The 40-year-old half-Spanish actress will lead cast in a gender-swapped adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamletfrom filmmaker Ali Abbasi.
The film will reunite Abbasi with Meta Film after they produced the director’s Oscar-nominated Cannes Film Festival 2018 hit Border.
Iceland’s Sjón is writing the project, with Stine Meldgaard Madsen producing for Meta Film. The film will be produced in collaboration with Boom Films, with principal photography scheduled for autumn 2021.
Swedish-Danish-Iranian filmmaker Abbasi said: “Shakespeare stole the Hamlet story from us. Now it’s our turn to claim it back and make a version so insane and so bloody that make him turn in his grave. Let’s make Hamlet great again!”
Prometheusand The Girl With The Dragon Tattoostar Rapace added: “Hamlet is a dream project in its purest and most explosive way. I’ve been hoping, dreaming, wishing for this as long as I’ve been an actress. I base this as much on the material as on the creative alliance that surrounds it. Ali, Sjón and Meta are for me creatives on the highest level. They’re truly brave and groundbreaking in their different areas and always on top of their game. To take on a Danish story with a Scandinavian touch and bring it out into the world with this group of people is a dream.”
Abbasi trained at the Danish Film School and made his feature debut in 2018 with Shelley, which was selected for the Panorama competition at the Berlin Film Festival. His second film, Border, won in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in the same year.
Verve has signed the Colombian filmmaker, and will rep her in all areas as she moves to widen her reach and continue her passion for telling untold stories from a female perspective.
Gallego co-directed Birds of Passage, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, was selected as the Colombian entry and made the shortlist for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards. The film is not a traditional Colombian drug-running story; it follows the journey of a Wayuu Indian family as they forego their traditions and fall into the drug trade.
Gallego was at the forefront of the creative process and wanted to subvert the genre that has typically been very macho by focusing on stories from the female members of the family and community. She directed the film with Ciro Guerra, her ex-husband; she produced the acclaimed 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent, which Guerra directed and which landed them their first foreign-language Oscar nomination. It was the first Colombian film to be nominated in the category. That led to Birds of Passage, a 10-year journey.
Most recently Gallego was in production on Cortes, a massive event miniseries for Amazon that she was executive producing and attached to direct multiple episodes of. Written by Steve Zaillian and starring Javier Bardem, this project was unfortunately a COVID-19 casualty and was shut down by the streamer back in September.
Gallego’s other producing credits include Wajib, the Palestinian official submission to the 90th Academy Awards and Ruben Blades is Not My Name, Panama’s submission to the 91st Academy Awards.
Luis López Carrasco is celebrating his big Discovery…
The 39-year-old Spanish filmmaker took home the Best International Film prize for his documentary The Year of the Discovery (El año del descubrimiento) on Sunday at Argentina’s Mar del PlataInternational Film Festival, the only Latin American film fest granted a Category A status by producers association FIAPF, placing it in the same league as the Cannes Film Festival, VeniceFilm Festival, San Sebastian Film Festival and Locarno Film Festival, among others.
Due to the restraints imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival hosted an online edition and offered free access to all Argentine residents.
Carrasco’s sophomore feature follows his debut film El Futuro, which premiered at Locarno and collected numerous awards on the festival circuit.
The Year of the Discovery portrays the flipside of 1992 Spain, which celebrated hosting the 1992 Barcelona Games and the World Expo in Seville while in Murcia, south-east Spain, enraged workers from the naval, mining and chemical sectors where companies were shut down, battled alongside students against the police, culminating with the launch of Molotov cocktails that set fire to the regional government’s Parliament.
In a video call from Spain, a grateful López Carrasco dedicated the award to his parents and brother “for being the people who most taught me how to listen.”
Colombian Camilo Restrepo’s Los Conductos won the best film prize in the festival’s Latin American competition. Winner of last year’s Mar del Plata Work in Progress competition, Los Conductos marks an attempt to explore Colombia’s civil conflicts with a style outside the canons of social realism as it follows a man in his attempts to flee from a sect and the trauma that still haunts him.
