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Italy’s True Colours has unveiled key sales across its slate, including deals for Toronto title U Are The Universe, Venice Horizons feature Familia and Locarno premiere Death Will Come.

Ukrainian director Pavlo Ostrikov’s sci-fi U Are The Universe, which played in Toronto’s Discovery section, has sold to France (The Jokers Films), German speaking territories (Pandastorm Pictures), Poland (Aurora Film), Brazil (Imovision) and Indonesia (Falcon Pictures).

Set after the explosion of Earth, the film follows a lonely Ukrainian astronaut who believes he is the only survivor – until he hears a French scientist on the radio, and decides to find her.

Italy’s True Colours has taken on international sales for German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s upcoming noir thriller Death Will Come (La Mort Viendra).

Currently in post-production, Death Will Come centres on a female assassin who is hired by a leading gangster to avenge the murder of one of his couriers – but soon finds herself the prey. The French-language film stars Franco-Belgian actress Sophie Verbeeck and veteran French actor Louis-Do de Lencquesaing.

Hochhausler’s previous film Till The End Of The Night premiered in competition at Berlin in 2023.

Death Will Come is a German-Luxembourg-Belgium co-production. The co-producers are leading German...

Laetitia Casta will soon appear on the big screen as the former wife of an abusive southern Italian man whom she is accused of murdering in the thriller “A Dark Story,” directed by Italy’s Leonardo D’Agostini.

In “Dark Story” the French star, whose recent credits include “The Crusade” directed by her husband Louis Garrel, plays Carla (first look image above), the ex-wife of Vito Semeraro, a banker who beat her when they were together and is the father of her three children. She is accused of murdering him a few years after they split up.

Italian sales company True Colours is launching sales in Cannes on this psychological noir that marks the sophomore feature by D’Agostini whose 2019 debut drama “The Champion” – a soccer dramedy about a young male soccer star and a shy academic who becomes his tutor – sold widely via the same outfit. Andrea Carpenzano stars in “Dark Story” alongside Casta.

Banijay has acquired control of Italy’s expanding Groenlandia Group, which is a producer on ITV’s “Romulus” skein and made recent Netflix Italian original film “The Incredible Story of Rose Island,” among other titles.

The Rome-based company, headed by directors and producers Matteo Rovere and Sydney Sibilia, has been steadily growing since its founding in 2014. Besides “Romulus” — both the film and the TV series which Rovere directed, and “Rose Island,” helmed by Sibilia, Groenlandia’s recent output also includes Leonardo D’Agostini’s widely exported soccer comedy drama “The Champion,” starring Stefano Accorsi, and Ludovico De Martino’s actioner “The Beast,” co-produced with Warner Bros. and now streaming globally on Netflix.

Groenlandia also comprises Ascent Films, founded and managed by Andrea Paris, who will keep operating in the shingle, in which it has had a majority stake since 2014. Ascent is an incubator shingle focused on identifying and establishing new talent.

Italy’s expanding production company Groenlandia — the shingle behind ITV’s “Romulus” skein and recent Netflix Italian original film “The Incredible Story of Rose Island” — is launching a groundbreaking new unit dedicated to women directors and writers.

Called Lynn, the new female-driven label is a first for Italy. They have partnered on a feature film with Amazon Studios and on another movie with Rai Cinema.

Projects in various stages in the Lynn pipeline comprise romantic comedy “Blackout Love” (pictured), toplining rising Italian star Anna Foglietta, who served as master of ceremonies at the 2020 Venice Film Festival.

In “Blackout Love,” which is being directed by first-timer Francesca Marino, Foglietta (“Perfect Strangers”) plays the coach of a female volleyball team whose love life is disrupted by the arrival of an old flame. Shooting started in December on the pic, which is being produced by Lynn with financing from Amazon Studios.

Lynn has...

Alessia Polli, head of project development at Groenlandia, will supervise the diversion alongside renowned novelist and essayist Eleonora Marangoni.

