The Brazilian actress-turned-director picked up the Global audience award at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival for her documentary Divine Divas.
Leal first directorial effort pays tribute to several of the transvestite artists of Rio de Janeiro’s Rival theater, an establishment originally run by her grandfather. It was one of the first clubs to openly feature men dressed as women.
Meanwhile, the Stephanie Beatriz-starrer The Light of the Moon earned writer-director Jessica M. Thompson the Narrative Feature Competition audience award.
Here’s a look at all of this year’s audience award winners:
Narrative Feature Competition: “The Light of the Moon ,” directed by Jessica M. Thompson Documentary Feature Competition: “Dealt ,” directed by Luke Korem\ Headliner: “Baby Driver,” directed by Edgar Wright Narrative Spotlight: “Mr. Roosevelt.” directed by Noel Wells Documentary Spotlight: “The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin,” directed by Jennifer M. Kroot Visions: “Becoming Bond,” directed by Josh Greenbaum Midnighters: “68 Kill,” directed by Trent Haaga Episodic: ”Dear White People,” directed by Justin Simien 24 Beats Per Second: “May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers,” directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio Global: “Divine Divas,” directed by Leandra Leal Festival Favorites: “The Big Sick ,” directed by Michael Showalter
Netflix has acquired global streaming rights to Madre, Aaron Burns’ psychological thriller starring the 30-year-old Chilean actress.
Madre, which made its premiere at SXSW, marks Burns’ sophomore turn as feature director.
Madre stars Ramírez as a four-months-pregnant mother of a severely autistic boy (Matías Bassi). After a chance encounter with a gifted Filipino caretaker (Aida Jabolin), the young mother begins to suspect that the new nanny is using the language barrier to turn the boy against her. And then things get sinister.
Burns, who appeared in Roth’s pics The Green Inferno and Keanu Reeves-starrer Knock, Knock, directs Madre from his own original screenplay.
His comedy Blacktino was released in 2011, and before that he worked on visual effects for Grindhouse and Machete, among other credits.
Netflix will begin streaming Madre exclusively by the end of 2017.
Ramirez’s previous credits include La Poseída and Los Archivos del Cardenal.
IFC Midnight will release Carnage Park, Mickey Keating’s sniper horror film starring the half-Spanish American actor.
The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, will hit New York on July 1, day-and-date with its Video on Demand bow. It will expand to Los Angeles later that month, but no firm date was set.
Set in 1978, Carnage Park follows two crooks (James Landry Hebert and Villar) who botch a bank job then hit the road with a hostage (Ashley Bell). After one of the hoods checks out, the surviving duo happens upon the isolated desert outpost of a psychotic ex-military sniper (Pat Healy), who turns their escape into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. Darby Stanchfield and Alan Ruck also star.
Keating wrote and directed Carnage Park, which IFC Midnight describes as a “gritty, grisly homage to the glory days of grindhouse cinema.”
The 35-year-old Spanish filmmaker is set to direct Svart Cirkel (Black Circle), a Swedish-language supernatural thriller starring Swedish icon Christina Lindberg, Quentin Tarantino’s inspiration for Kill Bill, through her role in 1973 Swedish cult classic thriller They Call Her One-Eye.
Black Circle centers on two sisters whose lives change dramatically after going through hypnosis using a mysterious vinyl album recorded in the 1970s.
“This is finally my opportunity to work with Christina Lindberg who has been one of my favorite actresses for many years,” said Bogliano. “She has an incredible presence and we’re getting an amazing cast and unique locations, that will make this movie something very different from anything you’ve seen from Swedish genre films.”
Garcia Bogliano, formerly Argentina-based, but now working out of Mexico, was a 2012 Austin Fantastic Fest five-prize winner with the Spanish-language film Here Comes the Devil.
A genre-auteur, Garcia Bogliano’s Black Circle is the latest genre, geographic and language permutation for the director whose English-language U.S. war vet/werewolf tale Late Phases bowed at 2014’s SXSW, while Scherzo Diabolico weighed in as a black comedy about a separating and out-of-work accountant’s kidnapping a teen girl, who proves his worst nightmare.
Black Circle’s cast also features award-winning Swedish actors such as Mathilda Paradeiser, Hanna and Erica Midfjäll, Madeleine Trollvik and singer Johan Palm.
The 18-year-old half Cuban American actress/singer and former Disney Channel star has signed with the Creative Artists Agency (CAA).
The move comes as Thorne, who has been branching out fast into feature films as both an actress and producer, just finished filming Midnight Sun opposite Patrick Schwarzenegger, Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween and The Babysitter with Robbie Amell and directed by McG.
Her recent credits include the SXSW pic Shovel Buddies, which she also produced, and Thorne now is in production on a second Awesomeness Films movie, You Get Me, in which she will also star and produce. She is voicing a role in Focus Features’ animated Ratchet and Clank and over the summer will begin production on Xavier Dolan’s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan.
She had been repped by WME.
Thorne has 11.3 million Instagram followers, 9.9 million Facebook fans and 6.3 million Twitter followers. She also has a novel, Autumn Falls, and another, Autumn’s Kiss, coming in the fall.
Everyone will want some of Ryan Guzman at this year’s SXSW…
This year’s South By Southwest Conference and Festival will open with the world premiere of Richard Linklater’s new comedyEverybody Wants Some, starring the 28-year-old half-Mexican American actor.
Written and directed by Linklater, the film (formerly titled That’s What I’m Talking About) follows a group of college baseball players in the 1980s as they adjust to the freedoms and responsibilities of unsupervised adult life for the first time
In addition to Guzman, who was a baseball pitcher in college, the film also stars Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Tyler Hoechlin, Blake Jenner, Glen Powell and Wyatt Russell.