Maria Alvarez’s The Lost Time (El Tiempo Perdido) trounced a strong lineup in the Argentine competition, which included notable titles like Esquirlas, The History of the Occult and Las Ranas, to nab the best Argentine film prize.
In The Lost Time, a group of now aged friends find new and personal meaning in Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time at each of the 18 years they have gathered at a Buenos Aires bar to discuss it.
“In this online edition, more than 200,000 people saw the films we have programmed, and on YouTube, more than 180,000 people followed our events, so I congratulate the public who have known how to adapt to our circumstances,” said festival president Fernando Juan Lima at the online closing ceremony. “We miss the City of Mar del Plata and its movie theaters, but we are going to return,” he declared.
“We celebrate [the festival’s] continuity even with the challenges that the pandemic has imposed on us,” concurred festival artistic director Cecilia Barrionuevo. The festival paid homage to filmmaker-politician Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas, Argentine actress-writer-director Maria Luisa Bemberg and, naturally, Argentina’s greatest hero, soccer star Diego Maradona, who died Nov. 25 from heart failure.
Augusto Costa, minister of production, science, and technological innovation, also announced that Mar del Plata would be the site of the fifth regional headquarters of Argentine film school, Enerc.
“From the government and from the ministry, we reaffirm our absolute commitment to the festival and to the audiovisual industry of the province,” said Costa.
2020 MAR DEL PLATA ASTOR PIAZZOLLA PRIZES
OFFICIAL INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
BEST FILM “The Year of the Discovery,” (Luis López Carrasco, Spain, Switzerland)
BEST DIRECTOR Matías Piñeiro, (“Isabella,” Argentina)
BEST PERFORMANCE María Villar, (“Isabella,” Argentina)
BEST SCREENPLAY
Nicolás Prividera, (“A Farewell to Memory,” Argentina)
SPECIAL JURY “Moving On,” (Yoon Dan-bi, Korea)
LATIN AMERICAN COMPETITION
BEST FILM “Los Conductos,” (Camilo Restrepo, Colombia, Brazil, France)
SPECIAL MENTION “Mascarados,” (Marcela Borela and Henrique Borela, Brazil)
SPECIAL MENTION “Fauna,” (Nicolás Pereda, Mexico)
BEST SHORT “Correspondence,” (Dominga Sotomayor and Carla Simón, Chile)
ARGENTINE COMPETITION
BEST FILM “The Lost Time,” (María Álvarez, Argentina)
SPECIAL MENTION “Las Ranas,” (Edgardo Castro, Argentina)
BEST SHORT “Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse,” (Pablo Martín Weber)
BEST DIRECTOR “Esquirlas,” (Natalia Garayalde, Argentina)
ALTERNATE STATES
BEST FILM
“My Dear Spies,” (Vladimir Léon, France)
SPECIAL MENTION “Heliconia,” (Paula Rodríguez Polanco, France, Colombia)
WORK IN PROGRESS
BEST PROJECT “Morichales,” (Chris Gude, Colombia, U.S.)
BEST LATIN AMERICAN DEBUT FILM, YOUNG CRITICS PRIZE “History of the Occult,” (Cristian Ponce, Argentina)
Penélope Cruz is ready to demonstrate her intelligence…
Universal Pictures has released the official trailer for the espionage thriller The 355, starring the 46-year-old Spanish Oscar-winning actress..
In addition to Cruz, the female-fronted globetrotting actioner stars Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Fan Bingbing, Sebastian Stan and Edgar Ramírez.
Universal still has plans to release the film on January 15 in the United States.
Simon Kinberg directs the story that kicks off when a top-secret weapon falls into mercenary hands. Wild card CIA agent Mason “Mace” Brown (Chastain) will need to join forces with rival badass German agent Marie (Kruger), former MI6 ally and cutting-edge computer specialist Khadijah (Nyong’o) and skilled Colombian psychologist Graciela (Cruz) on a lethal, breakneck mission to retrieve it, while also staying one-step ahead of a mysterious woman, Lin Mi Sheng (Fan) who is tracking their every move.
