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Shot between his directing Alicia Vikander in “Firebrand” and Kristen Stewart in “Rosebushpruning,” “Motel Destino,” which bows in Cannes Competition on May 22, can be seen as a return by Brazil’s now most international director to his Brazilian roots.

This axis between international and local, plays out in “Motel Destino” and Aïnouz insists, in now his whole career.

An erotic thriller, “Motel Destino” turns on Dayana, the young wife of a roadside sex hotel owner who seduces on-the-run minor mobster Heraldo for great sex. But she soon conceives the idea of his helping her to kill her terrifyingly abusive older husband.

“I was really interested in a kind of Brazilian interpretation of melodrama and noir cinema, how to take genre, which begins in Hollywood, and appropriate it make it local and ours,” Aïnouz tells Variety.

“Motel Destino” is melodrama “in the sense these characters that are trying to survive, by any means.

A key driver in Brazil’s late 1990s cinema resurgence, Globo Filmes has co-produced iconic box office blockbusters, Oscar and “A” Fest plays, arthouse breakouts. movies sparking big TV spin-offs. A brief selection of milestones in its storied history:

1990

President Fernando Collar’s government closes state owned film company Embrafilme, decimating Brazilian film production.

1993

A new Audiovisual Law offers companies income tax deductions for investment in Brazilian movies as Brazil’s Resurgence – economic and cultural recovery – lifts off.

1997

Globo Filmes is founded. Recalls Daniel Filho, its guiding spirit, in early years: “I started working in Globo TV but I always said: “I want to make cinema.’ I was on my way to close a deal with exhibitor Luis Severiano Ribeiro to launch a film production house when I got a call from Globo to launch Globo Filmes. I agreed: Globo had to do what French and British channels were doing: Participate in films.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “Rivers of Dust,” Anna Muyleart’s “Geni and the Zeppelin” and “Pearl Motel,” fromJorge Furtado, feature among potential nine brand new projects announced at the Cannes Festival by Globo Filmes, the theatrical film co-production arm of Brazilian TV giant Globo.

With Mendonça Filho deep in pre-production on political thriller “The Secret Agent,” co-produced by France’s Mk Productions, details on “Rivers of Dust,” save that he will re-team on it with Juliano Dornelles after their 2019 Cannes Jury Prize winner “Bacurau.”

Elsewhere, the new projects speak volumes of Globo Filmes’ current content focus. There’s the broad spectrum. . Titles straddle commercial plays – gay espionage operatives comedy “Special Agents” from Pedro Antônio – “A” list festival plays such as “Rivers” and Geni” and cross-over titles such as sex-laced situation comedy “Pearl Motel.”

Above all, additions to Globo Filmes’ development slate underscore two of its biggest investment priorities.

One is diversity.

Italian indie producer Vivo Film has boarded André Ristum’s action drama “Tecnicamente Dolce” (“Technically Sweet”), based on a screenplay by Italian legend Michelangelo Antonioni, teaming with Gullane Filmes, Brazil’s biggest independent film production house.

The news comes as “Carnival Is Over,” the awaited thriller drama by “Narcos” director Fernando Coimbra, whose “A Wolf at the Door” was one of the standout Brazilian feature debuts of the last decade, has now entered post-production, shaping up as one of the big arthouse titles to hit festivals from Brazil next year.

Featuring Leandra Leal (“A Wolf at the Door”), Pêpê Rapazote (“Narcos”) and Irandhir Santos (“Tropa de Elite 2”), “Carnival” is a Brazilian-Portuguese co-production that teams Gullane with Fado Filmes, Videodrome, Globo Filmes and Telecine, in association with Tc Filmes. France’s Playtime has started to pre-sell the film.

“This movie is our main title for next year. This is the...

Carolina Markowicz’s dark satire “Charcoal,” which world premieres on Sept. 11 at Toronto Film Festival, has debuted its teaser trailer with Variety (below). World sales are being handled by Urban Sales.

The film, which plays in the festival’s Platform section, centers on a poor family living in a remote area in Brazil, who earn a pittance from their charcoal business. When a shady nurse asks them to host a mysterious foreigner they accept. The home soon becomes a hideout as the so-called guest happens to be a highly wanted drug lord. The mother, her husband and child will have to learn how to share the same roof with this stranger, while keeping up appearances of an unchanged peasant routine.

