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Oscar-winning French director Luc Jacquet (“March of the Penguins”) will be honored by the Locarno Film Festival with its Locarno Kids Award celebrating a film personality who has brought the magic of movies to younger audiences.

“Luc Jacquet’s gaze has followed the perspective of the plant and animal kingdoms through his many voyages to the Antarctic or into forests both remote and close to home,” the Swiss festival dedicated to indie cinema said in a statement. It pointed out that this year’s prize “goes to a filmmaker who has consistently conveyed a powerful ecological message to younger generations of cinema lovers.”

The French biologist and filmmaker has made hugely popular nature documentaries such as “Penguins,” watched by more than 25 million people worldwide since its 2006 release, and “Once Upon a Forest” in 2013 and “Ice and the Sky” (2015). He also helmed a fiction feature “The Fox & the Child” (2007).

Jacquet...

Luc Jacquet, the Oscar-winning French director of March of the Penguins, will be honored with the 2023 Locarno Kids Award, an honor celebrating a film personality who has brought cinema to younger audiences, giving them “a sense of discovery about the big screen.”

Jacquet will receive his award in Locarno on Aug. 7, ahead of an open-air screening of March of the Penguins on Locarno’s legendary Piazza Grande. Jacquet will also take part in a panel discussion on Aug. 8. Locarno will screen a selection of Jacquet’s other films, which include documentaries Once Upon a Forest, 2015’s Ice and the Sky and Penguins sequel Penguins 2: The Next Step (2017), as well as the 2007 feature The Fox & the Child.

“Luc Jacquet is a director who has masterfully woven together the magical charm of observation and the pure poetry of storytelling, taking our gaze to dimensions of the planet never before explored,...

Morgan Freeman-narrated original won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2006.

Paris-based Bonne Pioche has released first images of Luc Jacquet’s March Of The Penguin 2 – The Call, the sequel to the Oscar-winning documentary that made $127.4m at the box office following its release in 2005.

Jacquet spent two months shooting mainly in 4K in Antarctica last winter using submarines and drones.

The narrator has yet to be confirmed. Morgan Freeman did the voiceover for the the original documentary.

This new story follows a young penguin about to embark on his first journey, driven by the mysterious instinctual call that pushes every penguin when winter comes to leave for an unknown destination.

Bonne Pioche – which produced March Of The Penguins, The Fox And The Child, Once Upon A Forest – is lead producing with Paprika Films in association with Wild Touch and Disney France.

Wild Bunch has launched sales in Cannes and handles all world rights apart from France and the...

Documentary revolves around actor’s 2014 return to the boxing ring in Moscow.

Paris-based sales company Versatile has acquired world sales rights to French photographer and director Richard Aujard’s bio-doc Guapo Siempre, a portrait of Mickey Rourke’s return to the boxing ring in Moscow in 2014.

The film, which is in post-production, follows actor and retired boxer Rourke as he prepares at the age of 62 to take on a fighter half his age in a special boxing exhibition in the Russian capital, after a 20-year absence from the ring.

A few days before the fight, Rourke’s beloved dog Guapo dies, plunging the boxer into a mystical state for his comeback fight.

Aujard, who is a long-time acquaintance of Rourke, captures the actor-boxer as he looks back over his life and career.

“The film will be ready for this summer,” said Versatile co-chief Pape Boye. “It’s very cinematic but one of the things that makes it particularly...

Marion Cotillard on how she met Luc Jacquet: "I wanted to make a movie on the forest. Luc heard about it. It's called Il Était Une Forêt, Once Upon A Forest…" Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In my conversation with Luc Jacquet on Wild-Touch and his documentary Ice And The Sky about the work of glaciologist Claude Lorius, which had its World Premiere as the closing film of the Cannes Film Festival, he mentioned a director who first encouraged him to make films. His name is Hans-Ulrich Schlumpf, the director of Der Kongress der Pinguine.

It was good advice for Luc, who became the director of March Of The Penguins (La Marche De L'Empereur), The Fox And The Child (Le Renard Et L'Enfant), narrated by Kate Winslet, and Il Était Une Forêt (Once Upon A Forest) on botanist and ecologist Francis Hallé.

Marion Cotillard at the launch of Ice & Sky: "I've...

Eco documentary is from the Oscar-winning director of March of the Penguins.

The 68th Cannes Film Festival (May 13-24) is to close with documentary Ice and the Sky, from Luc Jacquet, director of the Oscar-winning March of the Penguins.

The film explores the scientific discoveries of Claude Lorius, who traveled to study the Antarctic ice in 1957 and was the first to be concerned by global warming and its consequences for the planet in 1965.

Jacquet said its selection presented “a huge opportunity” for the eco message of the film. “Showing this film at the world’s largest film festival is contributing to the huge challenge facing humanity, which has to act as quickly as possible to secure its future and the future of the planet,” said the director.