The action-packed trailer sees Chastain recruit her team of international special agents, who must bond against a common enemy. If they don’t stop them, “they’ll start World War III,” says Chastain’s Mace.
The picture came together during the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, where it was the hottest project in the market. The hope is to launch a franchise based on an idea by Chastain of a Bourne Identity-like thriller revolving around female spies from agencies around the world.
Shooting took place last summer in locations like Paris, London and Morocco — each of which figures lushly in the trailer above.
Gael Garcia Bernal’s latest project is getting the Hola México treatment…
The 12th annual Hola México Film Festival, the largest Mexican film festival outside of Mexico, will take place virtually and exclusively on Lionsgate and Hemisphere’s Spanish-language streaming platform Pantaya from September 11-20, with the 41-year-old Mexican actor/producer’s Chicuarotes kicking things off.
The festival will feature 20 movies, starting off with Chicuarotes, directed and produced by Garcia Bernal.
The film, which played at the CannesFilm Festival and Toronto Film Festival last year, centers on a pair of young boys from poor backgrounds who perform clown acts on public transportation to make ends meet. The story takes a turn when the young boys begin to rob passengers.
The program will include contemporary features, documentaries, genre fare and family movies, and will include Q&A’s, ‘virtual red carpets’, an awards ceremony and will try to mirror the physical festival in an online way as much as possible.
Other films forming part of this year’s lineup include Matias Meyer’s Amores Modernos, Kenya Marquez’s Asfixia, Marcelino Islas Hernández’s Clases de Historia, Emilio Santoyo’s El Deseo de Ana and Rodrigo Cervantes’ Los Paisajes.
“As a result of the current pandemic, we wanted to ensure our industry and filmmaking community continues to connect and develop their careers, even if that cannot happen safely in-person,” commented Samuel Douek, founder and director of the Hola México Film Festival.
The festival’s mentor program Tomorrow’s Filmmakers Today will be a live online program directed to TFT alumni.
It’s a special First for Joao Paulo Miranda Maria…
The 2020 Cannes Film Festival, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will continue in spirit, with the 38-year-old Brazilian filmmaker earning a call out.
Cannes Film Festival organizers announced on Wednesday a list of 56 films that would have shown at this year’s festival if it had continued as planned. All titles will be permitted to bear Cannes’ highly regarded label on promotional materials as they continue to other festivals in the future.
Revealed by Pierre Lescure, president of Cannes, and Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s general delegate, the 2020 lineup — which does not include a competition section — includes Miranda Maria’s Casa de Antiguidades(Memory House) in The First Features category.
“It was also because of the filmmaker’s hard work that we didn’t want to give up,” Frémaux wrote on the Cannes website of the festival’s decision to continue its 2020 iteration in some form. “We couldn’t send everyone to 2021. So, we continued our selection. And it was the right decision.”
The 2020 slate was chosen from 2,067 total submissions. From there, the festival narrowed the main selection down to 56 movies — 15 of which are feature debuts, and 16 of which were directed by women (two more than were present in 2019’s lineup).
Typically held at the end of spring, Cannes is the most esteemed film festival in the world, and has launched highly anticipated titles from world-renowned filmmakers into its annual Palme d’Or competition.
