Plus… LA Film Festival announces partnership with ArcLight Cinemas for 2016; Lakeshore, Phantom Four partner on Miles, Seattle grant finalists; Davoli and Davids merge firms.

Havana Motor Club

  • Samuel Goldwyn Films has acquired worldwide rights from Submarine Entertainment and Rosalind Lichter to Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt’s Havana Motor Club (pictured) about underground drag racers in Cuba. The film premiered in Tribeca and will open in 2016.
  • The LA Film Festival produced by Film Independent has announced a partnership with ArcLight Cinemas that will see the 22nd edition of the LA Film Festival take place at ArcLight Cinemas across the city next summer from June 1-9.
  • Paramount Television has closed a two-year overall television deal with Beasts Of No Nation director Cary Fukunaga and his production company Parliament Of Owls. Fukunaga is collaborating with Paramount Television as director and executive producer of The Alienist for TNT. 
  • Benicio del Toro, an awards season contender for Sicario, will take place in an on-stage conversation about his career at AFI FEST on November 7.
  • Lakeshore Entertainment and David S Goyer’s Phantom Four will partner on Miles, a feature that Oliver Daly will direct from his original short and is being billed as a contemporary nod to E.T. about blurring the boundaries of humanity and technology, set in the teenage off-roading motocross world in California.
  • The Seattle International Film Festival has announced its finallists for the 2015 True Productions / SIFF $50,000 Documentary Filmmakers Grant. The finalists are: Big Sonia directed by Leah Warshawski and Todd Soliday; Dying In America, directed by Carolyn Jones and produced by Lisa Frank; Gold Balls by Kate Dandel; and Heaven Through The Back Door directed by Anna Fitch and produced by Banker White.
  • David Davoli and Adam Davids are merging their law practices to form a new firm, Davoli Davids, LLP. The new firm will be focused on representing content creators, startup companies and financiers, with a special focus on film production and advising film and television financiers. Davoli Law Firm has recently represented the producers of Amazon’s Man In The High Castle and A&E’s Bag Of Bones. Adam Davids & Associates previously represented Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa, Kristen Wigg’s Welcome To Me and Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie.
  • Writer-director Stella Meghie’s debut feature Jean Of The Joneses has begun principal photography this week in New York and Toronto (writes Gabrielle Altheim). Newcomer Taylour Paige stars in the story of a dysfunctional Jamaican-African family in New York from Circle Blue Media. Amos Adetuyi is producing with Floyd Kane. Poke Prod principals Sean Dwyer and Elizabeth Cullen serve as executive producers.