the 1986 World Cup pitch, but something is calling him in the distance that he can’t quite see. It’s punk metal versus new wave blues, hetero-normative conformity versus queer counter-culture.

Director Hari Sama’s opening scene to This Is Not Berlin is the perfect prologue for its rebellious themes.

Writer-director Hari Sama’s fifth feature, “This is Not Berlin,” is set to world premiere at this month’s Sundance Film Festival. New York-based Cinema Tropical, a leading presenter of Latin American cinema in the U.S., has granted Variety exclusive access to the first trailer for the coming-of-age drama set in 1986 Mexico City.

Sama wrote, directed and his company Catatonia produced the semi-autobiographical feature, which impressed in works in progress sections at Impulso Morelia in October – where it scooped the Cinepolis Distribución Award and a special mention from the Jury – and Ventana Sur’s Copia Final in December.

The film boasts an ensemble cast led by two newcomers Xabiani Ponce de León and José Antonio Toledano, along with “Roma” star Marina de Tavira and popular Mexican TV actress Ximena Romo. Sama himself makes an appearance as well.

In the trailer, we see the drug and art-fueled world of political...

La Boda de Mi Mejor Amigo will be directed by Celso García in Sony Pictures International Productions’ latest local-language remake of a classic property. A co-production with Zamora Films and Alameda Films, the Spanish-language adaptation of the 1997 Julia Roberts/Dermot Mulroney/Cameron Diaz starrer My Best Friend’s Wedding is targeting a 2019 release.

Ana Serradilla, Miguel Ángel Silvestre, Carlos Ferro and Natasha Dupeyrón star in the update on the original that grossed nearly $300M at the worldwide box office.

Shooting in Guadalajara and Mexico City, the film is adapted by Gabriel Ripstein from Ronald Bass’ original screenplay. Serradilla will play Julia, a renowned food critic who is terrified of commitment. Despite that, she made a promise with her best friend Manuel (Ferro) that if both of them were still single at age 35, they would marry each other. When Julia receives a call from Manuel that he is marrying someone else,...

Original grossed close to $300m worldwide.

Sony Pictures International Productions (Spip) is co-producing with Zamora Films and Alameda Films La Boda De Mi Mejor Amigo, a Spanish-language adaptation of the 1997 global hit My Best Friend’s Wedding.

Production on the rom-com takes place in Guadalajara and Mexico City. Celso García will direct from Gabriel Ripstein’s Spanish-language adaptation of the original screenplay by Ronald Bass.

Daniel Birman Ripstein and Gerardo Morán produce and Spip has targeted a 2019 release. The original stared Julia Roberts and Dermot Mulroney and grossed close to $300m worldwide through Sony in 1997.

Ana Serradilla plays Julia, a...

Exclusive: Vadhir Derbez and Ximena Romo have been set to star in Sony Pictures International Productions’ Spanish-language remake of 50 First Dates. 50 Primeras Citas is the redo of the 2004 Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore romantic comedy about a woman with short-term memory loss and the guy who continues to court her even though she forgets him after each day they spend together. It grossed $196M worldwide. The update begins shooting today in the Dominican Republic with Maur…...

South by Southwest, the multi-faceted film, music and technology festival held annually in Austin, TX will feature such upcoming films as Paul Feig’s Spy, David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, and Ondi Timoner’s Russell Brand profile Brand: A Second Coming as headliners in this year’s film festival lineup.

SXSW runs from March 13 to 21 in Austin and is now in its 22nd year. Variety has details of the 145 films and 100 world premieres bowing at this year’s festival. Brand, as previously reported, will be the festival’s opening night film.

Other notable titles on the list are the Will Ferrell/Kevin Hart comedy Get Hard, a rough cut of Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck, the directorial debut of 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland, Ex Machina, and a new comedy by Michael Showalter, Hello, My Name is Doris.

On the small screen,...