Here’s the full 2020 Cannes Film Festival lineup:
PASSION SIMPLE by Danielle Arbid (Lebanon) – 1h36 Production : LES FILMS PELLÉAS – International Sales : PYRAMIDE INTERNATIONAL – French Distribution : PYRAMIDE DISTRIBUTION
A GOOD MAN by Marie Castille Mention-Schaar (France) – 1h47 Production : WILLOW FILMS – International Sales : PYRAMIDE INTERNATIONAL – French Distribution : PYRAMIDE DISTRIBUTION
LES CHOSES QU’ON DIT, LES CHOSES QU’ON FAIT by Emmanuel Mouret (France) – 2h Production : MOBY DICK FILMS – International Sales : ELLE DRIVER – French Distribution : PYRAMIDE DISTRIBUTION
SOUAD by Ayten Amin (Egypt) – 1h30 Production : VIVID REELS
LIMBO by Ben Sharrock (United Kingdom) – 1h53 Production : CARAVAN CINEMA LTD – International Sales : PROTAGONIST PICTURES
ROUGE (Red Soil) by Farid Bentoumi (France) – 1h26 Production : LES FILMS VELVET – International Sales : WTFILMS – French Distribution : AD VITAM
SWEAT by Magnus Von Horn (Sweden) – 1h40 Production : LAVA FILMS – International Sales : NEW EUROPE FILM INTERNATIONAL SALES
TEDDY by Ludovic et Zoran Boukherma (France) – 1h28 Production : BAXTER FILMS – International Sales : WTFILMS – French Distribution : THE JOKERS FILMS
FEBRUARY (Février) by Kamen Kalev (Bulgaria) – 2h05 Production : KORO FILMS – French Distribution : UFO DISTRIBUTION
AMMONITE by Francis Lee (United Kingdom) – 2h Production : SEE-SAW FILMS – International Sales : CROSS CITY FILMS – French Distribution : PYRAMIDE DISTRIBUTION
UN MÉDECIN DE NUIT by Elie Wajeman (France) – 1h40 Production : PARTIZAN FILMS – International Sales : BE FOR FILMS – French Distribution : DIAPHANA DISTRIBUTION
ENFANT TERRIBLE by Oskar Roehler (Germany) – 2h14 Production : BAVARIA FILMPRODUKTION – International Sales : BAVARIA FILMPRODUKTION
NADIA, BUTTERFLY by Pascal Plante (Canada) – 1h46 Production : NEMESIS FILMS – International Sales : WAZABI FILMS
HERE WE ARE by Nir Bergman (Israel) – 1h34 Production : SPIRO FILMS – International Sales : MK2 FILMS
AN OMNIBUS FILM
SEPTET: THE STORY OF HONG KONG by Ann Hui, Johnnie TO, Tsui Hark, Sammo Hung, Yuen Woo-Ping et Patrick Tam (Hong Kong) – 1h53
Production : MILKYWAY IMAGE – International Sales : MEDIA ASIA DISTRIBUTION
THE FIRST FEATURES
FALLING by Viggo Mortensen (USA) – 1h52 Production : PERCIVAL PICTURES – International Sales : HANWAY FILMS – French Distribution : METROPOLITAN FILMEXPORT
PLEASURE by Ninja Thyberg (Sweden) – 1h45 Production : PLATTFORM PRODUKTION – International Sales : VERSATILE
SLALOM by Charlène Favier (France) – 1h32 Production : MILLE ET UNE PRODUCTIONS – International Sales : THE PARTY FILM INTERNATIONAL SALES – French Distribution : JOUR2FÊTE
CASA DE ANTIGUIDADES (Memory House) by Joao Paulo Miranda Maria (Brazil) – 1h27 Production : MANEKI FILMS
BROKEN KEYS (Fausse note) by Jimmy Keyrouz (Lebanon) – 1h30 Production : EZEKIEL
IBRAHIM by Samir Guesmi (France) – 1h20 Production : WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS – International Sales : WILD BUNCH INTERNATIONAL- French Distribution : WILD BUNCH INTERNATIONAL
BEGINNING (Au commencement) by Déa Kulumbegashvili (Georgia) – 2h10 Production : FIRST PICTURE / O.F.A – International Sales : WILD BUNCH INTERNATIONAL
GAGARINE by Fanny Liatard et Jérémy Trouilh (France) – 1h35 Production : HAUT ET COURT – International Sales : TOTEM FILMS – French Distribution : HAUT ET COURT
16 PRINTEMPS by Suzanne Lindon (France) – 1h13 Production : AVENUE B PRODUCTIONS – International Sales : LUXBOX – French Distribution : PANAME DISTRIBUTION
