Kinoton

Item of the Week: Sad news from the world of motion pictures. Yesterday 35mm film projector manufacturer Kinoton announced they were dissolving the company effective immediately. This leaves only two companies standing: Italy's Cinemeccanica and Japan's Tokiwa … We’ve found out more about Mia Hansen-Løve’s Most-Likely-Coming-Soon-to-a-Film-Festival-on-the-Cote-D’Antibes project about the 1990s DJ scene, which was shooting last fall in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Eden is based on the experiences of the director’s brother Sven, a superstar of the “French Touch” DJ scene, who co-wrote the film. Hansen sees the film as a break from her previous three films  “carried by a new energy and euphoria. I felt I had to come to grips with this other side of my youth, a brighter side, tied to Sven’s music events, which I often went to.”  It’s a tale of success, euphoria, drugs, death, and downfall that coincides with the decline of the analog record industry featuring a cast of more or less unknowns with Félix de Givry (who had a small role in Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air) as Sven, plus rising star Vincent Lacoste, man-of-the-moment Vincent Macaigne, Laura Smet, and inevitably, Greta Gerwig …

Terry Jones

Monty Python’s Terry Jones is now shooting Absolutely Anything, his first film since The Wind in the Willows in 1996. It’s being described as a “high-concept comedy” in which extraterrestrials set the human race a moral test by selecting one individual and giving them the power to do anything they wish. And that individual is a schoolteacher played by Simon Pegg, who co-stars with Kate Beckinsale, Eddie Izzard, and the ever-fragrant Joanna Lumley. But there’s more! Jones has persuaded the remaining members of Monty Python to supply the aliens’ voices. Per Jones, “John Cleese voices the chief alien, Mike Palin voices the kindly alien, Terry Gilliam voices the nasty alien, and I voiced the scientific alien.” (Eric Idle’s voice will also feature somewhere.) …

Phillippe Garrell

The next film from Philippe Garrel will be L’Ombre des femmes which centers on a love triangle. It stars Stanislas Merhar, Clotilde Courau, and Lena Paugam; Garrel co-wrote it with Jean-Claude Carrière, Caroline Deruas, and Arlette Langmann … Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s next project is La Femme de la plaque argentique, a fantasy to be filmed in France … Miguel Gomes is in preproduction on A Thousand and One Nights. Other new projects on the launching pad: Louder Than Bombs from Joachim Trier, Babi Yar by Sergeï Loznitsa, Winter Sleep by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Francofonia, le Louvre sous l’occupation by Aleksandr Sokurov …

George Clooney Coen Brothers

Hail Caesar: yes, that’s the title of the latest collaboration between Joel and Ethan Coen and George Clooney, who plays a silent-film star acting in an epic set in ancient Rome. Ethan Coen claims “it’s about the movie business and life and hope and faith,” but it’s also the conclusion of a supposed Numbskull Trilogy that began with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty …  Ryan Gosling is planning to produce and star in a Busby Berkeley biopic based on Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley by Jeffrey Spivak … Returning once again to the workaday lives of North Africans in modern France, Philippe Faucon will make Fatima, an adaptation of Prière à la Lune, an autobiographical novel by Fatima Elayoubi about the life of a cleaning lady raising two teenage daughters born in France …

Jason Osder

Let the Fire Burn director Jason Osder is developing his next project, the intriguingly untitled “Untitled Cold Case Film,” to be co-directed by Will Youmans. Osder shared a few more details with us: the film's actual title is likely to be Who Killed Alex Odeh? On October 11, 1985, Arab-American activist Alex Odeh was killed in the bombing of the west-coast headquarters of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Today, a  vanguard of young activists seeks justice … Director and cinematographer Daniele Ciprì’s next film will be La buca (The Hole) a black comedy with a social undertow starring Sergio Castellitto, Rocco Papaleo, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi … And rejoice: Pixar genius Brad Bird is working on a sequel to The Incredibles …