Paramount Pictures is set to release the film on April 15.
The SXSW opening-night festivities are set for March 11, with the festival running March 11-20.
Guzman, best known for portraying Sean Asa in the fourth and fifth installments of the Step Up franchise, most recently appeared in Jem and the Holograms. His other credits include The Boy Next Door and appearances on Pretty Little Liars and Heroes Reborn.
The 47-year-old Mexican pop-rock singer-songwriter, known as “the Mexican Madonna,” will walk the red carpet at the premiere ofGloria, a new biopic that follows her rise to fame and the circumstances that led to a stint in a Brazilian maximum security prison on charges of kidnapping and sex abuse of young women.
The film, which makes its U.S. debut at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference (SXSW) in Austin this week, is set to have its theatrical release in June.
“We are glad that we have been able to close this chapter with Gloria Trevi,” said Gloria producers Matthias Ehrenberg and Ricardo Kleinbaum. “It has been our intention that she become part of this great movie since the beginning. We are absolutely sure that audiences will enjoy the movie, which has great performances and an incredible reconstruction of the singles that made her famous.”
Trevi had originally supported the Mexican production but then backed out of involvement with the film, which her representatives began referring to as an unauthorized biopic.
“I did not want to be part of it,” Trevi told Billboard in October for a feature story on the outspoken, multi-million-album-selling singer. “Especially when they were asking people like my ex-manager about my life.”
She said she objected to the filmmakers’ interest in the more salacious elements of her much-publicized past, particularly focusing on her relationship with her then-manager/boyfriend, Sergio Andrade, with whom she was accused of leading a sex cult for minors. Trevi was acquitted by a Mexican court after almost five years in jail for lack of evidence.
“The story of my life is not just about this scandal,” she said. “It’s also about a girl who had dreams.”
Trevi eventually patched things up with the film’s producers, Pelo Suelto Mexico. She has recouped the rights to her life story from the producers, who owned them, according to her manager, Guillermo Rosas.
“We are pleased to have resolved our differences with the producers of the film,” Rosas said in a statement. “Things got off to a rocky start, due to a conflict with a third party, which will remain in the hands of our legal team, but there are no more conflicts with the producers at Pelo Suelto.”
Gloria, written by award-winning Mexican journalist-playwright Sabina Berman, does not shy away from the scandal that made Trevi even more famous than her music.
“People make comments, and even if they apologize later, they’ve done harm,” she previously told Billboard. “It’s like confetti — you’ll never be able to pick up all the confetti.”
“With differences now settled with the producers and myself, I can give my support to this Mexican production,” Trevi said through her publicist. “Ultimately [it] has a positive message: One’s life can unravel, but you can start over and fill it with beautiful things and glory!!”
Robert Trujillo has new directions… South by Southwest….
The 50-year-old Mexican American musician and Metallica bassist’s latest film project is headed to this year’s South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival.
JACO, co-written by Trujillo, will receive its world premiere at the Austin-based annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival.
JACO, the official documentary of Record Store Day in 2014, is the story of the extraordinary bassist Jaco Pastorius, who influenced Trujillo’s own music career. Pastorius changed the course of modern music through his work with Weather Report, Pat Metheny, Joni Mitchell and as a bandleader. Sony Legacy will be releasing the soundtrack
“We can get into a lot of the different levels in terms of composition and what he did for the instrument, but just the edge and attitude of the performance made me very excited about playing the bass,” recalls Trujillo. “That was one of the starting points. There was mystery and excitement to the instrument and this guy was taking it there.”
Meanwhile, Joaquim Castro and Eduardo Nazarian‘s look at Brazilian legend Dominguinhos; Christian Keller‘s scripted look at Mexican pop star Gloria Trevi, Gloria; and We Like It Like That, Mathew Ramirez Warren’s documentary on Latin boogaloo of the 1960s will also make appearances at the festival.
The SXSW Film Conference and Festival will be taking place March 13-21 festival in
The 22nd annual film festival includes 60 films from first-time filmmakers, 100 world premieres, 13 North American premieres and 11 U.S. premieres.
A new trailer for the 37-year-old Spanish filmmaker’s latest project Open Windows has been released.
Starring Elijah Wood and Sasha Grey, the film is being called a high tech Hitchcock project. It’s an internet age suspense thriller presented through the lens of a computer desktop.
Wood stars as Nick, a superfan who’s won a dinner with his favorite actress, Jill Goddard (Grey). When she refuses the date a mysterious third party offers Nick a chance to watch Jill secretly through her webcam, sparking a terrifying cat and mouse game.
The real-time thriller premiered in March at SXSW and was partially filmed at Austin’s annual Fantastic Fest where Vigalondo and Wood are frequent guests.
Fantastic Fest’s 2014 edition kicks off September 18 and will host the U.S. premiere of anthology threequel V/H/S Viral, for which Vigalondo directed a segment.
Cinedigm will peel back the curtain on Open Windows first on video on demand on October 2, before it hits theaters on November 7.
Vigalondo’s previous credits include Timecrimes, ExtraterrestrialandThe ABCs of Death.
From writer-director Nicholas McCarthy (The Pact), the thriller stars Rivera, Academy Award-nominee Catalina Sandino Moreno, Awkward’s Ashley Rickards, Wyatt Russell and Ava Acres.
It centers on an ambitious real estate agent (Moreno) who is selling a house with a checkered past. When she tries to help the runaway daughter of the property’s owners, she and her sister (Rivera) cross paths with a sinister supernatural force.
IFC Midnight will release Home in theaters and via video on demand (VOD) this year.
Meanwhile, the Stephanie Beatriz-starrer The Light of the Moon earned writer-director Jessica M. Thompson the Narrative Feature Competition audience award.