Matteo Rovere and Sydney Sibilia’s Italian production company Groenlandia has launched Lynn, a division dedicated to producing features, series and shorts directed by established and emerging female writers and directors.

Alessia Polli, head of project development at Groenlandia, will supervise the diversion alongside renowned novelist and essayist Eleonora Marangoni. Fabia Fleri, who has worked in production at Italian TV and film giant Taodue, will coordinate the line-up.

”We know we live in the best moment for women to have a spotlight and be creative,...

Piera Detassis, who heads the Italian Film Academy that runs the David Awards, is no longer anxious about how the no-frills ceremony for the country’s top prizes will play out.

Ever since the coronavirus outbreak, Detassis had been “tormented” about whether to go forward with the prizes, originally scheduled for April 3. But now that it’s been decided, in tandem with pubcaster Rai, to hold them on May 8, with no red carpet, no live audience, with live web platform hookups conducted by star host Carlo Conti in a studio, she’s just “curious to see how it goes,” she says.

“It will be an experiment…to see how much emotion we can transmit with this technology,” says Detassis. The 97-minute Davids ceremony is about half as long as the average Oscars one.

What this year’s Davids won’t be, she says, is a “celebration”. Detassis doesn’t like...

Cinema Italiano was thriving prior to the pandemic so Italy’s David di Donatello Awards, the country’s top film prizes, will serve as a collective rebirth rite just when coronavirus lockdown restrictions slowly begin to lift.

The ceremony marking the Davids’ 65th anniversary to be aired May 8 on pubcaster Rai in primetime obviously sans red carpet and with stars linked-in by remote, is timed shortly after May 4 when Italy entered “Phase Two” of its lockdown as local producers are busy drafting safety protocols and planning the road map for shoots to restart, hopefully in June.

Meanwhile the David academy’s 1,600 voters and, hopefully, millions of Rai viewers will be cheering a pack of nominees that is led by veteran auteur Marco Bellocchio’s elegant mob drama “The Traitor” – released by Sony stateside in January – and Matteo Garrone’s live-action “Pinocchio” alongside edgier titles by up-and-comers such as Matteo Rovere...

Italian sales company True Colours has scored multiple sales at the Efm on several titles including Christmas comedy “Once Upon a Time in Bethlehem,” which was Italy’s top-grossing domestic title in 2019.

“Bethlehem,” which scored roughly $17 million domestically, toplines comic duo Ficarra and Picone as a thief and a priest who time-travel to Palestine in the year of Jesus’ birth. It has sold to Hungarian distributor Rtl, to Russian company Pilotkino and to Palace Film for Australia and New Zealand.

Palace Film also picked up director Guido Chiesa’s comedy “Say It Loud,” about a severely stressed 40-year-old named Giulia, who gets a life coach and starts venting her anger incessantly. Pic will be released in Italy by Medusa in March.

True Colours also sold rom-com “A Bookshop in Paris,” directed by Sergio Castellitto — who also stars alongside Berenice Bejo — to Stars Media for former Yugoslavia territories and to Andrews Film for Taiwan.

French distributor Destiny Films has acquired rights for France to Italian soccer dramedy “The Champion” from Italy’s True Colours in the runup to the De Rome a Paris festival and confab, which kicks off Friday.

Produced by Matteo Rovere’s Groenlandia (“Romulus”), “The Champion” turns on the uneasy relationship between a young male soccer star and a shy academic, also male, who becomes his tutor. This rare representation of the soccer world’s money-crazed star system recently won several Silver Ribbon prizes from Italy’s film journalists’ union, including best producer and best feature debut for director Leonardo D’Agostini.

Destiny Film’s David Chhouy said he hopes “The Champion” will resonate in France, where the plan is for a summer 2020 release in local multiplexes. “We need French audiences to perceive it not as an Italian arthouse movie, but something more mainstream,” he noted.

That said, two Italian arthouse titles,...