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Ariel Kavoussi, whose acting credits include Netflix’s “Maniac,” Prime Video’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and film “Catfight,” has wrapped her feature directorial debut “The Next Big One: A Comedy with Three Potential Problems.”

In this dystopian sci-fi black comedy, a high-ranking employee at an omnipotent tech firm must help her depressed, activist brother move into their aunt’s house while a hurricane threatens New York city. Principal photography wrapped in Brooklyn, New York. Kavoussi previously directed shorts and some TV.

The lead cast includes Molly Bernard (“Younger”), David H. Holmes (“The Penguin”), Deborah Rush (“Strangers with Candy”) and Kevin Corrigan (“The Get Down”).

The ensemble supporting cast includes Maria Dizzia (“Orange is the New Black”), Josh Pais (“The Dropout”), Paul Lazar (“Silence of the Lambs”), Max Casella (“Tulsa King”), Craig Bierko (“UnREAL”), Catherine Curtin (“Stranger Things”), Matt Walton (“No Hard Feelings”) and emerging stars Victoria Villier (2021 Fantasia Film...

Exclusive: The Gotham Film & Media Institute has today named the fellows set for the 2023 edition of its Festival de Cannes Producers Network Program, scheduled to take place in person at Cannes from May 17-22. The list includes independent filmmakers Maria Altamirano, Liz Cardenas, Leah Chen Baker, Yoni Golijov, Emma Hannaway Nikkia Moulterie and Carlos Zozaya.

Running concurrently with the Cannes Film Festival and the Marche du Film, the program is specifically designed for experienced producers to build up their international networks and learn more about international production, financing, legal and packaging. As its sole U.S. partner organization, The Gotham annually selects U.S. fiction and nonfiction producers to participate.

“The 2023 Gotham/Cannes Producers Network Fellows are an extraordinary group of talented producers, who have demonstrated so early in their careers both the taste and acumen to bring excellent new projects to life,” said The Gotham’s Executive Director,...

2021 is nearly in the books and Hulu is celebrating by heading back to the past…like, the way past. With its list of new releases for December 2021, Hulu is going positive Medieval with two swords and shield original series arriving this month.

Animated comedy Crossing Swords premieres its second season on Dec. 10. This stop-motion style tale follows Patrick (Nicholas Hoult) as he works his way up the feudal latter of The Kingdom. This will be complemented by Dragons: The Nine Realms on Dec. 23. This series is set in the How to Train Your Dragon universe and takes place over 1,000 years after the events of the films. In it, a group of modern day kids uncover the secret truth about dragons.

Hulu also has some more current options for TV this month. Original comedy Pen15 premieres the second half of its second season on Dec. 3. Watch it to relive the trauma...

Every New Yorker has a subway story, a tale of culture clash, entitlement, cacophonic calamity, or worse. The subways of New York City are a breeding ground for tension, what with the rush of strangers, the jarring disruptions, and the uncaringly close quarters. For women, it’s even more stressful, as too many men use the claustrophobic enclosure as a means of exploiting a literally captive audience. This is how “Materna” begins, on a subway with one ranting man (Sturgill Simpson) disturbing his fellow passengers.

Continue reading ‘Materna’ Sets Up A Subway Thriller But Refuses To Go Deep [Review] at The Playlist.

David Gutnik’s debut feature “Materna” starts with an all-too familiar scene: a woman on a train, obviously desiring to be left alone, is being talked to by a highly aggressive man. He’s shouting, causing a scene, and the more the woman ignores him, the more frustrated he becomes. It’s unfortunate that the rest of “Materna” simultaneously never lives up to that opening intensity nor authenticity with regards to women in contemporary society,

Gutnik utilizes the technique of telling four separate stories, each spotlighting one woman on the train that day. We’ve seen this method of storytelling done so often in other independent features and when done poorly it feels like what it is: a gimmick. Here, there’s never a feeling of unity between the women at any point — outside of them being women with motherhood issues — so they play like four disparate stories with a...

It makes sense that one of the protagonists of “Materna” is a fan of Jean-Pierre Melville’s existential neo-noir “Le Samouraï,” given that David Gutnik’s feature debut is itself a tapestry of modern alienation and disaffection. Charting the plights of four women whose paths eventually cross on a New York City subway train, Gutnik’s fragmented feature debut is rooted in fraught mother-daughter dynamics and intertwined issues of regret, resentment, racism, classism and homophobia.

