Here are the list of candidates:
C’e’ Ancora Domani – Paola Cortellesi
– At the end of World War II, a woman in an unhappy marriage receives a mysterious letter that inspires her to build a better future for herself, right as her eldest daughter is about to be married.
Grazie Ragazzi – Riccardo Milani
– An unemployed actor accepts a job as a teacher in a prison theater workshop (a remake of a 2020 film based on a 2005 documentary).
Il Ritorno Di Casanova – Gabriele Salvatores
– A director fails to finish his film about Giacomo Casanova and is tormented by the man in his dreams.
Il Sol Dell’avvenire – Nanni Morett
– A director struggles with his familial relationships and latest movie about the Italian Communist Party.
Io Capitano – Matteo Garrone
– Two young men from Senegal emigrate from Dakar to Europe.
L’ultima Notte di Amore – Andrea di Stefano
– On the night before he is set to retire, a police lieutenant is called to investigate the death of his best friend and partner.
La Chimera – Alice Rohrwacher
– A young archaeologist in the 1980s becomes involved in the black market of stolen Etruscan artifacts.
La terra Delle Donne – Marisa Vallone
– In ancient Sardinia, two generations of women fight against tradition in order to achieve sexual and emotional freedom.
Mixed by Erry – Sydney Sibilia
– The story of the rise and fall of a pirated mixtape empire started by three brothers from Naples to bring pop music to the youth of 1980s Italy.
Noi Anni Luce – Tiziano Russo
– A 17 year-old leukemia patient has only one option for a bone marrow transplant: the father she has never met.
Rapito – Marco Bellocchio
– A young Jewish boy is kidnapped by the Papal States to be raised Catholic.
Stranizza d’Amuri – Giuseppe Fiorello
– Based on a news story from the 1980s, the film follows two teenage boys who fall in love in 1980s Sicily.
The shortlisted titles will be announced December 21st, 2023 and the nominations will be announced on January 23rd, 2024.
The 2024 Oscars award ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on March 10th, 2024.
Read the press release here.
AI’s good or evil nature is being debated, but it is helping Italian comedy find an audience worldwide and dispelling the myth that comedy only works locally.
Tech journalist Andrea Indiano on Wired Italy explains that AI technology is venturing into the Italian comedy world, translating and dubbing comedy films into other languages. “An Italian project known on social media as @italiancomedydub offers some of the most famous sketches from Italian films with English dubbing, thanks to artificial intelligence. Hearing well-known voices such as those of Carlo Verdone, Checco Zalone or Aldo, Giovanni, and Giacomo while speaking in English intrigues historical spectators and could open up new scenarios for Italian comedy abroad,” writes Indiano. “The peculiarity is that the voices are those of the original performers. Therefore, Gigi Proietti’s voice recites from the cult Febbre da Cavallo, or Aldo Baglio uses his unmistakable cadence to deliver, in English, a sketch from Tre Uomini e Una Gamba.” The @italiancomedydub project is on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. “The authors’ identities behind the page are unknown, but they are undoubtedly artificial intelligence experts,” writes Idiano. What surprises the most, writes the author, is the “fact that those that could pass as ideal sketches for an Italian audience remain funny even in another language.”
This fact dispels the myth that comedy is a local affair. When voice, speech, and physical comedy, such as facial expressions and hand movements, are delivered together, it works everywhere.
Before AI, the dubbing process was costly and lengthy, with various steps: the lip-sinking attentive translation, the search for the right dubbing actor, and the taping. “Now, using deep learning algorithms, AI dubbing software can be trained to quickly learn the patterns of a particular voice sample and convey the specific tone and emotions of the original actor,” says Indiano. Moreover, modern AI technology can modify the video and perfectly sync the labial movements with the foreign language.
“Automated transcribing, text translation, and video dubbing with the help of AI are commonplace nowadays. These technologies are developing and improving year after year. United into one automatic mechanism, they may become an economically profitable, fast, and relatively accurate tool for video localization,” says Alexander Konovalov, the founder and CEO at Vidby, a Swiss startup offering AI-powered video translation and dubbing across 70 languages.
Of course, there are downsides: the growth of AI dubbing means that the relevant work sector will change, causing more than one concern among voice actors worldwide. There’s many ethical debates on the puppeteering of dead actors using AI and how AI can be used to steal and mimic voices of well-known figures into spreading misinformation or bigotry.