VAURIEN by Peter Dourountzis (France) – 1h35 Production : 10:15 PRODUCTIONS – International Sales : KINOLOGY – French Distribution : REZO FILMS
GARÇON CHIFFON by Nicolas Maury (France) – 1h48 Production : CG CINEMA – International Sales : LES FILMS DU LOSANGE – French Distribution : LES FILMS DU LOSANGE
SI LE VENT TOMBE (Should the Wind Fall) by Nora Martirosyan (Armenia) – 1h40 Production : SISTER PRODUCTIONS – International Sales : INDIE INTERNATIONAL SALES – French Distribution : ROUGE DISTRIBUTION
JOHN AND THE HOLE by Pascual Sisto (USA) – 1h38 Production : MUTRESSA MOVIES
STRIDING INTO THE WIND (Courir au gré du vent) by WEI Shujun (China) – 2h36 Production : ALIBABA PICTURES
THE DEATH OF CINEMA AND MY FATHER TOO (La Mort du cinéma et de mon père aussi) by Dani Rosenberg (Israel) – 1h40 Production : PARDES FILMS – International Sales : FILMS BOUTIQUE
3 DOCUMENTARY FILMS
EN ROUTE POUR LE MILLIARD (The Billion Road) by Dieudo Hamadi – (Democratic Republic of Congo) – 1h30 Production : LES FILMS DE L’OEIL SAUVAGE – International Sales : ANDANA FILMS
THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS by Michael Dweck et Gregory Kershaw (USA) – 1h24 Production : GO GIGI GO PRODUCTIONS LLC – International Sales : SONY PICTURES CLASSICS – French Distribution : SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
9 JOURS A RAQQA by Xavier de Lauzanne – (France) – 1h30 Production : ALOEST FILMS
5 COMEDY FILMS
ANTOINETTE DANS LES CÉVÈNNES by Caroline Vignal (France) – 1h35 Production : CHAPKA FILMS – International Sales : PLAYTIME – French Distribution : DIAPHANA DISTRIBUTION
LES DEUX ALFRED by Bruno Podalydès (France) – 1h30 Production : WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS – French Distribution : UGC DISTRIBUTION
UN TRIOMPHE (The big hit) by Emmanuel Courcol (France) – 1h40 Production : AGAT FILMS & CIE – International Sales : MK2 FILMS – French Distribution : MEMENTO FILMS DISTRIBUTION
L’ORIGINE DU MONDE by Laurent Lafitte (France) – 1st film Production : TRESOR FILMS – International Sales : STUDIO CANAL – French Distribution : STUDIO CANAL
LE DISCOURS by Laurent Tirard (France) – 1h27 Production : LES FILMS SUR MESURE – International Sales : CHARADES – French Distribution : LE PACTE
4 ANIMATED FILMS
AYA TO MAJO (Aya and the Witch) by Gorô Miyazaki (Japan) – 1h22 Production : NHK / NHK ENTERPRISES / STUDIO GHIBLI – International Sales : WILD BUNCH INTERNATIONAL – French Distribution : WILD BUNCH
FLEE by Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Denmark) – 1h30 Production : FINAL CUT FOR REAL – International Sales : CINEPHIL
JOSEP by Aurel (France) – 1h20 – 1st film Production : LES FILMS D’ICI – International Sales : DOC & FILM INTERNATIONAL – French Distribution : SOPHIE DULAC DISTRIBUTION
SOUL by Pete Docter (USA) – 1h30 Production : PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS – French Distribution : THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
The 55-year-old Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker, author, actor, and former special effects makeup artist will take part in Tribeca Enterprises and YouTube’s We Are One: A Global Film Festival.
The fest will stream exclusively on YouTubefor free and feature more than 100 films co-curated by 21 of the most renowned festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival.
The 10-day fest kicked off on Friday, May 29 and will not only provide entertainment but also offer relief to the COVID-19 pandemic via supporting organizations.
