Javier Marco’s “Face to Face” (“A la cara”), the spin-off from a 2021 Goya winning short, was one of the big winners at this year’s RECLab in Tarragona, Spain which is celebrating its 10th anniversary by doing what it does best: Innovation, which questions many of the often set-in-stone conventions of festivals.  Also among winners […]

Wild Sheep Content, the high-flying L.A.-based production-distribution house of former Netflix international chief Erik Barmack, is teaming with International Emmy winner Hernán Caffiero on “Raza Brava,” a fiction series described as diving into the dark underworld of the barra brava – a ferocious fan gang – of Colo-Colo, Chile’s most popular football team.  Backed by […]

Marisa Paredes, a grand dame of Spanish cinema, died on Tuesday in Madrid from heart failure. She was 78. While she acted in 75 movies, she will be best remembered for the five films she starred in directed by Pedro Almodóvar: “Dark Habits” (1983), “High Heels” (1991), “The Flower of My Secret” (1995), “All About […]

Madrid-based Álvaro Brechner, “one of the leading South American screen talents to emerge in the last decade,” Variety wrote in a review of his Venice-selected “A Twelve-Year Night,” is attached to direct “Mägo de Oz, La Película” a big-scale bio of the Spanish folk metal band.   Behind Cannes Critics’ Week player “Bad Day to Go Fishing,” sales […]

TV powerhouse Beta Film has closed a weighty deal with Australian public broadcaster Special Broadcasting Service. (SBS)  Totalling nearly 200 hours of entertainment, the deal is led by RAI 2023 event series “Elsa Morante’s La Storia,” recently sold to the U.S. and Canada (MHz Choice), Canneswinner “Operation Sabre,” made for Radio Television of Serbia, Seriencamp […]

Algerian director Merzak Allouache received the Variety International Vanguard Director Award at the Red Sea Film Festival over the weekend, prior to the premiere of his social comedy, “Front Row,” about a feud between matriarchs vying for the best spot at the beach. Allouache is Algeria’s best-known director, with a career spanning six decades and […]

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — “As a meeting place, Ventana Sur was fantastic, the sales agent presence was good, focused on companies which really do buy, and the organization was impecable, run by highly dedicated and nice people,” said Antonio Saura, at Madrid-based sales agency Latido Films.  Most other attendees would buy into that.  Transferred for the […]

With a heady dose of ‘80s nostalgia and the gravity that only a script full of fierce intergenerational matriarchs can bring to the table, Mexico’s Mayra Hermosillo revealed a cut of her nuanced and buzzy coming-of-age title “Vainilla,” among the players selected for Ventana Sur’s Primer Corte. The film is produced by Stacy Perskie, Karla […]

One of the most active of sales agents at this week’s Ventana Sur, Madrid-based Latido Films has closed international rights on adventure-comedy “Small Town” (“Pueblo Chico”) a parable of greed and instance of the building scale and ambition of Latin American animation co-production whether regional or reaching out to Spain.  The subject of a Ventana […]