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Tubi has greenlit “Breaking Bear,” an adult animated series created by Julien Nitzberg and produced by Cartel Entertainment and Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Media.

Described as a parody of mobster dramas, combining elements of Yogi Bear with “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bear” Breaking Bear follows the escapades of three bear siblings who decide they have to start selling drugs in order to raise money and save their home after gas companies start fracking next to their cave. The bears soon enlist other forest animals in a scheme that will pit them against oil companies, the Russian mafia, local Hell’s Angels and polar bears who hate anything that isn’t white.

“When The Cartel pitched a series with cartoon animals as mobsters, I knew it was an offer I couldn’t refuse,” said Adam Lewinson, chief content officer at Tubi. “This is the perfect project to expand our adult animation...

Other winners included P.S. Vinothraj’s ‘Pebbles’ and Martín de los Santos’s ’That Was Life’.

Russian director Philipp Yuryev was the big winner at this year’s Transilvania International Film Festival in Romania’s Cluj-Napoca, clinching the €10,000 Transilvania Trophy for his debut feature The Whaler Boy.

Distributed internationally by Laurent Danielou’s Paris-based Loco Films, the Russian-Polish-Belgian co-production also won the Director’s Award on its premiere at last year’s Venice Days.

It is the second Russian film in TIFF’s 20-year history to be presented with the top award: Ilya Krzhanovsky’s 4 shared the trophy with Juan Pablo Rebella...

Philipp Yuryev’s “The Whaler Boy,” which took home the Venice Days award at last year’s Venice Film Festival, won the top prize at the Transilvania Film Festival on Saturday.

The jury praised the Russian director’s feature debut, an offbeat story of a teenage whale hunter on the Bering Strait who sets out to meet a webcam model, for being “beautiful and meticulous in its sense of time and place” while also being “really resonant and contemporary at the same time as being classic.”

Yuryev, who had not attended the festival, was hastily flown to Cluj from Moscow on Saturday morning, telling the audience: “It is really something surprising to be here, and to have a chance to visit this place and to see you all.” He dedicated the award to the remote whale-hunting community in Chukotka where the movie was filmed, as well as to its young...

TIFF artistic director Mihai Chirilov on how the festival supports the local industry.

The Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) was co-founded by producer-director Tudor Giurgiu and film critic Mihai Chirilov in Romania’s second city of Cluj-Napoca in 2002. It rapidly became the nation’s most important film-related event and this year’s physical edition marks its 20th anniversary.

TIFF opens today (July 23) with a gala screening of Spanish director Cesc Gay’s comedy The People Upstairs on Unirii Square as part of a new collaboration with the San Sebastian film festival. The festival will run until August 1.

Artistic director Chirilov...

Of all the international film festivals to roll out the red carpet this summer in what feels like a global industry reboot, few can fall back on past experience when it comes to the logistics of an in-person pandemic edition. But amid the wave of cancellations that all but wiped out the calendar year in 2020, the Transilvania Intl. Film Festival managed to pull off what few others could, relying on a host of open-air venues to successfully welcome moviegoers to the medieval city of Cluj.

One year later, for what in a different era might have been a splashy 20th anniversary edition, TIFF founder Tudor Giurgiu admits, “I thought this year would be easier.” Just days after confusion over Pcr tests and vaccine certificates reigned on the Croisette, however, Giurgiu and the TIFF organizing team have realized that as the coronavirus’ deadly Delta variant sweeps across the globe, a return...

Jury includes ‘Amores Perros’ screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga.

Transilvania International Film Festival has revealed the 12 films that will screen in its official competition and its international jury.

Each title competing for the Transilvania Trophy will receive its Romanian premiere at the 20th edition of the festival, which is set to take place in-person in the city of Cluj-Napoca.

They include What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?, by Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze, which played in competition at the Berlinale, and Lili Horvát’s Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time, which was Hungary’s Oscar submission.

Demi Lovato will find out if the truth is out there in a new limited unscripted series about UFOs that has been ordered at Peacock.

In “Unidentified with Demi Lovato,” the music superstar and actress, her skeptical best friend Matthew, and her sister Dallas attempt to help uncover the truth about the UFO phenomena. While consulting with leading experts, the trio will investigate recent eyewitness encounters, uncover secret government reports, and conduct tests at known UFO hot spots.

Peacock has given the show a four-episode order. Lovato will executive produce in addition to starring. Scooter Braun, Scott Manson and Allison Kaye will executive produce for Sb Projects. Jd Roth, Adam Greener and Sara Hansemann will executive produce for GoodStory Entertainment. Andrew Nock also executive produces. The series is produced by GoodStory Entertainment in association with Sb Projects

“Unidentified” is the latest television project that Lovato has set up at NBCUniversal.

Pop star Demi Lovato, who recently opened up about her struggles with drugs and sexual abuse in a docuseries for YouTube, is chasing UFOs for her next television project.

Peacock has ordered four-part series Unidentified with Demi Lovato (w/t), which will see the singer, her skeptical best friend Matthew and her sister Dallas attempt to uncover the truth about the UFO phenomena.

While consulting with leading experts, the trio will investigate recent eyewitness encounters, uncover secret government reports and conduct tests at known UFO hot spots.

