Paolo Sorrentino: Last News

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentThe upcoming Los Angeles-Italia Film Fashion and Art Festival will be honoring Italian directors Paolo Sorrentino (“The Hand of God”) and Enrico Casarosa (“Luca”) as well as costume-designer Massimo Cantini Parrini (“Cyrano”) all of whom have scored nominations for the upcoming Academy Awards. The 17th edition of the pre-Oscars event will be held March 20-26 at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theatre and also online.This year’s opening ceremony will be hosted by veteran Italian-American actor Robert Davi, who is also this year’s president of the event. Sofia Milos (“CSI: Miami”) and Hollywood acting coach Bernard Hiller will co-host.Consul General of Italy Silvia Chiave and Italian Institute of Culture chief Emanuele Amendola will also be introducing honorees both at the Chinese Theatre and during a separate March 25 event being held at the Italian Institute of Culture.

Bob Verini Of the five 2021 Academy Award nominees for best international film, Italy’s entry, “The Hand of God,” most directly combines two of cinema’s most treasured themes: intensely personal autobiography that is able to speak to a wider audience, and the art of filmmaking itself.Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino uses the character of 16-year-old Fabietto Schisa — played by newcomer Filippo Scotti — to examine the real-life experiences that led to his own growth as a man as well as his eventual birth as a filmmaker.Watching audiences connect so deeply with a character that is drawn so closely from his own experiences has hit Sorrentino deeply. “Now that it’s more than one year that I shot the movie, I have to say that it’s strange, because now I am sharing my pain with a big audience,” he shares.

Read more: Man gives Belfast one star review after not realising it's in black and white Accepting the award, writer and director Kenneth Branagh said: "Thank you to British cinema audiences for watching in tonnage a UK and Irish cinema film at UK and Ireland cinemas. "All hail the streaming revolution, but all hail the big screen too. It's alive, and long may they live together.

The full list of winners for the 2022 BAFTAs has been announced!

Deadline has launched the streaming site for Contenders Film: The Nominees, this past weekend’s showcase of 24 Oscar-nominated films and their stars, creatives and craftspeople talking about their roads to the Academy Awards.

Paolo Sorrentino won the Foreign Language Oscar, as it was known then, in 2014 with his film The Great Beauty. He returns to the frame this year with The Hand of God, perhaps his most personal picture, which is nominated for Best International Feature. This lightly fictionalized tale of Sorrentino’s own youth in Naples, as he grappled with family tragedy, celebrated Diego Maradona’s arrival at his local football team, and took his first steps into his love of cinema, stars newcomer Filippo Scotti as Fabi Schisa, a teenager struggling to find his place in the world.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentFremantle has acquired a 70% stake in Italy’s Lux Vide, the prominent TV production company that has been steadily raising its standing in the international arena, most recently with the high-end TV series “Medici,” “Devils” and “Leonardo.”The long-gestating Lux Vide deal, which closed on Thursday, marks the latest acquisition by the expanding RTL-owned production and distribution giant. Fremantle, which has been on a buying spree, now owns or controls a panoply of independently operated production shingles across Europe, as well as in Israel, Australia and the U.S.Their stated goal is to invest and grow in the global scripted arena where, by their count, Fremantle delivered 81 scripted shows in 2021, including BBC One hit “The Responder,” HBO Max series “Lust,” from Sweden’s Miso Film, and Italian dystopian drama “Anna.” Previous Fremantle investments include acquiring the 12 former Nent Studios production labels in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark (now rebranded This is Nice Group); Australian-American television production company Eureka Productions; U.K.-based Naked Entertainment; French label Kwai; and Israel’s Abot Hameiri, among others.The Lux purchase also marks Fremantle’s third acquisition of a production company in Italy, where the company already owns Wildside and The Apartment, the outfit behind Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-nominated “The Hand of God.” Fremantle also recently inked a pact with Italy’s Cinecittà involving the long-term rental of six sound stages at the iconic Rome studios.Founded in 1992 by Ettore Bernabei, who was a long-time former chief of Italian pubcaster RAI, Lux Vide has since been headed by his progeny, Matilde and Luca Bernabei.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentGiancarlo Giannini, who was the late great Lina Wertmüller’s muse, helmer Gabriele Muccino (“The Pursuit of Happyness”), and Teresa Saponangelo, star of Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God,” are among top honorees of the seventh edition of Filming Italy — Los Angeles, the bridge between Italy and Hollywood set to run as a hybrid event Feb. 28-March 3.The celebration of Italy’s top film and TV titles is headed by longtime Italian industry promoter Tiziana Rocca, a former chief of the Taormina Film Festival.