Having won prizes for best actress (Assol Abdullina) and best cinematography at the pandemic-pinched 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, it should entice audiences in search of distinctive art-house fare when it debuts in limited release on Aug. 6 (ahead of an Aug. 10 VOD premiere), even if

Co-written with leads Abdullina and Jade Eshete, Gutnik’s film begins in a New York City subway car whose crowd includes a quartet of women — later identified as Jean (Kate Lyn Sheil...

Michael Chernus is set as a lead opposite Rachel Weisz in Amazon’s Dead Ringers series, a reimagining with a gender swap of David Cronenberg’s cult classic 1980s film. The project, which received a straight-to-series order last year, hails from Weisz, Alice Birch, lead writer of Hulu’s acclaimed Normal People series, Annapurna Television and Morgan Creek Entertainment, the company behind the original movie.

Dead Ringers is a modern take on Cronenberg’s thriller starring Jeremy Irons, featuring Weisz playing the double lead role of Elliot and Beverly Mantle, twins who share everything: drugs, lovers, and an unapologetic desire to do whatever it takes, including pushing the boundaries on medical ethics in an effort to challenge antiquated practices and bring women’s healthcare to the forefront.

Chernus will play the series regular role of Tom, a brilliant scientist, working with Elliot (Weisz) on a groundbreaking but perilous new project.

There are few boundaries on public transportation, at least not physical ones. Crammed together in small spaces for oftentimes unexpected lengths of time, people who don’t normally interact are suddenly forced into each others’ orbits. Such is the concept behind Tribeca winner “Materna,” which uses the New York City subway system as a meeting point for four seemingly very different women, all of whom are forced to deal with an unexpected encounter and the impact it has on their lives. At its heart, motherhood and questions of feminine identity burn bright.

The film is the directorial debut of David Gutnik, who is also the editor of several acclaimed features, including Christina Choe’s 2018 Sundance award-winning drama “Nancy.” Gutnik wrote the film alongside two of his stars, Jade Eshete (“Billions” and “High Maintenance”) and Assol Abdullina (in one of her first film roles), and the film also features leading roles...

Utopia has acquired worldwide rights to David Gutnik’s “Materna” ahead of the film’s in-person debut at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

The movie looks at four women, whose lives intersect during an incident on a New York City subway. Kate Lyn Sheil (“She Dies Tomorrow”), Jade Eshete (“Billions”), Lindsay Burdge (“Black Bear”), Assol Abdullina (“First Snow”), Michael Chernus (“Orange Is the New Black”), Rory Culkin (“Castle Rock”) and Sturgill Simpson (the upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon”) all star. Abdullina and Eshete co-wrote the screenplay with Gutnik.

According to the official logline: “‘Materna’ follows the journeys of four New York women who are isolated by city life, separated by class, politics, race and religion, and yet bound by a shared hunger for identity and connection. With their futures at stake, the characters’ lives are upended by a fateful encounter underground, where their stories of personal transformation become a battle for survival.

Company boards sales on Moments Like This Never Last, Shit & Champagne, Dilemma Of Desire

Robert Schwartzman’s US sales and distribution company Utopia has announced a raft of deals at EFM including 2020 SXSW, Toronto, and Outfest selection Shiva Baby.

Emma Seligman’s comedy has gone to HBO for the US, Pacific Northwest Pictures for Canada, Filmin for Spain, and Watcha for South Korea. As previously announced, Mubi has acquired the film for the UK, Germany, Latin America, India, and Turkey.

Rachel Sennott, Fred Melamed, Polly Draper, and Dianna Agron lead an ensemble cast in the story of secrets that erupt at a Jewish funeral.

Wyatt Oleff, who starred in Netflix comedy “I Am Not Ok With This” and appeared in the “It” franchise, “Ugly Betty’s” Michael Urie and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, who will star in the Jordan Peele co-written and produced “Candyman” and HBO Max’s “Generation,” will topline drama-comedy “Our Last Summer,” executive produced by Alan Ball.

The Exchange is handling worldwide sales rights, and is introducing the film to buyers at the virtual European Film Market, which runs until Friday.

“Our Last Summer” will be directed by Katie Ennis and Gary Jaffe from an original screenplay by Jaffe. Katie Ennis and Emily McCann Lesser, whose credits include Sundance 2020’s “Farewell Amor” and Tribeca 2020’s “Materna,” are producing.

Ennis and Jaffe directed the short “Sunset,” which premiered at Palm Springs ShortsFest and played in more than 35 film festivals, and the short “Last Summer With Uncle Ira” — a proof of concept for “Our Last...

Watching David Gutnik’s debut feature film Materna, I got a clear sense that he was trying to tap into both cultural and political diversity. As diversity has become the buzzword du jour, directors have been eager to keep up with the times. This has been a great incentive for white directors to put more consideration into casting roles and sometimes even deciding what stories to tell and how to tell them.

