Malcolm McDowell-Narrated Wine Doc
EXCLUSIVE: Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange) is narrating observational documentary A Wonderful Kingdom, about Portugal’s Douro Valley’s wine region. Set in the mountains of Portugal, the film is a homage to those who take part in the annual harvesting of the season’s grapes, generations-old families who pick, carry and stomp their way through September with blood-red feet, stained by grape juice. The film is set to prose by the poet Miguel Torga. A digital release is coming via Giant Pictures on September 1. Carlos Carneiro directs for Vacationland Studio.
Canadian Indie Pic Begins
EXCLUSIVE: Principal photography has begun on Sheila Pye’s directorial debut The Young Arsonists. The film will shoot through to the first week of September on location in Caledonia, Ontario. Pic follows four teenage girls during a 1980s summer of discovery, arson, friendship and death. Set amongst the sparse landscape of an isolated farming community, the girls band together to escape their desolate lives by reclaiming an abandoned farmhouse as their own. Cast includes Maddy Martin, Jenna Warren, Sadie Rose and Madison Baines. The film will also feature performances by Aaron Poole, Miranda Calderon, Joe Bostick, Kyle Meagher and Canadian opera singer Measha Brueggergosman. Producers are former TIFF programmer Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo of Borrowed Light Films and Sonya Di Rienzo and Aeschylus Poulos of Hawkeye Pictures. Martin Katz and Karen Wookey serve as executive producers. The film was developed with the assistance of The Harold Greenberg Fund and produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada, Ontario Creates, Crave and The Shaw Rocket Fund. “The Young Arsonists is unapologetic in its examination of these young women,” said director Sheila Pye. “The characters create their own utopian society free from the constraints of predominantly patriarchal rules, traditional gender roles and dissemination of power.”
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