Drive My Car,” a three-hour Japanese film; “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” only the second Oscar submission (and first nom) from Bhutan; Paolo Sorrentino’s “Hand of God,” the Italian helmer’s second visit to the Academy Awards; Denmark’s “Flee,” an animated tale of an Afghan refugee; and Norway’s “The Worst Person in the World.”Three of the films even broke out of the international film race, with “Drive My Car” drawing noms for best pic, adapted screenplay and director; “Flee” also earned nominations for animation and doc, while “The Worst Person in the World” nabbed a nom in original screenplay.Joachim Trier, who directed “Worst Person in the World” says of the noms: “The Academy wants a broader spectrum of people from across the world looking at films and voting. It’s a more international community.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentWhile Netflix has been praised for being the first and only global streamer so far to have signed a windowing deal with French film orgs, a comeback at the Cannes Film Festival — in or out of competition — just isn’t in the cards for 2022.A Netflix rep confirmed to Variety that the streamer isn’t planning to world premiere its films at the festival’s 75th edition, meaning movies such as Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde,” a Marilyn Monroe biopic starring Ana de Armas, will likely be skipping the French Riviera.Dominik recently told journalists at the Berlinale that he hoped his film would play on the Croisette, but it appears that discussions with Netflix have stalled due to Cannes’ rule, which dictates that every competing movie must have a theatrical release in France. Netflix, meanwhile, has certainly been open to having select festival movies open in European theaters.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentIn spite of a disastrous box office situation, the Italian film industry is staying buoyant thanks to increased exports, a friendly rapport with streaming giants and support from the government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi that is pumping money into a revamp of Rome’s Cinecittà Studios.“Production never stopped and ailing movie theaters have been able to get subsidies,” says Francesco Rutelli, the former Rome mayor who heads Italy’s motion picture association, Anica. The org recently broadened its member base to include executives from Amazon Prime Video, Disney and ViacomCBS, after Netflix had joined.This move — which is unique in Europe — indicates the level of friendly dialogue between film producers and streaming platforms in Italy, best encapsulated by Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God,” Italy’s international Oscar nominee.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentIn a new series, Variety catches up with the directors of the films shortlisted for the International Feature Oscar to discuss their road to the awards, what they’ve learned so far, and what’s taken them off guard.Paolo Sorrentino, who won an international Oscar for “The Great Beauty” in 2014, is back in contention with autobiographical film “The Hand of God,” which marks the director’s return to filmmaking in his native Naples 20 years after his debut, “One Man Up.”This Netflix Italian original film is the story of a goofy kid named Fabietto who starts harboring a passion for filmmaking in the tumultuous Naples of the late 1980s. As Sorrentino has put it, “it’s a tale of destiny and family, of sport and cinema, love and loss.” It’s a great honor and a great responsibility to represent my country once again. Being a candidate for the second time fills me with joy because it means that the first time wasn’t just a fluke.

The full list of nominees for the 2022 BAFTAs have finally been revealed!

While this year’s BAFTA nominations offer up a more balanced split between streamers and traditional distributors and studios than in recent years, Netflix still remains the dominant streamer in the 2021 race.

Editors note: When we think of Robert De Niro and Italy, it’s easiest to focus on the Sicilian town of Corleone, because of his Oscar-winning turn in The Godfather: Part II. But De Niro wanted to focus on Naples, which director Paolo Sorrentino brought to life in The Hand of God. De Niro was so moved, he wrote a guest column for Deadline on why the film touched him so dearly.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentAs we enter the final countdown to the Feb. 8 Oscar nominations announcement, Isabella Rossellini is clearly rooting for Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God,” which is Italy’s candidate for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and among the shortlisted titles.To help promote the pic with Academy voters, Rossellini engaged in an online chat with the director and young Italian actor Filippo Scotti, who plays Sorrentino’s alter-ego Fabietto in the pic. She also wore a gold horn amulet that belonged to her father, the late great Italian master Roberto Rossellini, for good luck.Here are edited excerpts of the conversation, to which Variety has been given exclusive access.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItaly’s True Colours has taken international sales on “Perfect Strangers” director Paolo Genovese’s new movie, a comedy drama titled “The First Day of My Life.”The Rome-based sales company will be launching pre-sales at the upcoming online EFM market on Genovese’s latest concept pic, which has echoes of Frank Capra’s classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.”Based on Genovese’s novel of the same title, which was a bestseller in Italy, “The First Day of My Life” revolves around four characters on the brink of taking their lives who make a pact with a stranger with supernatural powers, played by “The Great Beauty” star Toni Servillo. The mystery man gives them a chance to travel forward in time to see for a week how their friends and relatives would react to their deaths and what the world would be like without them.

When Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino reached his milestone 50th birthday, he decided the occasion was ripe with the potential to break away from many of the enduring ways he made distinctive, much lauded projects (including Academy Award winner The Great Beauty, Youth, Il Divo, The Consequences of Love and The Young Pope) and experiment with new cinematic and storytelling techniques. And for his next film, The Hand of God, he decided to plumb the depths of his own past as well.

EXCLUSIVE: Amid its continuing drive to ramp up local feature productions, Netflix has a host of ambitious titles coming out of Europe in the next year. Already, Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-shortlisted The Hand Of God launched on the service in late 2021, hitting the Top 10 in 11 countries, while ahead are films from such directors as Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Louis Leterrier, Romain Gavras, Edward Berger, Roar Uthaug and Oscar winner Sébastian Lelio, among others. Currently in production for later down the pike are J.A. Bayona’s Society Of The Snow and the Spanish feature spinoff of Netflix hit series Bird Box.

Talking Heads frontman David Byrne before he filmed This Must Be The Place.Starring Sean Penn and Frances McDormand, the 2011 drama film follows wealthy former rock star Cheyenne who, bored in his retirement, ventures out to find a Nazi war criminal who tormented his father.The film, named after the Talking Heads song, was soundtracked by Byrne. He also makes an appearance as himself during a gig sequence.Speaking to NME about meeting Byrne for the first time, Sorrentino said: “For me it was everything.

Paolo Sorrentino said the experience of turning 50 two years ago helped encourage him to depict the experiences of his youth onscreen. That led to the Netflix film The Hand of God.