News

With co-production an ever-popular resource for independents and emerging talent, the Madrid Film School (Ecam), hailed as one of the leading film schools in the world, has launched Ecam Forum, a new co-production initiative to run June 10 – 13 in Madrid.

An Open Call ending April 9 has been announced March 18 for submissions from local Spanish feature film projects in development or in post-production, and series projects in development.

Said Ecam director Gonzalo Salazar Simpson at a press conference in late Feb.: “I believe that the key to the Forum’s success will have to do with the presence of decision makers and international professionals. Ecam’s ability to attract this kind of people has been growing for about 10 years or so. I have no doubt we will be able to attract them.”

The forum is aimed at producers, directors and screenwriters, and seeks to foster audiovisual production, promote emerging talent and...

Former Netflix exec Juan Mayne has hung his own shingle, Madrid-based N&l Films, which is bulwarked by strong talent relationships, a strategic alliance with Exile Content and a sure sense of market opportunities for Spain-based independent producers.

Exile Content and N&l Films have struck a first-look development deal. Jeff Glaser, who oversaw Netflix production finance in Mexico City and Madrid, has joined the company.

N&l’s first slate includes a Mexican remake of “Miracle in Cell No. 7,” co-produced by Rock & Ruz and Mexico’s Corazón Films, which will handle distribution in the country, and “Aristides: A Righteous Life,” the true-life account of a Portuguese diplomat who saved thousands from the Nazis in WWII, from Seanne Winslow.

N&l is also in conversations with with Lluis Quilez and Fernando Navarro – director and writer of Netflix Top 10 non-English movie “Below Zero” – to develop a true crime film based...

Strengthening its credentials in this year’s international feature film Oscar race where it represents France, Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” edged Belgian’s Oscar entry “Close” for top honors, the Giraldillo de Oro, at a busy Seville European Film Festival.

A celebration of European arthouse which could not be more timely – the fall-off in arthouse attendance proved the festival’s main talking point – Seville’s top prizes served to underscore the vast variety of tones and issues in current European cinema.

“Saint Omer,” Variety noted in a Venice review, is “a quietly momentous French courtroom drama that subtly but radically rewrites the rules of the game.”

Lukas Dhont’s sophomore feature “Close” shared Seville’s Jury Prize with João Pedro Rodrigues’ “Will-o’-the-Wisp’.” The two films could not be more different tonally, “Close” weighing in as “a profoundly felt portrait of two inseparable friends” whereas “Will-o’-the-Wisp is, for Variety,...

Barcelona — “Sacred Spirit,” “Five Little Wolves” and “Ane” are among five feature projects to be put through development at the Ecam Madrid Film School’s pioneering Incubator development program.

The Incubator forms part of The Screen, Ecam’s umbrella initiative aimed at nurturing on the rise Spain-based talent kinks with Europe’s film and TV industries.

Selected by Variety as a Spanish talent to track, Chema García Ibarra will direct “Spirit,” from Basque production house Apellániz & De Sosa, which has half of Spain searching for a missing girl as a Spanish Ufology association plans a night studying the heavens. The fate of humanity depends on one of its members, the morbidly obese José Manuel, who hides a secret.

García Ibarra’s debut short “Attack From the Robots From Nebula 5,” was selected for Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes and took the 2010 Meliès d’Or Short Film Award. His newest film, co-directed with Ion de Sosa,...