While AI technology continues to advance, concerns arise as voice artists face potential job loss due to this growing trend. AI companies are even hiring voice actors to train computer models, emphasizing the value of human creativity and emotion that machines cannot replicate. For the very same reason, actors stopped Hollywood two months ago.
Social media is posing a new threat to copyright laws. The blockbuster Barbie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, is now available on streaming platforms. Before that, almost at the same time as the theatrical release, it made its appearance on TikTok.
Barbie is not the first movie to be fully available on the social network. Accounts on the platform post snippets of films and TV shows, which can be seamlessly watched as a full-length movie. The clips are cleverly titled “Part 1,” “Part 2,” and so on, keeping the movie (or TV series) title reference a secret. However, once viewers start watching, they can enjoy the entire movie, with each small part playing consecutively.
Hollywood lawyers and law professors agree that these accounts flagrantly violate copyright laws and infringe upon the intellectual property of movie and television studios.
However, the perplexing part is that these accounts seem to have no financial gain from sharing these clips, with no sponsored posts or paid promotions in sight.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, protects internet companies from punishment if their users post copyright material on their networks. That leaves makers—movie studios, production companies, or individual creators—to monitor platforms and file claims when they spot their work. “So long as the platform acts expeditiously to remove infringing material once notified,” says Aaron Moss, a copyright lawyer at Greenberg Glusker in Los Angeles, “the platform will be protected,” TikTok says it prohibits content that violates intellectual property rights, and allows copyright holders to report violations.
On the other hand, these rogue posts could also benefit studios, as they give their content a new audience. “I don’t turn the TV on as much as I used to because everything is in the palm of my hand,” says JayCee Hughes, a 30-year-old engineer. Just like him, many Generation Zs prefer social media over TV. Peacock, owned by NBCUniversal, is among the streaming providers experimenting with building an audience on TikTok, uploading full episodes of Killing It and Love Island USA to the service. Once hooked, they hope the audience will go to the streaming service to continue to watch. “Piracy, I’m sure, will never go away,” says Jan van Voorn, chief of global content protection at the Motion Picture Association and head of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. “It will always need actions to keep it manageable.”
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Netflix currently has more than 50 exclusive games for mobile devices as part of the streaming subscription, as well as a cloud-streaming initiative that allows users to stream the games to multiple devices.
Netflix’s co-CEO Greg Peters said at a Goldman Sachs conference that while it could take years, Netflix’s plan is to have games across all devices.
“We’re excited about the performance that we’ve got in mobile, releasing more and more games, and we see every month our engagement goes up in that regard. But we have aspirations to go beyond that,” he said.
Peters also discussed the introduction of an advertising tier and a paid-sharing initiative. He clarified that the company’s goal is to offer consumers a more extensive array of pricing options and ultimately adopt a flexible pricing approach. Netflix’s objective is to avoid influencing users towards specific pricing tiers to prevent any adverse effects on the business.
He also reported that Netflix plans to invest in more local programming around the world and that Netflix as a company has content across multiple genres, languages, and countries:
“We think that there’s an opportunity to, over time, increase our content spending and deliver more value to members around the world across all of those content categories, really. But one of the areas that’s most exciting, again, is breaking down these barriers that have traditionally existed between storytellers around the world, whatever country that they live in, whatever language that they speak, and being able to now give them the ability to tell that story at a really high level that previously was mostly accessible to a couple handfuls of creators, most of them in Hollywood, and then to give them the ability to connect that story with a huge global audience.”
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Unity Technologies, the company behind the cross-platform game engine Unity, which is used by AAA (major game studios like Blizzard) studios and indie developers alike, is changing its pay structure.
“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user,” a Unity representative revealed in a blog post. “We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.”
With this new pay structure, games will need to meet a certain revenue and download threshold before it is charged with these fees, but there are concerns among all levels of game development that these changes will harshly impact indie and marginalized developers, that griefing can occur by redownloading games, and that by assessing these fees based on installs instead of purchases, it is not taking into account that games can have multiple installs without being purchased (such as games downloaded across different devices and pirated copies).
Unity has stated it would indeed charge a developer each time a game was redownloaded or downloaded to different devices.
Developers have also noted that Unity is implementing this new fee structure on top of charging yearly subscription fees while removing cheaper tiers. Unity also announced that it would no longer be offering the Unity Plus subscription tier, meaning whoever was in that tier at $400/year may now have to pay the Pro rate ($2,000/year).
These changes will begin January 1st, 2024.