Jacquet’s films have all focussed on the environment and nature issues from March of the Penguins, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2006, to The Fox and the Child (2007) and...

Devour the turkeys and gobble up the crackers with our guide to the best films showing on the television over the 2010 festive period. Stock up on the popcorn now, or else it'll be leftover sprouts to munch on...

Christmas Eve - Friday, 24 December Kick off the magical day with a very special and entrancing movie for all the family in the shape of The Fox And The Child (10am, BBC2) - but have a few tissues on standby! The same could apply to any anti-monarchists who encounter the beguiling charms of Helen Mirren as The Queen (3pm, ITV1), a dramatic tour de force that also features Michael Sheen in familiar guise as Tony Blair. If solid Christmassy fare is needed, then check out the classic Alastair Sim version of Scrooge (4pm, Channel 5). Or if you don't want any young relatives 'bah humbugging' for the rest of the day, then plonk...

After a mention that an unproduced Kubrick project was going to see the light of day, another filmmaking legend might be making a comeback from the dead. After a mostly dormant film career over the past two decades, Gérard Corbiau, best known for 1994's Farinelli, is according to Production Weekly, going to direct Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen & Cliff Curtis in The Dreamers (expect a title change) - which is according to recent legend, Orson Welles' unfinished last project. - After a mention that an unproduced Kubrick project was going to see the light of day, another filmmaking legend might be making a comeback from the dead. After a mostly dormant film career over the past two decades, Gérard Corbiau, best known for 1994's Farinelli, is according to Production Weekly, going to direct Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen & Cliff Curtis in The Dreamers (expect a title change) -...

After a mention that an unproduced Kubrick project was going to see the light of day, another filmmaking legend might be making a comeback from the dead. After a mostly dormant film career over the past two decades, Gérard Corbiau, best known for 1994's Farinelli, is according to Production Weekly, going to direct Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen & Cliff Curtis in The Dreamers (expect a title change) - which is according to recent legend, Orson Welles' unfinished last project. - After a mention that an unproduced Kubrick project was going to see the light of day, another filmmaking legend might be making a comeback from the dead. After a mostly dormant film career over the past two decades, Gérard Corbiau, best known for 1994's Farinelli, is according to Production Weekly, going to direct Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen & Cliff Curtis in The Dreamers (expect a title change) - which is according to recent legend,...

Beneath the saccharine surface of this summer's kiddie-pleaser lurks a darkly subversive message

These days, U-certificated celluloid is hard to come by. As the school holidays drag on, the local multiplex offers all too little succour to harassed mums desperate for something to do with their broods on rainy afternoons. To them, The Fox and the Child must look like a godsend indeed.

Here be no naughty words, scantily-clad trollops or grinning posthumous Oscar candidates menacingly extolling knife crime. A freckly little girl makes friends with a foxy-woxy, amidst fairytale Eurocountryside. Oh, how happily they play together, for what seems like more than a lifetime. Eventually, however, a moral surfaces. As long as Beauty confines herself to merely toying with the Beast's savage affections, all is well. But, once she (literally) hugs it to her bosom and (literally) invites it into her bedroom, chaos breaks out, and near-tragedy ensues. Wildness,...

NEW YORK -- Producer Linda Saetre is launching her own New York-based production, sales and distribution outfit, Saetre Film.

One of the first features the company will executive produce and distribute is On the Trail of the Fox, a docu about the making of Luc Jacquet's upcoming Picturehouse nature fable The Fox and the Child.

Saetre previously headed the New York office of Paris-based producer Bonne Pioche (Jacquet's March of the Penguins). She will continue co-producing select films with Bonne Pioche, and her company will handle sales for select TV shows docus.

She is now developing a Bonne Pioche/Sundance Channel feature docu Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare as executive producer.

NEW YORK -- The Fox & the Child, Luc Jacquet's follow-up to his monster hit documentary March of the Penguins, has been acquired for U.S. distribution by Picturehouse.

Jacquet's fable combines narrative storytelling with docu footage to tell the tale of a young girl who follows a fox into the woods outside her home. Based on Jacquet's experiences as a child, the English-language film will use an adult female narrator to relate the events as her childhood story.

Picturehouse president Bob Berney said that because there is very little onscreen dialogue, he may hire a well-known actress to provide the voiceover and shoot her in new scenes for the feature.

The $13 million-plus feature began principal photography last March in France, Italy and Romania after some initial nature shoots, and the filmmakers hope to complete it in time for this May's Festival de Cannes. The Bonne Pioche film is produced by Yves Darondeau, Christophe Lioud and Emmanuel Priou, the team behind Penguins.

Jacquet used a combination of real foxes and a trained fox to work with the young star, Bertille Noel-Bruneau.