Latest in Abel Ferrara

Shia LaBeouf plays the title character in this period piece, and his face dominates the promotional material, but the latest film from the ridiculously prolific Abel Ferrara, now into his 70s, is really more of an ensemble with a supporting cast that's near-unknown outside Italy. Padre Pio, playing in Venice Days at…

Switzerland's Locarno Film festival has unveiled its line-up ahead of a physical 2021 edition running August 4-14. Scroll down for a list of titles. As previously announced, Ferdinando Cito Filomarino's Beckett, starring John David Washington and Alicia Vikander, will open the festival with its world premiere on…

Sometimes controversial director Abel Ferrara addressed the idea of cancel culture in today's world and whether it had become more difficult to make the kinds of films he once did. "It's on the artist to uncancel himself, to come clean with himself," he said. "If you're paranoid about reactions, you shouldn't be…

An iconic filmmaker hailing from the Bronx who currently lives in Rome, Abel Ferrara recently made a pilgrimage back home to shoot The Projectionist, his first New York doc in nearly a decade. Premiering in Tribeca this past week, the film looks back at the heyday of independent film exhibition, through the…

Kino Lorber has acquired North American rights to Abel Ferrara’s drama Pasolini, nearly five years after its world premiere at Venice and subsequent festival slots that year in Toronto and New York. The film, which stars Willem Dafoe, will have its theatrical premiere in New York at The Metrograph on May 10. Leading…

Abel Ferrara, who launched his controversial Gerard Depardieu-starrer Welcome To New York at Cannes last year, will return to announce his plans for his next film. He’ll unveil at a 4 PM Monday press conference Siberia, a film he wrote with Chris Zois that will star Willem Dafoe. Ferrara will announce he’s taking to Ki…

Abel Ferrara's Welcome To New York premiered in Cannes last May as it simultaneously went out on VOD in France in an unconventional release strategy for Wild Bunch. It was downloaded 100K times in the first week and similarly went on to some success in other markets, but the drama is only now getting its Stateside…

When Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome To New York screened in Cannes on Saturday night, Wild Bunch‘s Vincent Maraval was asked about potential lawsuits given the film’s source of inspiration. He responded that the movie was made under American law and had been well vetted by attorneys. But, he tossed out, if anyone wants to…

Abel Ferrara and screenwriter Chris Zois’ Welcome To New York, inspired by the 2011 sex scandal surrounding former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, had its world premiere here in Cannes tonight. Once thought to be a candidate for an Official Selection berth, it instead unspooled in an unofficia…

Drafthouse Films reached back into the vaults to snap up rights to the 1981 revenge thriller Ms. 45, the second film directed by Abel Ferrara after his 1979 horror pic The Driller Killer. The rape and revenge flick follows a mute garment district seamstress (Zoë Lund) who suffers a string of sexual assaults that…

American director Abel Ferrara told France’s Le Monde newspaper that he will make a film about disgraced French politician and former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Gérard Depardieu will play the principal role in the film that will revolve around Strauss-Kahn, who resigned after he was accused of sexually…

EXCLUSIVE: ICM has signed Willem Dafoe, the veteran actor who just wrapped the Andrew Stanton-directed Disney film John Carter, with Taylor Kitsch playing the title character. Dafoe had been repped by WME. Dafoe has been working up a storm. He starred in The Hunter, a film that premiered at Toronto and has been acquire…