With that in mind, there also must be a consideration for how cast diversity changes the story and its tone in ways that not even a director can control....

Watching David Gutnik’s debut feature film Materna, I got a clear sense that he was trying to tap into both cultural and political diversity. As diversity has become the buzzword du jour, directors have been eager to keep up with the times. This has been a great incentive for white directors to put more consideration into casting roles and sometimes even deciding what stories to tell and how to tell them.

With that in mind, there also must be a consideration for how cast diversity changes the story and its tone in ways that not even a director can control....

On the night my first feature film, “Materna,” was set to world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on opening night of the program, I found myself instead watching Abbas Kiarostami’s film, “The Wind Will Carry Us,” at home.

“The Wind Will Carry Us” follows Behzad, a filmmaker traveling to a remote Kurdish village to document the death of a 100-year-old woman. The trouble is, she won’t die. Instead, Behzad spends much of the movie searching for cellphone reception, in a panic about the fate of his project. The experience forces him to slow down and learn to adjust to his new normal — the slower rhythms and traditions of the village. The relevance to the moment was obvious enough. But what the lesson was for me was not immediately clear.

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I was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., in a Russian immigrant family. My childhood home was...

Chicago – “The show must go on … “ That became the rallying cry of the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, which was physically postponed because of the Covid pandemic (it was originally scheduled from April 15-26). Despite that unexpected turn, the Festival went online, named juries and awarded honors to films on April 29th.

The top prizes went to “The Half of It,” directed by Alice Wu (Best U.S. Narrative), “The Hater,” directed by Jan Komasa (Best International Narrative) and “Socks on Fire,” directed by Bo McGuire (Best Documentary).

Best U.S. Narrative Feature is ‘The Half of It,’ directed by Alice Wu

Photo credit: Tribeca Film Festival

Awards were distributed in the following feature film competition categories – U.S. Narrative, International Narrative, Documentary, New Narrative Director, and the Nora Ephron Prize, honoring a woman writer or director. Awards were also given in the short film categories – Narrative, Documentary, Student Visionary and Animation.

This evening, Tribeca Film Festival revealed the Jury-selected winning titles from the 19th annual confab, which was forced to postpone its originally scheduled April gathering in response to the global health crisis. Top honors went to Alice Wu’s Netflix coming-of-age dramedy The Half of It, which picked up The Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature, while The Hater was named Best International Narrative Feature, and Socks On Fire nabbed Best Documentary Feature.

In addition, Best U.S narrative feature screenplay went to Anna Kerrigan for Cowboys, a film that also earned a best actor nod for its star Steve Zahn. Assol Abdullina was awarded best actress for her performance in Materna. Also announced were the winners in the shorts program.

Soon after announcing the delay of its 2020 edition, Tribeca Enterprises and Tribeca Film Festival Co-Founder and CEO Jane Rosenthal told Deadline that the org was looking into...

“The Half of It,” a coming-of-age drama written and directed by Alice Wu, and actors Steve Zahn and Assol Abdullina were among the winners of the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival’s slate of juried awards.

“The Half of It,” which will be released on Netflix on May 1, follows a shy, straight-a student named Ellie Chu who makes some extra money by writing papers for her high school peers. She reluctantly agrees to write a love letter for a lovesick jock to his crush, a girl Ellie also secretly loves. All three students go on a journey of complicated friendship and self-discovery in the drama-comedy film.

The Polish film “The Hater” by Jan Komasa won for best international narrative feature and “Socks on Fire” directed by Bo McGuire won for best documentary feature.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic halting most in-person award shows, this year’s Tribeca winners were announced on Instagram.

Though it postponed its annual in-person gathering, the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday handed out awards for the 2020 juried competition. Top narrative and nonfiction honors went to two queer films, Alice Wu’s coming-of-age tale “The Half of It” and Bo McGuire’s hybrid documentary “Socks on Fire,” while Jan Komasa’s “The Hater” won Best International Narrative Feature. Other winners include “Cowboys,” “Materna,” “Kokoloko,” and “Asia.”

In mid-March, festival organizers postponed the festival just weeks before it was set to bow in New York City. In the interim, some programming for the 19th annual festival was made available online, while its brass still hopes to hold a traditional festival in the coming months.

“We are fortunate that technology allowed for our jury to come together this year to honor our filmmakers,” said Tribeca co-founder and CEO Jane Rosenthal in an official statement. “Despite not being able to be together physically,...