Diana Cadavid at Toronto Film Festival commented: “For her unsettlingly precise feature-film debut, writer-director Carolina Markowicz blends biting social commentary on the pervasive forces that prey on the least fortunate...

Paris-based Urban Sales has swooped on international sales rights to Brazilian writer-director Carolina Markowicz’s awaited debut feature film “Charcoal” (“Carvão”), which is set for its world premiere at at Toronto’s prestigious Platform showcase before heading to San Sebastian for a Europe bow as part of its just-revealed Horizontes Latinos lineup.

Urban Sales has also shared with Variety a first look still from the film.

Distribution in Brazil is handled by Pandora Filmes, founded by André Sturm, which launched the country’s first classic film streaming platform Belas Artes in 2019, bringing big-name, cult, and regional classics to audiences nationwide.

Markowicz has written and directed six short films that have been selected by 400 festivals including Locarno, SXSW, Toronto and AFI. Her short film,“The Orphan,” a gritty tale about a young queer boy who tries to navigate his most recent adoption after being placed with a well-off conservative family, premiered...

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Three new German dramas have scooped up top honors at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival’s First Look awards, an industry prize that backs works-in-progress.

Lukas Nathrath’s One Last Evening, a scathing dramedy that skewers success-obsessed society, took the Cinegrell First Look Award, which comes with a 51,000 (50,000 euro) bursary in postproduction services from German/Swiss post-house Cinegrell.

Arthur & Diana, a road movie from director Sara Summa, won the Le Film Français Award and the accompanying 5,700 (5,600 euro) in advertising services for the yet-to-be-released feature. Summa, director of the Italian-set 2019 horror title The Last to See Them, stars in the documentary-style Arthur & Diana with her real-life brother. The feature follows the two siblings as they travel from Berlin to South Tyrol re-enacting the road trips of their childhood.

Locarno Pro’s Kaiju Cinema Diffusion Prize, which includes 5,100 (5,000 euro) to go toward the design of an international poster for the film,...

“Island City,” the latest film from “Lower City” director Sérgio Machado, has been acquired for international sales by Edward Noeltner’s Beverly Hills-based Cinema Management Group. Given a current absence of Brazilian movies selected for the Cannes Festival, the acquisition gives Cmg one of the most awaited of titles coming out of Brazil this year.

It also marks latest title from Brazilian production powerhouse Gullane, whose credits include Cannes Competition players – Hector Babenco’s “Carandiru,” Marco Bellocchio’s “The Traitor” – as well as Sundance winners, such as Anna Muylaert’s “The Second Mother,” and Berlin Panorama laureates, such as Luis Bolognesi’s “The Last Forest.”

Exploring the foibles and failure of manhood, also the focus of “Lower City,” “Inner City” tells what Cmg describes as the “captivating” tale of three brothers who end up living under the same roof as middle brother Dalberto’s sensual new wife, Anaira (Sophie Charlotte...

Netflix commemorated five years of local production releases in Brazil last November announcing a drive into production outside the country’s two traditional powerhouse bases of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Last week, Netflix Brazil revealed more productions set across the country’s vast terrain to bring compelling and fresh narratives to the platform.

“Ricos de Amor” relocates to Northern Brazil for a second season. Produced by São Paulo’s Prodigo Films, “Invisible City,” the first live action title from “Ice Age” creator Carlos Saldanha, has direction and production teams working out of Belém, Pará, in northern-most Brazil.

“This is a very special series, with diverse artists, with accents from all over Brazil,” said Lucy Alves of “Só Se For Por Amor,” in which she stars. “When we see something this big being done in the countryside we identify a lot… it’s immediate,” she added.

Netflix has also...

If 2021 has been a calvacade of bad decisions, dashed hopes, and warning signs for cinema’s strength, the Criterion Channel’s monthly programming has at least buttressed our hopes for something like a better tomorrow. Anyway. The Channel will let us ride out distended (holi)days in the family home with an extensive Alfred Hitchcock series to bring the family together—from the established Rear Window and Vertigo to the (let’s just guess) lesser-seen Downhill and Young and Innocent—Johnnie To’s Throw Down and Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons in their Criterion editions, and some streaming premieres: Ste. Anne, Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over, and The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love.

