Italian screenwriters Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi have completed the screenplay for The echo chamberBernardo Bertolucci's unfinished project that he worked on before he died.
Italian producer Indigo Films acquired the drama feature in 2018 and now has the project in active development and seeking co-production partners at the Toronto Film Festival. Bernardini wrote the Italian series Free Body and Rampoldi was a Max writer Gomorrah gangster drama.
Bernardini and Rampoldi wrote the first draft of the screenplay for The echo chamber with Bertolucci, and have completed the script. Carolina Iorio is producing the $6 million English-language film that focuses on a love story in a single-family home. Leo, a successful music producer struggling with addiction, begins a relationship with Layla, a passionate but enigmatic physical therapist.
There is no casting news for The echo chamberwhich is about to announce an Italian director for the project.
Also in Toronto, Italian director Enrico Parenti seeks international collaborators for the documentary Nanyang, on the daughter of former Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong. Her father, Li Rui, wrote a diary now in the possession of Stanford University and the subject of a lawsuit filed by the current government in China to keep it hidden.
“China is sitting on a tightly controlled house of cards and the ideas it is propagating around the world could collapse,” Parenti said if a U.S. court rules that the diaries can be made public. The 90-minute documentary from Elliot Films in Italy already has co-production partners in Denmark’s Final Cut for Real and funding from Arte France and Rai Italia.
Nanyang It centers on Nanyang Li, who went from the corridors of power in Beijing during Mao's reign, where her father was eventually purged, to becoming a self-taught mechanical engineer at CERN and Berkeley.
“It's the story of a person who believes in the illusion of the utopia of those early years of communism and then slowly realizes that the system didn't work and that his father, who had criticized Mao, was right,” Parenti explained.
On Saturday, he and Iorini took part in the Spotlight Italy co-production forum at TIFF, organized by the Italian Trade Commission, Cinecittà and Telefilm Canada, among others. “Film, documentary, animation co-productions and other collaborations are a growing and promising area of cooperation between our two countries,” said Luca Zeiloli, Italy’s general counsel in Toronto.