Roberto Sessa: Last News

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Oscar-nominated multi-hyphenate Uberto Pasolini – who produced “The Full Monty” and most recently directed “The Return,” starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus – has embarked on a TV series adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s classic satirical adventure “Gulliver’s Travels.” Prominent British writer William Ivory (“We Want Sex,” “The Great Escaper”) is writing the screenplay for the six-episode project on which Pasolini will serve as showrunner. The high-end show, now in early stages, is being produced by Italy’s Roberto Sessa (“The Sea Beyond”) and Germany’s Jan Wünschmann (“The Swarm,” “Concordia”).

EXCLUSIVE: Bleecker Street has set a Dec. 6 nationwide release of The Return, which reunites Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche for the first time since the 1996 multi-Oscar winner The English Patient. Overall it’s there collaboration together counting the 1992 movie Wuthering Heights in which they both starred. In addition to the release date change, first look photos of the epic were unveiled.

Frank Doelger’s The Swarm has sold to the UK and Spain, while a U.S. partner is in the final stages of talks.

EXCLUSIVE: Black Adam, The Old Guard and Aladdin star Marwan Kenzari is set to join Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in The Return, which is due to film this spring.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Bleecker Street continues its acquisition spree with the pick-up of historical epic “The Return,” which reunites Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche. The project, which will be based on Homer’s ancient classic “The Odyssey,” is directed by Academy Award nominee Uberto Pasolini and written by Edward Bond, John Collee and Pasolini. The project, announced last year, reunited “The English Patient” co-stars Fiennes and Binoche after 25 years. The pic will also star Venice Film Festival Best Young Actor Award winner Charlie Plummer, with production beginning in Greece this spring in the regions of Corfu and the Peloponnese, before continuing in Italy. Bleecker Street will release the film in theaters in 2024.

EXCLUSIVE: In October, Breaking Glass Pictures acquired Mario Martone’s Nostalgia, Italy’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar for North America, and today we have a first look at the official trailer (check it out above). 

Manori Ravindran International Editor“The English Patient” co-stars Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes will reunite in Uberto Pasolini’s “The Return,” a gritty retelling of Odysseus’ return home from war.The film is an original take on Homer’s “The Odyssey” with a script by John Collee (“Master & Commander”) and U.K. playwright Edward Bond, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.”“The Return” is produced by James Clayton and Pasolini for Red Wave Films, while Roberto Sessa’s Picomedia is providing funding.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItalian producer Roberto Sessa (“The Sea Outside”) has snapped up rights to bestselling spy thriller “Supernotes” about a CIA-trained Italian intelligence officer who winds up in a Cambodian prison after investigating a sensitive scheme to print counterfeit $100 bills in North Korea.Picomedia chief Roberto Sessa plans to turn the book – which had previously been optioned by Alexandra Milchan’s Los Angeles-based Emjag Productions — into a high-end TV series that he is pitching to prospective partners during France’s Series Mania festival.“Supernotes,” which has been published in more than 30 countries, including the U.S., U.K. and France, is the purportedly true story of an Italian secret agent known as Agent Kasper who while on a mission during the mid-90s to investigate perfectly counterfeited $100 bills that were flooding Southeast Asia stumbles into an explosive secret behind them involving the CIA.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentNaples-set young adult series “The Sea Beyond,” which depicts the world of a juvenile jail in the crime-ridden Italian city, is scoring a slew of international sales prompted by its phenomenal ratings on pubcaster RAI.Germany’s Beta Film, which is selling the show about kids behind bars produced by Rome-based Picomedia and RAI Fiction, has inked deals with WarnerMedia Latin America for HBO Max, Sweden’s free-to-air channel TV4, cabler HOT for Israel, and streamer Blu TV in Turkey.The deals mark a rare case of an Italian young adult series traveling abroad.Set in a youth detention center overlooking the bay of Naples, “The Sea Beyond” depicts a world populated by kids apparently without hope, “given that they mostly belong to [the Camorra] organized crime syndicate that Naples is known for,” said Picomedia chief Roberto Sessa, who added that the show also has “all the color and vitality of that city.” Instead, “It’s like the flip side of ‘Gomorrah’ in that it gives a sense of hope,” Sessa noted, because “there is light at the end of the tunnel for these kids.”Sessa also pointed out that they took some poetic license by making the youth penitentiary a place for both men and women who get to interact “with all the relationships and passions that stem from this.”The jail warden is a woman named Paola Vinci, played by Carolina Crescentini (“Bastards of Pizzofalcone”).Directed by Carmine Elia, Milena Cocozza, and Ivan Silvestrini, “The Sea Beyond” is now at its second season which debuted on RAI in mid-November 2021 both on the pubcaster’s linear RAI 2 channel and on its RAI Play streaming platform.It has become a minor phenomenon in Italy because it’s the first show that proved a