Special notice to Yvonne Rainer’s brain-expanding Film About a Woman Who . . .—debuting in “Female Gaze: Women Directors + Women Cinematographers,” a series that does as it says on the tin—and a Joseph Cotten retro boasting Ambersons,...

Paris-Based Loco Films has boarded “The Business Women’s Club,” the next film from Brazilian writer-director Anna Muylaert

Muylaert’s “The Second Mother” won a 2015 Sundance Grand Jury Prize and a Berlin Panorama Audience Award, and it notched up fulsome sales for the Match Factory.

“The Business Women’s Club” will be introduced to buyers at this week’s Cannes Film Market by Loco Films’ head Laurent Danielou.

Channeling Mulaert’s keen sense of social dynamics in a comedic take on sexism, “Club” is set in an alternate Brazil where gender stereotypes are flipped.

Two young male journalists visit the retreat of the Business Women’s Club. Over the course of a day, they discover the old, rich and powerful female characters “lying, cheating, melting, sinking, breaking, going over the top and almost dying to maintain what is already lost,” Muylaert said.

The journalists decide to write a Club exposé,...

Condor Entertainment acquires French rights

Paris-based Alpha Violet has picked up worldwide sales rights excluding Bolivia and Uruguay to Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s anticipated Utama and will show footage at the virtual Cannes market next month.

The sales agent has licensed French rights on the Bolivia/Uruguay drama to Condor Distribution, whose slate includes Quo Vadis, Aida?, and First Cow. Buyers have been tracking the Alma Films production since it won three key awards at Films In Progress 39 in Toulouse earlier this year.

Currently in post, Utama is expected to land prestige festival slots this year and is set against...

A man is standing still, facing the camera. He wears a construction hat and a neon safety vest over a bulletproof one. It is nighttime, he’s shrouded in darkness. He closes his eyes as the camera slowly pans out, as if to better tune into his surroundings. The din around him suggests a natural scene, crickets drowning out all else. Only gradually do we begin to hear the sounds of machinery. As Justino (stoic newcomer Regis Myrupu) is lulled into sleep, a radio call brings him back into himself. It’s then we see he’s been standing in front of a shipping container, one of the many he’s tasked with patrolling during his shifts as a security guard at the Manaus cargo port.

This poignant opening moment sets up the tensions between nature and modernity, labor and rest, that structure Maya Da-Rin’s captivating debut fiction feature,...

Efm market screenings will be available in 120-minute windows.

The Berlinale’s European Film Market (Efm) has given details of its upcoming edition that is running online from March 1-5, including how its market screenings platform will work.

The Efm will also include a presentation of the Berlinale’s film selection.

Films will be available to watch by delegates within a 120-minute time window from a designated start time. These will be determined by local time zone. For example, a film available from 10.00-12.00 in Berlin would be available from 10.00-12.00 in any other global location.

Additionally, the online Efm...

Brooklyn-based distributor KimStim has acquired North American rights to Brazilian director Maya Da-Rin’s feature debut “The Fever” (“A Febre”), which world premiered in competition at Locarno and played at Toronto in 2019.

The film is represented in international markets by Pierre Menahem’s French sales banner Still Moving, who negotiated the deal on behalf of the producers with KimStim’s Mika Kimoto. “The Fever” will have its New York premiere at New Directors/New Films in December.

“The Fever” follows Justino, a 45-year-old member of the indigenous Desana people, who is a security guard at the Manaus harbor. As his daughter prepares to study medicine in Brasilia, Justino comes down with a mysterious fever. The movie’s key crew includes the veteran cinematographer Barbara Alvarez.

“The Fever” is set to open in theaters in 2021 in France where it will be distributed by Survivance, and in the U.K. with New Wave Films handling,...

Karim Aïnouz’s beguilingly stunning “Invisible Life” is Brazil’s latest cinematic treasure. Even as the country’s conservative government threatens to cut the funding to the robust film scene that has given us critically acclaimed works like “Aquarius,” “Neon Bull” and “The Second Mother,” there are works like “Invisible Life” that remind international audiences of the stories the nation is fighting to tell in the face of adversity.