The more-than-10-day ESPN and ABC station blackout from Spectrum-pay-TV service proves the demise of traditional TV and cable. Still, some hope comes from the deal reached by Walt Disney Co. and cable giant Charter Communications that restored Disney channels to the pay-TV service.
Charter and Disney have reached a new agreement that necessitates Charter to pay increased fees for the distribution of Disney programming. The cable company gained the ability to provide Disney’s ad-supported streaming apps — including Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ — along with Spectrum’s television service. Charter will eventually be able to offer the ESPN channel as a streaming add-on when Disney takes that service directly to consumers.
Some analysts had warned that a failure to resolve the dispute would have expedited the unraveling of the traditional pay-TV bundle. Executives from both parties have come to an agreement that maintains the current status quo.
Nineteen Disney channels will be available in Spectrum packages, including Disney-owned ABC stations, such as Los Angeles’ KABC-TV Channel 7, entertainment channel FX, National Geographic, and the Disney Channel, which provides children’s programming. But much of Disney’s kids and young-adult programming will be provided through the ad-supported, basic version of the Disney+ streaming service. The deal acknowledges the rapid shift in TV viewing habits, where consumers now prefer on-demand streaming apps over traditional linear channels.
Even sports fans, who’ve long been the glue holding the cable bundle together, have embraced different ways to watch their favorite teams.
Disney’s entire lineup of ESPN sports channels will continue to be offered in Spectrum packages distributed to 14.8 million American homes, a big win for Disney, which has signaled that ESPN will be a crucial part of its future.
Source: Los Angeles Times
Oscar winner writer and director Bobby Moresco (Crash) is set to direct the third movie about Italy’s glorious auto-racing heritage produced by Andrea Iervolino and Monika Bacardi’s ILBE Group, which already delivered Bobby Moresco’s Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend (2022) and Micheal Mann’s Ferrari screened last week at the Venice Film Festival, with Adam Driver in the leading role of Enzo Ferrari.
Ferrari vs. Mercedes is described as a journey when Mercedes dominated the motor racing world unchallenged. “Against this backdrop of powerful cars and aggressive drivers, Enzo Ferrari emerges, a young novice driver with an obsessive passion for engines and speed, whose only desire is to beat Mercedes’ formidable rivals,” the project’s synopsis explains. “With Ferrari vs. Mercedes, we will be proud to bring to movie theatres an Italian success story that, starting purely with ambition, has achieved glory all over the world,” said Andrea Iervolino, CEO of Iervolino & Lady Bacardi Entertainment. “One of the most exciting aspects of Ferrari vs. Mercedes will be the possibility of uniting top Italian talents with great international actors,” a reference Iervolino made to Pierfrancesco Favino’s remarks about the “cultural appropriation” inherent in the fact that in Michael Mann’s movie, Enzo Ferrari’s role should have gone to an Italian actor. “We would be thrilled to collaborate, in this new production of ours, with top Italian actors capable of working alongside international stars in a film that has the potential to be seen worldwide,” said the producer. No names are attached to the project’s cast yet.
Iervolino and Bacardi announced last March they are also developing a Maserati biopic about the family behind the high-performance automobiles that, along with Ferrari and Lamborghini, Italy is widely recognized and valued for.
Source: Variety
During the initial stages of the walkout, there was a prevailing sense of anticipation. The entertainment industry in Hollywood contemplated the uncertain outcome. As the writers’ strike enters its fifth month and the actors’ strike in its third month without any signs of resolution, significant transformations are taking place. This situation has created a tangible opening for international productions to thrive in the industry.
The topic emerged as the subject of most conversations at the Venice Film Festival one week ago and now at the Toronto Film Festival. “If supply decreases with Hollywood on strike, we need to be ready with our products for the international market as well,” said Francesco Rutelli, president of the Italian national audiovisual association Anica, speaking at a panel in Venice. Nicola Maccanico, CEO of Cinecittà, said the time has come for international filmmakers to “conquer the world market.”
International producers, who are not restricted by SAG guidelines and have the advantage of accessing government subsidies and tax credits, believe they are in a favorable position to meet the production demand. “We can get movies made and big movies,” said Louise Vesth of Denmark’s Zentropa, a producer on Nicolaj Arcel’s Danish period epic The Promised Land starring Mads Mikkelsen, which premiered in Venice and is screening at TIFF (the film sold, pre-strike, to the Magnolia Pictures for the U.S.) “It looks like most buyers have enough movies to hold them through the end of the year but after that, there could be an opportunity.”