The truly global event will feature programming from different cultures all over the world, with films representing more than 35 countries and include 23 narrative and 8 documentary features, 57 narrative and 15 documentary short films, 15 archived talks along with 4 festival exclusives and 5 VR programming pieces.
The fest will include 13 world premieres, 31 online premieres and 5 international online premieres. Each selection was handpicked to give shine and highlight each participating festival.
“We are so excited to share the combined efforts of our festival partners and YouTube with the world this week,” said Tribeca Enterprises and Tribeca Film Festival Co-Founder and CEO Jane Rosenthal. “Together, we were able to curate a compelling slate of programming that succinctly reflects the subtle variations in style that make each festival so special. We Are One: A Global Film Festival will offer audiences an opportunity to not only celebrate the art of film, but the unique qualities that make each story we watch so memorable.”
The fest will include the world premiere of Ricky Powell: The Individualist, which spotlights the titular legendary street photographer featuring interviews with Natasha Lyonne and LL Cool J.
Eeb Allay Ooo! will make its online debut and introduce a whole new audience to New Delhi’s professional “monkey repellers”. The satirical film won Mumbai Film Festival’s Golden Gateway Award.
The iconic Joan Chen will present the world premiere of Iron Hammer, a documentary about legendary, trailblazing Chinese Olympic volleyball star Jenny Lang Ping.
There will also be a lineup of specially-curated talks from past festivals as well as new discussions. Talks will feature del Toro, Francis Ford Coppola with Steven Soderbergh, Song Kang-ho and Bong Joon-ho, Jane Campion and Claire Denis.
In addition to features, audiences will be able to access over 50 narrative and documentary shorts such as the world premiere of Japanese narrative short Yalta Conference Online (wt), which was created exclusively for the fest by director Koji Fukada. The fest will also include the global premiere of the Third Eye Blind documentary short Motorcycle Drive By, as well as shorts from Dreamworks Animation, Bilby, Marooned and Bird Karma.
360 VR selections will feature Emmy-nominated documentary Traveling While Black and Alteration, a sci-fi narrative starring Bill Skarsgard, as well as titles featuring John Legend, Oprah Winfrey and Lupita Nyong’o. On top of the film goodness, Questlove from the legendary Roots crew will perform a DJ set for your listening and dancing pleasure.
On the episodic side, We Are One will host the world premiere of Losing Alice, an Israeli female-fronted neo-noir psychological TV thriller as well as the two-part docuseries She Could Be Next which chronicles the experiences of women of color running for office, including Stacey Abrams and Rashida Tlaib.
In addition to Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Sundance, Toronto and Tribeca, participating festival also include Annecy International Animation Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Guadalajara International Film Festival,International Film Festival & Awards Macao (IFFAM), International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Jerusalem Film Festival, Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI), Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival,Marrakech International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, San Sebastian International Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival and Tokyo International Film Festival.
The fest will provide COVID-19 relief through donations to the World Health Organization( WHO), UNICEF, UNHCR, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, Leket Israel, GO Foundation and Give2Asia, among others. Audiences will be able to donate via a link on every film page.
United Talent Agency (UTA) has signed the 29-year-old Mexican actor in all areas.
Espitia most recently starred in Heidi Ewing’s drama I Carry You With Me, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Audience Awardand Grand Jury Awardin the Next!categories.
Espitia first came to prominence with his leading role in Amat Escalante’s Cannes Film Festival title Heli and also starred as the lead in Nuestras Madres, which opened at Cannes in Critics’ Weekwhere it picked up the Caméra d’Or.
Additionally, he has appeared in several features including Ayúdame A Pasar La Noche,and Open Cage.
On the television side, his credits include Amazon’s Diablo Guardián, Telemundo’s El Recluso as well as History Channel’s Texas Rising.
He also founded the theater company Conejo Con Prisa.
MGM International Television is developing Tacowood, a comedy series headlined and produced by the 44-year-old Spanish actress.
