Author: Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: The DOXA Documentary Film Festival – Western Canada’s largest nonfiction film showcase – today announced the lineup for its 25th anniversary edition. The festival, running April 30-May 10 in Vancouver, will open with live cinematic performance piece Bella Sutra, directed and narrated by OK Pedersen and accompanied by musicians Eden Glasman and Jakob Tokarczyk. It’s described as “a personal essay about life as an innkeeper in Bella Coola, BC. With honesty and levity, the piece reflects on our current communication crisis, the rural/urban philosophical divide, and the myth of progress.” The festival’s Mid-Week Gala presentation will be the BC…

EXCLUSIVE: Plan B Europe, the recently launched London-based subsidiary of Brad Pitt’s L.A.-based Plan B Entertainment, is expanding its team with two key producer hires. Former Sony Pictures Television International exec Maria Fleischer joins as Executive Producer, while Charlie Silver arrives from House Productions to take up the role of Development Producer. The hires come seven months after the subsidiary was launched with Baby Reindeer producer Ed Macdonald at the helm. The pair will support the subsidiary’s founding mission to develop and produce projects in the UK and across Europe. Fleischer was previously at Sony Pictures Television International as VP,…

EXCLUSIVE: Damian Abraham, frontman of punk band F*cked Up, and former CBC producer Zach Feldberg have launched Cut & Paste Pictures out of Toronto, Canada. The company has been quietly operating since last year and now officially debuts with a development slate spanning, scripted, unscripted and a documentary that’s currently in production. The slate is being geared toward authored voices rooted in music, counterculture and “outsider perspectives,” according the co-founders, who named their company due to their DIY approach to creativity. Cut & Paste is currently in pre-production on a feature-length documentary about the unlikely lifelong friendship between Rise Against…

Rob Schneider wrote in a social post over the weekend that he believes the United States should reinstate a military draft system.  “We must once again recommit ourselves to one nation under God, indivisible,” Schneider said. “Therefore, we must restore the military draft for our nation’s young people. Each and every American, at 18 years of age, must serve two years of military service. They could also choose to serve part of that time overseas or in the country in a volunteer capacity.” Schneider continued to write that American citizenship comes with “unparalleled freedoms and opportunities,” which are the “envy of…

David Alan Grier has some regrets about certain casting choices. The St. Denis Medical star recently appeared on NBC’s Today with Jenna & Sheinelle, where he addressed why he passed on roles in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Seinfeld. “I passed on it because it was a bad script,” the Tony winner and Grammy-nominated musician said of the 1994 comedy film. “What I didn’t see is what Jim [Carrey] saw, which was, ‘Can I do anything?’ They said, ‘Yeah.’ So he had total freedom. He took that script and he reinvented it. And that’s why it was so successful.”  While…

Although Antonio Banderas has led a versatile onscreen career, he experienced ethnic stereotyping and typecasting early in his career. The Oscar nominee recently recalled being told he could only play “bad guys” due to Hispanic ethnicity, which is why he’s proud of breaking out of that box with his roles in the Zorro and Shrek franchises. “They said, you are here, like the blacks and the Hispanics, to play the bad guys,” Banderas recalled to The Times. “The problem was a few years later I had a mask, hat, sword and cape and the bad guy was Captain Love, who…

Andrew Garfield has revealed that he recently watched the Harry Potter movies for the first time, but said he did so knowing that it was “controversial.” The British-American actor, who is promoting The Magic Faraway Tree, said investing in the Potter universe would ultimately reward “she that shall remain nameless.” In an interview with Hits Radio show My Life In Movies, Garfield did not name J.K. Rowling or reference the transgender rights debate directly, but he did allude to interventions she had made on the issue. Here’s his full quote: “I hadn’t watched the Harry Potters until recently … and…

Bleecker Street’s event cinema division Crosswalk has teamed with LD Entertainment to acquire North American and English-speaking territories for the West End live theater-shot Tony Award-winning hit musical Hadestown. A July 24 theatrical release has been set and a UK date will be announced in the near future. The filmed-lived production reps the first of a series of Broadway live captures that Crosswalk and LD are planning to release. Recently, Crosswalk had some great specialty B.O. success with the concert pic Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience which made $7.2M stateside. Prior to that pic, Bleecker released the live stage version…

EXCLUSIVE: Coming-of-age romantic feature An Autumn Summer, starring Lukita Maxwell and Mark McKenna, has been acquired by Blue Harbor Entertainment. Maxwell is known for appearing in Apple TV series Shrinking and A24’s upcoming film Backrooms. McKenna’s credits include YouTube Premium original series Wayne and film musical Sing Street. The film tracks Kevin (played by McKenna) and Cody (Maxwell), a young couple spending their last month before going away to college in a lakeside town in Michigan. Jared Isaac wrote and directed An Autumn Summer, which had a well-received festival run. The film will premiere in Chicago on April 23 at…

EXCLUSIVE: Two of Canada’s biggest entertainment and media players are joining forces in support of Canadian feature projects. Postmedia Studios, a division of Postmedia Network Inc., and Elevation Pictures‘ production division have struck a strategic partnership to finance, develop and launch select Canadian feature projects. The collaboration kicks off with Fire Weather, a feature documentary commissioned by CBC and produced by Elevation Pictures and Mercury Films. The film, inspired by John Vaillant’s bestselling book and directed by Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, delves into the human, environmental and societal impacts of wildfires and the lives forever changed by these…