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, designed by Renzo Piano, launches its autumn season with a rich lineup of Italian cinema. This remarkable cinematic showcase is made possible through an exclusive partnership, which has been renewed for yet another year, between CINECITTÀ and the ACADEMY, the foremost film institution worldwide.
Italy is the most recognized country in the International Feature Film category (previously Foreign Language Film category) with 14 Academy Award wins. Italian film has always been celebrated, even more so now that the increasingly globalized market allows these films to extend beyond Italy.
Central to the program will be the tribute to Ennio Morricone, accompanied by Giuseppe Tornatore and the Morricone family. The highlights will include the screening of “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso” on October 1st, as part of the Oscar® Sundays section, and “Ennio” on October 4th, which concludes the “New Italian Cinema / Nuovo Cinema Italiano” section. This extraordinary documentary by Giuseppe Tornatore about the renowned musician, a two-time Oscar® winner (Lifetime Achievement and “The Hateful Eight”), is closely linked to the showcase “The Soundtracks of a Cinema Maestro,” dedicated to the genius composer.
Giuseppe Tornatore states, “I am very happy and honored to participate in this initiative by Cinecittà and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, in the temple of cinema, to celebrate Ennio Morricone, a friend, a collaborator, an incomparable composer, the author of the music for all my films, starting with ‘Nuovo Cinema Paradiso,’ which will be screened on October 1st at the opening of the significant film series featuring his music. To this, my documentary ‘Ennio,’ a tribute to his professionalism and humanity, is ideally added, made possible by our long artistic collaboration but, above all, by the friendship that bound us.”
From October 6th to November 25th, this section offers an overview of many iconic scores from the Maestro’s multifaceted career. The first screening will be “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” by Sergio Leone, followed by Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.” Next in line is Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers,” Lina Wertmüller’s “The Basilisks,” Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Theorem,” Marco Bellocchio’s “Fists in the Pocket,” Mauro Bolognini’s “A Beautiful November,” Elio Petri’s “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” and “A Quiet Place in the Country,” Giuliano Montaldo’s “Sacco and Vanzetti,” Don Siegel’s “Two Mules for Sister Sara,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900,” Valerio Zurlini’s “The Desert of the Tartars,” Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s “The Night of the Shooting Stars,” Dario Argento’s “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage,” concluding with Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America.”
The Oscar® Sundays section, which opens with “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso,” marking the beginning of the collaboration between Tornatore and Morricone, also presents three other films: Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables,” and Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” all featuring music by Ennio Morricone.
Italian Cinema, appreciated in the USA and awarded more Oscars® than any other foreign cinematography, is also at the heart of the “New Italian Cinema / Nuovo Cinema Italiano” section, which precedes the Morricone tribute starting from September 6th, featuring renowned directors such as Gianfranco Rosi, Pietro Marcello, Luca Guadagnino, Alice Rohrwacher, Francesco Munzi, Emma Dante, Laura Bispuri, Adele Tulli, in addition to Giuseppe Tornatore for “Ennio.”
There are nine titles from the last five years, starting with Luca Guadagnino’s remake of the classic horror “Suspiria.” The other films in the showcase include “Happy as Lazzaro,” “Martin Eden,” “Daughter of Mine,” “Notturno,” “The Macaluso Sisters,” “Normal,” “Futura,” and “Ennio.”
Source: Cinecitta’
The US Copyright Office is seeking public input on potential regulations for generative AI, specifically regarding how these technologies utilize the creations of authors and creators.
The office is accepting comments until October 18th to gain insights for their ongoing study, which includes tools like Midjourney, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google Bard. This comment period is typically followed by the proposal of new laws. The Office is examining potential regulatory action and exploring the development of new federal regulations due to “widespread public debate about what these systems may mean for the future of creative industries.”
Massive amounts of information and data are scraped and saved by automated web crawlers and many copyrighted works are exploited without recognizing or compensating the creators responsible for the original content by Generative AI tools, including ChatGPT, Bard, and Meta’s Llama 2.
Companies like Amazon, Airbnb, Tumblr, and news outlets like The New York Times and CNN are increasingly blocking web crawlers through the robots.txt tool, which is old and relatively inefficient.
Still, currently, there is almost no way to avoid content being crawled and used to create AI content. At the moment, copyright law does not address the issue.
Source: Business Insider