Based on an original idea by Spanish writer-producer-director Frank Ariza, Tacowoodis a modern-day comedy that follows Guada (Vega), a 40-year-old single mother who spends her days running her family’s taco truck business in the outskirts of Mexico City as she embarks on the journey of a lifetime with her mother and 10-year-old daughter to pursue her dream of becoming a Hollywood actress.
MGM International Television will produce and distribute the project.
“Good ideas married with good talent knows no borders today,” said Diego Piasek, SVP International Development at MGM International Television. “As a first-generation immigrant myself, I’m so proud that MGM is supporting the new voices of our generation.”
Launched last year, MGM International Television is ramping up in key markets like UK, Europe and Australia. One of the division’s main priorities is developing culturally rich programming with Latinx talent both in front of and behind the camera for English- and Spanish-speaking audiences around the world.
“Making a more inclusive cinema, focusing on minorities and fairly representing the society in which we live is a responsibility of everyone who works in this industry,” Vega said. “That is why I feel extremely excited to join MGMand put my voice at the service of this beautiful initiative that will generate great opportunities for the Latin community.”
Vega is known for her starring role opposite Adam Sandlerin the 2004 James L. Brooksfilm Spanglish. She won multiple awards for the Spanish movie Lucía y el sexo,including a breakthrough award at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
Vega also starred opposite Morgan Freemanin indie film 10 Items or Lessand opposite Sylvester Stallonein Rambo: Last Blood.On the television side, she played Renata in Netflix’s The OA.
Tubi has scored the exclusive streaming rights to the 51-year-old Mexican American filmmaker and visual effects supervisor’s sci-fi horror film Red 11, as well as his docuseries The Robert Rodriguez Film School.
Red 11 is based on Rodriguez’s experiences in a medical research facility to finance his first feature El Mariachi.
The film, which made its world premiere at SXSW and went on to play in the Directors Fortnightsection at the Cannes Film Festival, is set in the dark, twisted world of legal drug research. College kids turn lab rats to make quick money. The film’s protagonist Rob (who is assigned the color and number Red 11), is trying to buy his way out of a huge debt to the tune of $7K. But things get surreal when he’s not sure if the hospital is really trying to kill him, or if it’s side effects from the experimental drugs.
Red 11 will hit the free ad-supported streaming service in the U.S., Canada and Mexico this summer.
Robert Rodriguez Film School is the companion piece to Red 11that explains the director’s guerrilla filmmaking process, while speaking to filmmakers and entrepreneurs alike on overcoming the perceived limitations of time, budget and other variables.
“I’m thrilled to be partnering with Tubi to deliver Red 11and its accompanying Film School docuseries free of charge and easily accessible to all audiences,” said Rodriguez. “I made both Red 11and the Film School series to celebrate the 25th anniversary of El Mariachi, and this project shows truly actionable methods using my no crew, micro budget filmmaking style that will inspire others to make their own films and have their voices be heard. These are both dream projects of mine, an entertaining culmination of ideas and ruminations on the creative process that also highlight the heightened sense of spirituality that comes from dancing with creativity when there is an absence of the usual financial resources. In other words, ‘low budget fun.’”
“Red 11 and the story of how Robert made this movie is inspirational to up-and-coming filmmakers,” said Adam Lewinson, Chief Content Officer, Tubi. “We are thrilled to amplify Robert’s message to the next generation of filmmakers as a part of our commitment to helping independent films find a wide audience.”
Tubi counts more than 20K movies and TV series – more than double the size of Netflix. This month it was announced that Tubi will launch in Mexico with TV Azteca, one of the two largest producers of Spanish-language TV programming in the world.
Tubi is available on Hisensetelevisions, Android and iOS mobile devices, Amazon Echo Show, Google Nest Hub Max, Comcast Xfinity X1, Cox Contour, and on OTT devices like Amazon Fire TV, Vizio TVs, SonyTVs, SamsungTVs, Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, AndroidTV, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
