Author: SD

Leading Australian producers are calling on the government to honour a 2024 promise to remove a financing blockage facing a growing number of independent feature projects. The Producer Offset (PO) tax rebate allows up to 40 per cent of a feature’s production costs to be claimed back. However,above-the-line (ATL) costs, including fees to directors, producers, and principal actors, plus development expenditure, must be capped at 20 per cent of the total budget.   Minister Tony Burke, who has arts among his many portfolios, has promised to remove the cap, but the Treasury is yet to amend the relevant act of Parliament. Burke…

UK-Ireland top five, Oct 9-11 Rank Film (origin)Distributor  Oct 9-11 Total Week 1  Other Mommy (US)  Universal  £2m  £2m  1 2  Verity (US)  Sony  £1.9m  £7.3m  2 3   Heart Of The Beast (US)  Paramount  £815,000  £5.4m  3 4   Resident Evil (US)  Sony  £780,000  £12.7m  4 5   The Social Reckoning (US)  Sony  £621,000  £621,000  1 GBP to USD conversion rate: 1.32 Rob Savage’s horror Other Mommy topped the UK-Ireland box office with a £2m opening weekend, as Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning started its run in fifth place. Universal’s Other Mommy opened to £2m from 526…

Britain’s Daniel Pemberton has won film composer of the year at the 26th World Soundtrack Awards (WSA), which took place tonight (October 10), during the opening weekend of Film Fest Gent in Belgium. Scroll down for full list of winners Pemberton, who also won the award in 2021, was honoured for his scores for Project Hail Mary, The Drama, The Bad Guys 2 and Masters Of The Universe. Northern Irish composer Hannah Peel picked up the discovery of the year award for her score for Polly Findlay’s Midwinter Break, starring Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds. After being nominated twice previously,…

Pegah Ahangarani’s Rehearsals For A Revolution has been selected as the UK’s entry for the best international feature category at the 2027 Oscars. The film was chosen by the UK selection committee, which is composed of members or representatives of Bafta’s film committee. Rehearsals For A Revolution had its world premiere in the Special Screenings section at Cannes Film Festival this year, where it won the L’Oeil d’or award for best documentary across the festival’s sections. In the film, Ahangarani traces her life and over 40 years of Iranian history through five portraits of relatives and mentors. London-based Ahangarani wrote,…

In the third major acquisition from Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Black Bear has taken North American rights from FilmNation to the queer romantic comedy Honeymoon / Funeral starring Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, and Carrie Coon. Nahnatchka Khan directs from a screenplay by Julia Bicknell about two women (Ferguson and Lee) who meet on a flight from LA to London – one en route alone to her honeymoon after being jilted at the altar by her girlfriend, the other headed home for her mother’s funeral – and wind up spending the week together. Khan and Jennifer Carreras are producing for…

Gay stories on film and television should encompass an entire spectrum of experiences, according to Elsinore star and producer Andrew Scott, speaking in his Screen Talk at the BFI London Film Festival today.  “I welcome things like Heartstopper, Heated Rivalry and Red, White & Royal Blue, and all those things that are joyful,” said Scott, in response to a question about his response to some criticism of Andrew Haigh’s 2023 film All Of Us Strangers, in which he starred, for indulging in the pain of gay people. “The fact that there’s lots of different types of gay drama is extraordinary. “[The pigeon-holing] troubles me a bit.…

Ray Panthaki’s In Starland, Jose Maria Cabral’s Sh*t Happens and Alison Kuhn’s The Matriarch are among 21 world premieres selected across the Official Competition and First Feature Competition sections at Estonia’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (POFF, November 6-22). All 12 titles in the Official Competition are world premieres, including Sh*t Happens, a dark comedy from Dominican filmmaker Cabral. It follows a wealthy Dominican household where the biotechnologist father develops a treatment for his sickly daughter, only for the miracle remedy to get out of control. Cabral’s feature Woodpeckers premiered at Sundance in 2017. Scroll down for the list of…

After nearly a year in pursuit, regulatory hurdles and a stand-off with 12 US states and Writers Guild of America who raised antitrust concerns, David Ellison has closed the $111bn merger of Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD). Some 14 months after Ellison’s Skydance acquired Paramount, the 43-year-old mogul’s new entity – called Skydance – presents a rival in size to Netflix and Disney with its two storied film studios, cable, streaming, and news operations. However it comes at a cost. Ellison and his team will need to service a debt load of approximately $80bn. He will also need to…

David Ellison has named his leadership team for the merged Paramount-Warner Bros Discovery, ahead of the expected closing of the $111bn deal tomorrow. The leadership team for the combined company, called Skydance, was announced today by chairman and CEO Ellison, and new co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, the former Mattel boss who was appointed last week. Scroll down for full leadership Andy Gordon becomes president of Skydance, working closely with Ellison and Co-CEO Kreiz. An early advisor to Skydance Media, he helped orchestrate its acquisition of Paramount in 2025 and Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery. He is currently chief strategy officer…

Pierre le Gall’s truck driver romance Flesh And Fuel scooped the Golden Eye for best film at Zurich Film Festival. The Feature Film Competition jury, headed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, said that, “At a time when isolation has become a means of protecting ourselves from the world and from one another, Flesh And Fuel offers a compelling and deeply cinematic reflection on the fundamental human need for connection. Scroll down for the full list of winners “With exquisite sensitivity, the film explores how the desire to love and be loved demands that we confront, and ultimately break through the physical…