This comes after Lovato revealed on her Instagram page in October that she spent a few days in Joshua Tree with Dr. Steven Greer, who claims to be one of the “world’s foremost authorities on the subject of UFOs, Et intelligence and initiating peaceful contact with Et civilization” and witnessed “the most incredibly profound sightings both in the sky as well as feet away from me.

The Romanian director is putting the finishing touches to his third feature, an independent film that he shot before the pandemic. After his feature debut, Outbound (2010), it took US-based Romanian director Bogdan George Apetri almost a decade to finish his second feature, Unidentified (2019), but he is certainly not waiting that long for his third effort: Miracle, an independent film that he shot before the pandemic, will soon wrap post-production. The project is being staged by Apetri and Oana Iancu through their new production company The East Company Productions (Romania). The co-production companies are Cineart TV Prague (Czech Republic), represented by Viktor Schwarcz, and Tasse Film (Latvia), represented by Aija Bērziņa. The screenplay, written by Apetri, follows Cristina (Ioana Bugarin), a 19-year-old nun, as she finds herself at a crossroads in her life. We see her sneaking out of her monastery in order to attend to an urgent matter...

Romanian-born filmmaker Bogdan George Apetri has made a life for himself in New York City, since moving there 19 years ago to study film at Columbia University, where he now teaches. But for the director whose second feature film, “Unidentified,” plays in the Meet the Neighbors competition this week at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Greece’s second city has a special meaning.

It was in Thessaloniki that Apetri’s debut, “Outbound,” took home the Golden Alexander for best feature film 10 years ago, shortly after its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. “I love Thessaloniki because it’s close to my heart,” he told Variety. “Of course, now I can see [Greece] is much closer to the Balkan experience, so for a Romanian film—people in Greece will respond in a different way than in America.”

“Unidentified” is the story of a hot-headed cop (Bogdan Farcaș) who grows fixated on cracking open a...

Lethal Weapon: Apetri’s Intricate & Unpredictable Tale of Revenge Dips into The Swamp

After tackling social realism with genre filmmaking underpinnings in Outbound, Romanian director Bogdan Andrei Apetri doesn’t stray too far off the mark with his follow up sophomore feature. Unidentified is a crime drama that by way of an entangled chase that exposes both the underbelly of the Romanian police world, and the racism that lies within.

Written by Apetri in collaboration with the actor Iulian Postelnicu (Arest), Unidentified promises a traditional detective set-up, where Florin Iespas (Bogdan Farcaș) is the only cop in the office who wants to deal with several fires that affected a chain of cabins in the woods and resulted in the death of two women.…...

History’s Unidentified is like no other show on television, and perhaps like no other show that has ever been on TV. It follows UFO researchers in an organization called To the Stars Academy of Art and Science (Ttsa), as they investigate credible cases. Reality shows following UFO researchers are common enough, but what is unique about this show is the makeup of the team, which includes a rock star, a former executive of a company that develops top-secret aircraft and built Area 51, a former intelligence officer who investigated UFO for the Pentagon, and the former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

The cases covered in Unidentified season one made headlines across the world, including several articles in The New York Times. These cases included testimony from United States Navy jet fighter pilots who chased objects they say exhibited technology well beyond our own. Some of the...

Last week, the Department of Defense released three declassified videos of “unexplained aerial phenomena.” The videos — filmed by Navy pilots in 2004 and 2015 — show “objects hurtling through the sky, one rotating against the wind, and pilots can be heard expressing confusion and awe,” wrote the New York Times, who published two of the videos in 2017 at the same time as To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a company that researches unidentified aerial phenomena co-founded by Tom DeLonge, the original singer-guitarist of Blink-182. A third video, of a 2015 incident off the East Coast,...

Exclusive: Film and TV marketing and distribution outfit 1091 Media has launched Unidentified, a new streaming channel carried by free, ad-supported service Xumo.

The linear channel features programming on paranormal, alien-related and conspiracy-minded themes. It will leverage 1091’s catalog of documentaries and indie films, including The Cosmic Secret, which features author David Wilcock. Recent titles in the paranormal realm released by 1091 include Bob Lazar and Area 51, Unacknowledged, Close Encounters of The Fifth Kind, and The Phenomenon.

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Xumo, which was acquired by Comcast in February, reaches 45 million U.S. households across smart TVs, mobile, web and streaming boxes with more than 190 channels. Free streaming services like Xumo, Pluto TV,...

A sleepy ranch In Utah’s Uinta Basin has been the focus of decades of secretive scientific paranormal research and now it’s the focus of the History Channel reality series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. According to History, this is the first time TV cameras have been allowed on the ranch. The show’s team of scientists and experts, equipped with the “latest in cutting edge technology,” made shocking discoveries that one scientist describes as “phenomena that cannot be explained by human technology.”

“I don’t like the word paranormal,” explains Astrophysicist Dr. Travis Taylor on a conference call with reporters, including Den of Geek. “I don’t like it at all because it suggests that something we see in the universe, and it exist within the universe, that it’s not supposed to be in the universe. And what I saw was within our universe. So to me,...