News

The project is being showcased in the Work in Progress section of Re>Connext.

The Party Film Sales has acquired world sales rights to Belgian actor Veerle Baetens’ feature directorial debut When It Melts, which has just completed the first part of shooting.

The project is being showcased in the Work in Progress section of Re>Connext, the virtual edition of the annual Connext event showcasing films and TV series made in Flanders and Brussels.

Baetens is best-known internationally for her award-winning performances in features including The Broken Circle Breakdown and Mother’s Instinct and has recently broken into high-end...

Three mercenaries on the run with a plane full of gold and a dark secret in their past are the starting point for Jean Luc Herbulot’s Senegalese genre-bender “Saloum,” which has its world premiere in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto Film Festival.

The film centers on the Bangui Hyenas, a mythic trio of mercenaries whose plane is shot down as they’re fleeing a coup in Guinea-Bissau. Transporting a bounty of stolen gold and a kidnapped drug lord, they’re forced to take refuge in a remote and mystical region of Senegal.

But as they lay low in the Saloum Delta waiting to repair and refuel their plane, a mysterious secret from the past emerges, unleashing dark ancestral forces that threaten to consume them all.

“Saloum” is the first production from Lacme Studios, a Dakar-based production company that Herbulot and co-founder Pamela Diop hope will reshape narratives...

Funding

“The Crown” stars Olivia Colman and Lesley Manville are among a host of British creative industries personalities calling for a levy on gadgets, the proceeds of which would to towards supporting the U.K. creative sector.

“As a coalition of creators and performers we support the Smart Fund, a new scheme that could help to bring cultural and economic renewal to the whole of the U.K. The fund could generate £250-£300 [$346-415] million a year for the creative sector, and boost a wider U.K. economic recovery, by placing a small levy on the sale of devices that enable people to store and download creative content, such as mobile phones, laptops and personal computers. This would provide a direct way for tech companies to invest in culture,” the artists wrote in a letter to U.K. newspaper The Times on Tuesday.

“In 2019 the creative industries contributed £111.7 billion to the...

With filming now underway on season 2 of the highly acclaimed Sky series ‘Gangs of London’ a line-up of fresh new faces to join the cast have been announced.

Joining the cast of series one, which include Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù, Michelle Fairley, Brian Vernel, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Lucian Msamati, Paapa Essiedu, Valene Kane, Orli Shuk, Narges Rashidi and Asif Raza are Waleed Zuaiter (Baghdad Central, The Spy), French rapper Jasmine Armando in her first TV role, Salem Kali, Aymen Hamdouchi and Fady El-Sayed (Baghdad Central, A Private War).

Season 2 is set one year after the tumultuous events of series one, since the collapse of the Wallace Dumani empire, order is lacking, and the energy and chaos of a gold rush threaten the city with gangland anarchy. The Investors are viewing the city as a place of ruin and decide enough is enough. Licensing a new gang to restore stability, drama instead ensues. These...

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is reclaiming its roots, as evident in the debut trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which showcases a defining return by the shadowy syndicate that tangled with Tony Stark way back in 2008’s original Iron Man. Yet, while Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) is on a collision course with the long-awaited “real” Mandarin (Tony Leung), he will clearly have his hands full fighting a masked villain named Death Dealer, whose hitherto obscurity in the pages of Marvel Comics seems to belie the character’s importance in the film.

Death Dealer, as depicted in the upcoming Shang-Chi movie, appears to be an integral member of the Ten Rings organization led by the Mandarin, who is also known here as Wenwu, which makes him a hybrid of comic character Fu Manchu, Shang-Chi’s father, mentor and eventual adversary. Yet, it’s clear that Death Dealer also...

Cash injection aims to increase production of Flemish content.

The Flemish government has greenlit a €20m ($24m) screen fund, which aims to boost production in the Belgian region impacted by the ongoing pandemic.

The Flemish Resilience recovery plan will see financial support spread across 2021 and 2022, and will be awarded to successful applicants by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (Vaf).

Half of the cash will go to the Vaf Film Fund, with €8.9m invested in film production, €1m in audience activities (comprising exhibition and promotion) and €100,000 put into talent development.

In addition, the Vaf Media Fund will allocate €8.9m to TV production and €100,000 for talent development,...

Twenty participants from 13 European countries selected for scheme organised by the Erich Pommer Institut.

A new career enhancement programme for female producers in the European drama series sector has revealed its first cohort of 20 participants.

The inaugural edition of the Series’ Women edition, organised by the Erich Pommer Institut (Epi), includes producers from 13 European countries and will foster access to industry markets, support the building of professional networks and offer access to top industry experts as mentors to take the producers’ careers to the next level.

Among those selected are Belgium’s Sarah Marks, a producer on Tim Mielants’ comedy-drama...

Geraldo Rivera said that he is considering running the open U.S. Senate in Ohio seat being vacated by Rob Portman.

He wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, “Pondering running for retiring @senrobportman seat in United States Senate. #GoBuckeyes.”

Of course, there is a big difference between saying you are considering running for office and actually filing the paperwork, doing the organizing and hiring staff.

Rivera told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that he plans to travel the state on a listening tour in the coming weeks to get feedback. Rivera, 77, is a longtime TV personality and talk host, and has appeared frequently on Fox News shows like The Five. He also hosts the radio show Geraldo in Cleveland.

Although Rivera said that he is a friend of Donald Trump, he was highly critical of Trump’s actions following the election.

“However, I think President Trump is not only redeemable, but he...

March brings breezes loud and shrill/stirs the dancing daffodil. Bit of poetry for you there. What Sara Coleridge fails to mention is that March also brings season seven of Brooklyn Nine-Nine to Netflix UK, more weekly episodes of Riverdale season five, a brand new sci-fi series from the creators of Misfits, a new film directed by Amy Poehler and a host of cool animated series.

The One (pictured above) is an eight-part British series created by Howard Overman about a near-future world in which a DNA test can track down your perfect partner. It’s adapted from John Marrs’ novel of the same name, and yes, has a strikingly similar premise to US anthology sci-fi Soulmates. Another fun new UK addition is The Irregulars, a period supernatural fantasy set in the Sherlock Holmes universe in which a bunch of ragtag kids not only have to save the world from darkness,...