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Italy’s PiperFilm has sold North America rights for Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’sVenice competition title Diva Futurato Breaking Glass Pictures.

A fictional biopic about the birth of Italy’s porn industry in the 1980s and 90s, the film centres on Italian pornography pioneer Riccardo Schicchi and his agency Diva Futura whose stars included Cicciolina, the Hungarian-Italian porn star, member of parliament and former wife of Jeff Koons, as well as Moana Pozzi and Eva Henger.

The film stars Pietro Castellitto, Barbara Ronchi, Denise Capezza, Tesa Litvan and Lidija Kordic.

Diva Futura is produced by Banijay’s Groenlandia and PiperFilm with...

The 2024 Venice Film Festival kicked off August 28 with the long-awaited Tim Burton-Michael Keaton sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opening the 81th edition, which runs through September 7 on the Lido. Deadline is on the ground to watch all the key films.

The lineup for the world’s oldest fest also includes world premieres of Todd Phillips’ Joaquin Phoenix-Lady Gaga pic Joker: Folie à Deux, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, Pablo Larrain’s Maria Callas biopic Maria starring Angelina Jolie and new works from the likes of Alfonso Cuarón, Walter Salles, Harmony Korine, Thomas Vinterberg, Brady Corbet, Takeshi Kitano, Claude Lelouch, Errol Morris and others.

Below is a compilation of our reviews from the fest, which last year awarded its Golden Lion for best film to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, starring Emma Stone, who went on the win the Best Actress Oscar. Isabelle Huppert heads the competition jury this year.

Porn king Riccardo Schicchi was, according to Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s bubbly, shallow “Diva Futura,” named after Schicchi’s now-defunct multimedia adult-entertainment enterprise, a really sweet guy. Moreover, the film insists, his vision for pornography was similarly wholesome: a means to liberate prudish late-20th century Italian society by celebrating the beauty of women as he saw it — with the dazzled, goofy gaze of the permanent adolescent peering through an uncurtained bedroom window.

But what may have been charmingly unworldly in a man becomes disingenuously simplistic in a film that refuses to really look into the forces that propelled his giddy rise and blameless fall, just as Schicchi, gifted a peeping-Tom telescope by his porn-positive dad as a kid, could look away when the women were clothed, or the curtains were closed.

Confusingly, and with no real reason, the movie hops about in time, so we begin in the middle...

Harking back to a simpler, more innocent time, when porn stars got elected to Parliament and the “sexual revolution” was still shiny and new, the comic-tragic feature Diva Futura pays tribute to the Italian adult entertainment empire of the same name and the colorful characters who founded and worked for it. Comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s similarly themed Boogie Nights (1997) will be inevitable and probably not flatter the much messier, less bravura Diva Futura. Nevertheless, writer-director Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s (Settembre) sophomore effort definitely has its moments and some standout performances.

Moreover, most of the characters met here — such as La Cicciolina (Lidija Kordic), aka Ilona Staller, the porn-star politician, and her tragic fellow star Moana Pozzi (Denise Capezza) — correspond to real-life figures. Only insiders from that time will know exactly how much of this movie (and the memoir by Debora Attanasio on which it’s based) is true.

There are two kinds of pornography, according to movie mythology. One kind is sordid, exploitative, and supported by shady money and even shadier characters. Then there is the cuddly, family kind, as fluffy and innocently randy as a burrow full of bunnies, that flourished on video before the horrible internet spoiled everything and made porn rapey. Italian director Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s Diva Futura returns us to this Eden of sex tapes and strippers in a scattergun biopic of Riccardo Schicchi, impresario of club, talent farm and film production house Diva Futura. You can decide how much to believe.

As a boy in the 1960s, Schicchi tells his new secretary Debora (Barbara Ronchi) that he never grasped the first principles of machismo. Bullied by other little boys, by day he enjoyed giggling with the girls at school. By night, his father would lend him his binoculars to spy on women through their windows,...