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Shooting has kicked off in Bordeaux for Gaya Jiji’s Pieces Of A Foreign Life (L’Etrangère), with Cannes best actress winner Zar Amir Ebrahimi starring as a Syrian woman seeking freedom and a new life in France.

France tv distribution has picked up international sales rights to the film and will kick off discussions with buyers at the upcoming American Film Market. It has also released this first-look image.

Ebrahimi, who won Cannes’ best actress prize in 2022 for Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, plays a woman who flees war-torn Syria, leaving her son and husband behind, and ends up seeking asylum in Bordeaux.

“There is no theme. Film whatever you want, however you want, with whomever you want.” This is the message that Egyptian filmmaker Sam Abbas sent to his favorite cinematographers as an invitation to contribute to the new film Erēmīta (Anthologies). Directors of photography from five countries––USA, France, Argentina, Italy, and the UK––answered the call and today we’re pleased to debut the exclusive trailer for the anthology project.

Featuring contributions from Abbas (Alia’s Birth, Marie, The Wedding), Alexis Zabe (The Florida Project, Silent Light, Post Tenebras Lux), Antoine Héberlé (A Son, My Favourite Fabric, GriGris), Ashley Connor (Madeline’s Madeline, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, The Death of Dick Long), Soledad Rodríguez (Pendular, Maternal, The Student), Stefano Falivene (Siberia, Pasolini, Mary), the zero-budget production will now get a release next month on VOD and Virtual Cinemas with all profits going entirely to a charity the team will choose.

The Shoot the Book adaption market — a staple at the Marché du Film since 2014 and a rising player on the global film scene — continues to evolve.

As the program — a joint initiative between publishing trade group Scelf (Société Civile des Editeurs de Langue Française) and the publicly funded Institut Français — continues to host curated pitch sessions at markets in Cannes, Shanghai and Los Angeles, it will also look to expand its B2B rendezvous component that was introduced last year.

“Our ambition is very simple,” says Scelf director Nathalie Piaskowski. “We want to entrench and entwine the two events. We want to make the rendezvous a fixture — and export it to other markets and festivals.”

And so on June 25, Shoot the Book will kick off this year’s edition with a morning pitch session — spotlighting 10 literary properties selected by an industry jury — and return in the afternoon for a three-hour...

Five years after fashion powerhouse Kering launched its initiative to highlight the role of women before and behind the camera, the mission of Women in Motion is as pressing as ever. While the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have put a spotlight on the struggles of women in the film industry, the battle for gender parity is far from over.

The numbers still indicate that women are underrepresented both on screen and behind the scenes. Yet how the marginalization of women is addressed has changed drastically in just half a decade. In 2015, when Kering premiered its talks at the Cannes Film Festival, frank conversations about gender inequality were hardly de rigueur.

“I’m proud of the awareness it brought to the topic, even at a time when very few thought it was something that should be acted upon,” says Kering CEO Francois-Henri Pinault. “And I’m impressed by all...

A buttoned-up young woman in 2011 Damascus is lured by the possibility of personal liberation when a brothel opens upstairs in debuting director Gaya Jiji’s fuzzily reasoned “My Favorite Fabric.” Inspired by “Belle du Jour,” though with little of that classic’s trenchant subversiveness, this thematically ambitious femme-centric drama aims to weave together the repressiveness of Syria’s regime with the limited possibilities for female self-expression within that society. The results are uncertain and artificial, full of missed chances that bode ill for a screen life outside a French release and a few festivals.

Life in Syria is becoming increasingly difficult, so for a middle-class family like that of Salwa (Souraya Baghdadi), a woman alone with three daughters, the best way of leaving behind the bombings is to find husbands for her offspring. Nahla (Manal Issa) is the oldest: Flinty and petulant, she clothes herself in dowdy garments that aim to hide an overripe sensuality.

The first edition will be presided over by Palestinian actress and director Hiam Abbass

Paris’s Institute of the Arab World is set to revive its festival activities this June with the launch of the new Arab Film Festival, the first edition of which will be presided over by Palestinian actress and director Hiam Abbass.

The new event will present some 70 films hailing from the Arab world across all genres.

A competitive feature line-up will showcase 13 recent titles from the Arab world including Palestinian director Muayad Alayan’s The Reports on Sarah and Salim, which premiered to critical acclaim at Rotterdam,...

A sexually frustrated young Syrian woman comes of age just as her country slides into civil war in My Favorite Fabric, which premieres in Cannes today. Impressively, Paris-based Syrian writer-director Gaya Jiji has landed a prestigious slot in the festival's Un Certain Regard section with her autobiographical debut feature. But her career-boosting coup may prove a mixed blessing, because this French-German-Turkish co-production is an unpolished, underpowered, navel-gazing affair which strains too hard to map private emotional angst onto the genocidal horrors of Syria's civil war. Noble intentions and timely feminist themes should ensure healthy festival interest, but theatrical potential will...

Arab cinema is gaining greater international traction amid constant flux in the Middle-East film industry.

With two works competing for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival — Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s “Capernaum” and Egyptian-Austrian first-time filmmaker Abu Bakr Shawky’s “Yomeddine” — plus three more pics sprinkled throughout other sections, the Arab contingent at Cannes has achieved representation on a scale rarely seen before. The rise of cinematic artists in the Middle East stems from a multi-cultural mindset and a conscious drive to transcend geographical borders while remaining rooted locally.

Shawky, whose “Yomeddine” is a road movie about a man raised in a leper colony who embarks on a journey across Egypt to try and reconnect with his family, is an alumnus of NYU’s graduate film program. This passion project was produced by American-Egyptian producer Dina Emam, who is one of Variety’s 10 Producers to Watch, and supported by the Tribeca Film Institute,...

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the emergence of the #MeToo movement, Women in Motion, the initiative launched in 2015 by fashion powerhouse Kering and backed by the Cannes Film Festival, is proving more timely than ever.

The 4-year-old initiative, whose mission is to highlight to role of women before and behind the camera, has already begun to bear fruit. Variety is a partner in the initiative.

Syrian helmer Gaya Jiji, who won the Women in Motion’s Young Talents Award and a grant along with Leyla Bouzid and Ida Panahandeh in 2016, will be back in Cannes this year to present her feature debut “My Favorite Fabric” in Un Certain Regard.

Aside from paying tribute to iconic women in the industry such as Olivia de Havilland and Isabelle Huppert, Women in Motion has also been turning the spotlight on emerging women filmmakers, including Jiji.

“Kering was the first...