Leo Barraclough

Apple TV+’s “Franklin,” which stars Michael Douglas, has its world premiere at series festival Canneseries on April 10 in Cannes, France. The show is produced by ITV Studios America and Apple Studios. Variety spoke to Philippe Maigret, president and managing director, ITV Studios America, who is an executive producer on the period drama. “Franklin’s” journey […]

Sales agency Taskovski Films has picked up “The Landscape and the Fury,” directed by Nicole Vögele, which will have its world premiere in the international competition at Visions du Réel. The documentary, produced by Aline Schmid of Beauvoir Films, was shot on the Bosnian-Croatian border, which is also the outer border for the European Union. […]

French broadcaster M6 has greenlit a French-language adaptation of Turkish crime drama “Persona,” to be titled “Mémoire Vive.” Instead of a male protagonist, as in the Turkish version, it will have a female main character, Esther Lefevre, to be played by Clementine Celarie, whose credits include “Six Women,” “Betty Blue” and “Two Is a Family.” […]

Talpa Studios, the company founded by “The Voice” and “Big Brother” creator John de Mol, has closed further territory sales for quiz-show format “The Floor.” Variety can also reveal that the show has been named by research organization K7 Media as the “Format to Watch” in its “Tracking the Giants” format sales report, which was […]

“Long Live the Tyrant: Life and Times of Giancarlo DiTrapano,” a feature documentary about the independent book publisher, is being developed as an Italy-U.S. coproduction. DiTrapano is described by Ian Thornton, one of the film’s producers, as the “Basquiat of the New York literary scene.” The film is written by Guia Cortassa and directed by […]

European Film Promotion has unveiled the seventh edition of the Changing Face of Europe, a section that runs as part of Toronto documentary festival Hot Docs, which runs April 25 – May 5. The section features nine European documentaries, selected by the Hot Docs programming team, that “illustrate and examine a new and contemporary Europe […]

 Bavaria Fiction’s documentary unit, founded in March 2022, has been spun off as a separate brand called Icon Docs. The unit produces both films and series for cinema, TV and streamers. In addition to in-house and commissioned productions, national and international co-productions are set to be increasingly produced in the future. Icon Docs is headed […]

Science is one of the central themes of leading European doc film festival CPH:DOX. Alongside the broad selection of films on offer in the CPH:SCIENCE section, the event also opens the floor to conversations on the role of science docs with key players, ranging from filmmakers and producers to commissioners and public broadcasters. Entitled “Widening […]

Coming straight from Sundance with their respective buzzy docs “Power” – a Netflix Original – and “Union,” U.S. director/producer Yance Ford and his Canadian counterpart Brett Story delivered March 20 an empowering talk at Copenhagen’s “Film:makers in Dialogue” session, where they bounced ideas between each other about power structure in American society, capitalism, race and […]

The ongoing war in Gaza was high on the agenda at the awards ceremony of CPH:DOX, Copenhagen’s international documentary film festival, with numerous filmmakers calling for a ceasefire in Gaza as they picked up their awards. Opening the ceremony following a concert by the locally-based Middle East Peace Ensemble, artistic director Niklas Engstrøm told the […]