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Actors Brandon Grace, Éanna Hardwicke and Paulina Chávez are joining the cast of Fate: The Winx Saga in Season 2, which is now in production in County Wicklow, Ireland.

Grace will play Grey, with Hardwick portraying Sebastian; Chavéz has been cast as Flora.

Fate: The Winx Sagaga is based on Nickelodeon animated series Winx Club, which was created and produced by Rainbow Group’s founder and CEO, Iginio Straffi. The show follows the coming-of-age journey of five unlikely friends attending a magical boarding school known as Alfea. At the school, they must learn to master their magical powers, all the while navigating love, rivalries and the monsters that threaten their very existence.

Brian Young (The Vampire Diaries) returns in Season 2 as showrunner and executive producer. Additional exec producers include Judy Counihan and Kris Thykier of Archery Pictures, as well as Joanne Lee and Cristiana Buzzelli from Rainbow.

The...

Pedro Costa is not the most obvious Oscar contender. The director of “Vitalina Varela,” a slow-burn atmospheric character study about an immigrant woman confronting her past, has never been keen on self-promotion. But now that “Vitalina Varela” is the Portuguese submission for Best International Feature Film, he has no choice.

“This is the part where I’m supposed to put a smile on,” the 62-year-old director said in a recent interview. He attempted a dry laugh that did not come naturally to him. “I would love for a different type of people to see this film. If they’ll watch it because of this Oscar thing, great.”

And they should. Costa has been making rich, ambitious documentary-fiction hybrids since the ‘90s, but they rarely get noticed much beyond the festival circuit. Nearly all of his films take place in the same rundown immigrant community of Fontainhas and surrounding areas, in Lisbon,...

From Horse Money to Colossal Youth and beyond, Pedro Costa has consistently impressed with his enigmatic and austere works, turning his camera to the disenfranchised and marginalized with his signature docufiction style. Working in Lisbon throughout his career, his masterful newest film Vitalina Varela is a part of the tradition. The winner of the Golden Leopard and Best Actress at the Locarno Film Festival and an official selection at Nyff and Tiff, Grasshopper Film has unveiled the first trailer for the film in anticipation for Sundance debut, and with a release to follow starting February 21 at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center.

Continuing the informal trilogy he began in Colossal Youth, Costa turns his focus to an older woman Vitalina Varela, (playing herself) who travels to Lisbon to find the husband who left her twenty-five years ago, only to discover that he’s been dead for three days. The film...

Like a moth to the light, Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa (“Colossal Youth“) always finds himself returning to the Fontainhas neighborhood that he holds so near and dear— a shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon that’s home to predominantly immigrant communities. Almost always using non-actors and blurring reality and fiction by drawing from their real lives, in “Vitalina Varela” the Portuguese filmmaker refracts and expands an episode from his previous feature “Horse Money,” wherein a Cape Verdean woman navigates her way through Lisbon, following the death of her husband.

Continue reading ‘Vitalina Varela’ Trailer: Pedro Costa Tackles Grief & Ghosts Of The Past at The Playlist.

A dark back-alley drowned in shadow; towering concrete walls on either side; on the top right a row of headstones overlook; the glimmer of a walking stick emerges in the distance, and then a funeral procession. 15 minutes later a women disembarks from an airplane and is greeted not by family but by the airport’s cleaning staff. “There is nothing for you in Portugal, Vitalina,” they say.

Welcome—or perhaps welcome back—to the world of Pedro Costa, the austere Portuguese director behind Colossal Youth (2006), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and other haunting works with which to grapple. His latest is titled Vitalina Varela and picks up where last year’s Horse Money left off, focusing on the eponymous character who first appeared as a supporting player in Money while also persisting in Costa’s unmistakable style: slow static shots set up like minimalist plays; stark white lighting from far above,...

The mystery and wonder of Pedro Costa’s filmmaking defies any specific category other than his own unique blend. The Portuguese director conjures dark, dreamlike visions of post-colonial neglect and yearning that hover somewhere between fantasy and neorealism, horror and melodrama, spirituality and desperation. “Vitalina Varela,” Costa’s fifth journey into the shantytown Fontainhas outside of Lisbon, once again showcases Costa’s masterful ability to mine cinematic poetry from a unique environment and the mournful figures who wander through its murky depths.

The Costa Expanded Universe stems back to 2006’s “Colossal Youth,” when Costa first began exploring the Cape Verdean residents of Fontainhas by casting members of the immigrant community as themselves. Costa’s ravishing blend of light and shadow captures the characters as they wander the claustrophobic interiors of their ramshackle homes and muse about their wandering lives. Costa’s dour, humorless aesthetic takes time to settle in and...

Photo by Darren HughesTHE Beau Travail Effect When Film Comment surveyed nearly 120 filmmakers, critics, and programmers for its “Best of the Nineties” feature in the January/February 2000 issue, only four people mentioned Claire Denis.. A year later Beau travail topped the magazine’s poll of the best films of 2000. The only evidence I’ve been able to find of a complete Denis retrospective in the English-speaking world during the 1990s was one organized by Linda Blackaby at the 1997 Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. Whereas between 2000 and 2003—following Beau Travail’s festival tour of Venice, Toronto, New York, Sundance, Berlin, and on and on—Denis was the spotlight of retros at the Cinematheque Ontario (courtesy of James Quandt), the National Film Theatre London, the Dublin International Film Festival, and the Northwest Film Forum. There were certainly others. This is not to suggest that Denis was unknown before Beau travail. Her first...