“Invisible Life” is a tale of two sisters in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. Guida (Julia Stockler), the slightly more adventurous one, escapes from a family dinner one night to go out with a mysterious suitor, a Greek sailor. She disappears the next morning, leaving behind only a note and one of her grandmother’s earrings she had left with the night before.

Her sister, Eurídice (Carol Duarte), blames herself for covering for her sister to leave the family without so much as saying goodbye.

Cannes — In yet another – and significant – Latin America distribution deal for the now highly active Ott giant, Amazon Prime Video has acquired Brazilian and pan-Spanish-speaking Latin American Svod rights to Turner Latin America’s highly anticipated “Freitas Brothers.”

The announcement was made late Tuesday by Turner Latin America at Cannes Mipcom TV and Ott trade fair.

Underscoring the alliance between WarnerMedia’s Turner Latin America, the No. 1 pay TV powerhouse in Latin America, with the cream of Brazil’s film world, the boxing bioseries was created by Sergio Machado (”Lower City”) and Walter Salles (“The Motorcycle Diaries”), directed by Machado and Aly Muritiba (“Rust”) and supervised by Salles.

Top Brazilian production house Gullane produces with Salles’ label VideoFilmes.

“Freitas Brothers” will bow on Tla’s pay TV channel Space Brazil and, two hours later, be made available on Amazon Prime Video in the same country. Three months after the end...

A chaotic class dramedy where the help and the helped wind up switching places, Three Summers (Três Verões) marks another occasion for Brazilian actress Regina Casé (The Second Mother) to shine in the role of a housekeeper trying to overcome stiff social barriers and find her own slice of happiness. Set in one location over a trio of Christmas holidays (which, in Brazil, take place during the summer), this cleverly written and staged, if sometimes unruly, new feature from writer-director Sandra Kogut (Campo Grande) could see wider exposure after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival....

A chaotic class dramedy where the help and the helped wind up switching places, Three Summers (Três Verões) marks another occasion for Brazilian actress Regina Casé (The Second Mother) to shine in the role of a housekeeper trying to overcome stiff social barriers and find her own slice of happiness. Set in one location over a trio of Christmas holidays (which, in Brazil, take place during the summer), this cleverly written and staged, if sometimes unruly, new feature from writer-director Sandra Kogut (Campo Grande) could see wider exposure after its world premiere in Toronto.

Plunging us straight into ...

Madrid — In a sign of one direction Latin America’s film industry is going, building ever more significant production partnerships on banner art films around the region, premier Brazilian production house Gullane has boarded Benjamín Avila’s “The Cardinal.”

Already produced by Chile’s Storyboard Media and Argentina’s Magma Cine, “The Cardinal” has just been selected for San Sebastian’s Europe-Latin America Co-production Forum.

News of Gullane’s equity participation comes as it is finalizing Argentine financing on “Bachelor Party,” its latest big commercial play, distributed in Brazil and Latin America by Warner Bros.

Now packing three partners as multi-lateral production partnerships increasingly mark out the biggest movies from Latin America, “The Cardinal” will weigh in to San Sebastian as one of the highest-profile at the Forum.

Part of Argentine Avila’s lifelong concern for opposition to dictatorship and tyranny – both his parents were montoneros, who died fighting Argentina’s Junta,...

Paris-based Still Moving has dropped a first international teaser-trailer for Maya Da-Rin’s “A Febre” (The Fever), which world premieres this week in main International Competition at the 2019 Locarno Intl. Film Festival.

One of two Latin American Locarno Golden Leopard contenders, with Maura Delpero’s Argentine-Italian “Maternal” (“Hogar”), “The Fever” marks one of the latest productions from Germany’s Komplizen Films, the recipient of Locarno’s 2019 Best Independent Producer Award.

Produced by Dar-Rin’s label, Tamandua Vermelho, and Sao Paulo-based Enquadramiento Filmes, “The Fever” is co-produced by Komplizen and Still Moving, which has also stepped up to handle international sales.

Brazil’s Vitrine Filmes, the go-to-distributor for many top Brazilian films – “Divine Love,” “Bacurau” – will release “The Fever” in Brazil.

At a time when Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro has drawn world attention to the fate of the Amazon, championing its predominantly illegal logging industry, “The Fever” nails the fate of many indigenous Brazilians.

