Screen Global Production

Production has wrapped on Edem Kelman’s debut feature Chairman starring Ṣọpé Dìrísù following a shoot in London and Paris. Dìrísù plays Duke, a man who dreams of uniting London’s African diasporic community. As his ambition grows, so do the risks, endangering not only his dreams but also the lives of those who come to rely on him. Samuel Adewunmi and Heather Agyepong star alongside Dìrísù. Chairman is based on an idea by Kelman, who co-wrote the script with Noah Reich.

BFI Film Academy and partners, including Amazon MGM Studios, Aardman, Framestore and Lucasfilm, will offer 120 fully paid professional development trainee placements and 885 places across 12 free training courses as part of its expanded 2026-2029 offer. From 2027, BFI Film Academy will support 18-25-year-olds to participate in six-month professional development programmes providing four months of tailored training culminating in paid six-week placements.

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.

Antonio Banderas has signed to star in French filmmaker Paul Mignot’s historical drama Cortés, which will incorporate generative AI technology to tell the story of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in the 16th century. Banderas is playing the notorious Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in the film, which is based on a screenplay by Nicholas Kazan. Cortés is being produced by US-based AI-focused TV and film companies Utopai Studios and Ex Machina Studios.

The film stars Loreto Mauleón, whose credits include HBO’s Patria and Netflix thriller The Snow Girl. By Tim Dams 12 Oct 2026 Source: © Unai Mateo Berlin-based Picture Tree International (PTI) has boarded sales on Rafaela, the debut feature from Basque filmmaker Alba Lozano, as the film starts shooting in the Basque Country in Spain.

Louis Garrel, Benedetta Cimatti, Barbara Ronchi and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi have joined the cast of Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio’s Fiat-Chrysler biopic Falcon, which has started shooting in Toronto. They join Pierfrancesco Favino, who is already confirmed as the lead in the biopic about Sergio Marchionne, who led struggling Italian car manufacturer Fiat out of bankruptcy, conquering the American market by merging with Chrysler, but paying a personal price.

Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian singer and actress who became the highest-paid woman in Hollywood in the 1940s, is to become the subject of a Portuguese- and English-language biopic. The story, which carries a huge $12.1m (BRL 61m) budget by Brazilian standards, will span 1940 to 1955 and explore the ups and downs of the star who introduced Brazilian samba and Latin culture to global audiences and paved the way for future Latina actresses.

After nearly a year in pursuit, regulatory hurdles and an antitrust tussle with 12 US states and Writers Guild of America, 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.

Jack O’Connell and Odessa A’zion will lead The End Of The World As We Know It for Studiocanal, Working Title, Film4 and Parkville Pictures. Production will begin on the UK feature in Canada in November, produced by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner for Working Title and Olivier Kaempfer for Parkville. It is directed by Tom Berkeley and Ross White, who won the Oscar for best live-action short and Bafta for best short in 2023 for An Irish Goodbye.

After government money earmarked for German production incentives ran out in August, the state of film funding in the country was in the spotlight at FilmFest Hamburg’s Industry Days event last week. The issue has taken on particular urgency for Germany’s production community after it was announced in August  the combined €250m budget for the country’s two key production incentive schemes – the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF) and the German Motion Picture Fund (GMPF) – had been exhausted.