Pamplona, Spain — Few events were more anticipated at Conecta Fiction than the joint keynote delivered by HBO Latin America’s Roberto Ríos and HBO España’s Miguel Salvat. The room was packed,some attendees caught it from a screen outside.

That’s a sign of the draw of HBO’s brand in Spanish-language programming and of Ríos and Salvat. When it comes to Spanish-language premium TV series both executives are pioneers and now institutions. Ríos’ credits at HBO date back at least to the 2008-released “Alice” and Season 2 of “Epitafios,” produced with Pol-ka, the first ever premium limited TV series in Spanish bowing way back in 2003.

Salvat was the driving force behind two of Spain’s very first scripted premium series: “Whatever Happened to Jorge Sanz?” and “Crematorium,” released at Canal Plus España over 2010-11.

One of the keys to understanding a Svod platform is its slate of projects in productions,...

Karine Teles and Otavio Muller in Loveling Photo: Bianca Aun

Brazilian writer/director Gustavo Pizzi and writer/actor Karine Teles were a husband and wife team when they began working on their warm-hearted study of family life, Loveling. They split up during the making of the film, which stars Teles – perhaps best known to British audiences from The Second Mother – as a mum of a family trying to come to terms with the fact their eldest son (Konstantinos Sarris) is about to move to Germany while also trying to keep their heads above water financially.

When I catch up with them in Sundance Film Festival, it’s obvious that, marriage or not, theirs is an enduring friendship and working partnership that is unlikely to stop any time soon.

As Pizzi puts it: “We raised our kids together and we have equally shared custody. We’re still friends and we work well together.

Fernanda Torres (Cannes best actress prize winner for “Love Me Forever or Never”) is attached to star in “The Hanged,” the second Brazilian feature of Fernando Coimbra, which is set up at Brazilian shingle Gullane.

Co-produced by Globo Filmes and Brazilian pay TV channel Telecine, “The Hanged” is a “tragic action thriller,” producer Fabiano Gullane said in Cannes. It centers on a married couple: Regina, from one of Rio de Janeiro’s most important (but bankrupt) families and Valerio, a mobster. Impelled by ambition, they kill Valerio’s uncle to grab a slice of Rio’s illegal gambling racket.

While a by-the-book police chief investigates corrupt cops with links to the city’s underworld, the murder sparks a turf war contaminating Valerio and Regina’s trust, driving their growing sense of paranoia, and leading to what the film’s synopsis calls a tragic outcome and “an operatic and insane bloodbath.

Director Gustavo Pizzi wastes no time opening up the intimate and economical “Loveling” to its audience. The film is not alienating; it does not obfuscate its intentions. Pizzi knew what he wanted to make, and what he has made is a touching yarn about the pangs of familial maturation. Set on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Irene (Karine Teles, “The Second Mother”) is essentially a domestic superhero. On top of raising four boys, she’s letting her recently divorced sister (Adriana Esteves) crash while her husband Klaus (Otávio Müller) struggles with some financial woes. Oh, and she’s in the process...

The first pangs of empty nest syndrome hit the devoted, exuberant mom at the center of Loveling, a captivating portrait of the joys and aches of family life. Karine Teles brings ferocious warmth and humor to the lead role, in essence playing the opposite of her perfectionist upper-class character in The Second Mother. Without pandering to audience sympathy, she creates an exceptionally sympathetic focal point for a story that embraces the messy tenderness of life as it's lived.

With its attention to quotidian detail, the screenplay by director Gustavo Pizzi and Teles — the married duo's second feature collaboration, after...

Oscilloscope opens the film this Friday. Brazilian Anna Muylaert started as a critic and television and film writer; she originally wrote the script for "The Second Mother" 20 years ago, intending to direct it as her first feature. But she went on to shoot "Durval Discos" (2001) instead, and seven years later, made "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," followed by "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation" and finally, she overhauled and updated the script for her fourth film, "The Second Mother." The Brazilian Oprah, Regina Casé, wasn't willing to smoke cigarettes for "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," but was happy to take on the juicy role of Val, a live-in domestic in São Paulo whose life is thrown into disarray when her grown daughter Jessica arrives from Val’s hometown to study for her college entrance exams. The understood boundaries that rule Val's life with her employer Bárbara (Karine...