EXCLUSIVE: In the wake of their Cannes Best Director winning Fatherland, Italian-based producers Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli and their Our Films banner are teaming with Oscar nominated and Cannes- winning filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher on the feature take of Italo Calvino’s 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees.
The UTA repped Rohrwacher will adapt and direct the Viareggio Prize-winning book which follows a young Baron, little Cosimo, who is bulled by his older sister and tired of his distinguished role. He decides to climb a tree and never set foot on the ground again. There’s only been one previous adaptation of the famed Italian author Calvino’s work, that being the 1969 movie, The Nonexistent Knight directed by Pino Zac.
Rohrwacher, who was Oscar-nominated in the 2023 live-action shorts category for the Disney+ title Il Pupille, is currently in production on the feature adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling novel Three Incestuous Sisters with Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan, Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor starring. Of her Cannes canon, she helmed 2011’s Heavenly Body which premiered at Director’s Fortnight, 2014’s The Wonders which won the Grand Prix, 2017’s, Happy as Lazzaro which delivered her the fest’s best screenplay prize, as well as 2023’s in-competition La Chimera starring O’Connor and Isabella Rossellini. Last year, Rohrwacher won a European Film Academy Achievement in World Cinema.
The Mediawan owned Our Films continues to be a destination for auteurs making foreign language and English-speaking films and TV series for a global audience. For a U.S. distributor, the black-and-white Thomas Mann biopic Fatherland would be extremely risky, however, Our Films working in conjunction under their newly re-upped financing and distribution deal with Mubi, minimizes downside in an it-takes-a-village approach, attaching myriad European foreign partners who can capitalize the project in their respective territories (many sold by Mubi’s Match Factory).
On Pawlikowski’s 3x Oscar-nominated black and white 2018 feature Cold War, the filmmaker’s homeland of Poland was the highest grossing territory in reported grosses with $4.8M, followed by France with $2.7M, Spain $1.5M, UK at $1.4M, Italy at $1.3M and Netherlands at $1.2M. U.S. was the second highest grossing territory behind Poland with $4.5M.
“We’re trying to maximize the space for specialty movies,” Mieli tells Deadline, “The goal is to reach the specific target audience in each country.”
“We have to find solutions.” says Gianani about mounting autuer foreign pics in today’s fierce theatrical and streaming ecosystem, “We’re pragmatic and find financial solutions and with Mubi we invented a model that didn’t exist before.”
Our Films isn’t just a mere bridge financier, rather they find material, develop it closely with the filmmaker and scribes (the producing duo have a penchant for bestselling literary novels having catapulted Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend into a global HBO Max hit) before taking it out to other financial and producing partners, sometimes within the Mediawan empire. Our Films keeps an equity stake.
In the case of Fatherland, Our Films had a history with the Cannes-winning Pawlikowski. He co-penned the script for the 2024 Cannes title Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie with the pic’s director Kirill Serebrennikov. In addition, Gianani and Mieli were involved in shepherding the filmmaker’s feature film, The Island, however that production was dashed due to the 2023 U.S. SAG and WGA strikes.
The duo sent Pawlikowski Colm Tóibín’s biography of Thomas Mann, The Magician.
“After we read the book, the first person we thought of was Pawel,” said Gianani, “He read the book in two days.”
“With Limonov, he turned a large biography into a fantastic script. His ability to synthesize complexity is amazing,” says Gianani on why Pawlikowski was the right director for the IP.
Fatherland
Agata Grzybowska.
Pawlikowski initially turned down the opportunity to adapt the book into a full-on biographical film of Mann’s life. However, he was inspired by one particular episode – Mann’s return to Germany in 1949 with his spitfire and worldly daughter Erika (played by Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller in the pic). Pawlikowski proceeded to re-imagine the event as a five-day road trip, and was assisted by Henk Handloegten, to fashion a very personal and largely fictional story.
Our Films then brought the German production company Nine Hours on board and invited Ewa Puszczyńska of the Polish company Extreme Emotions, Pawlikowski’s long-time producer, to join the project. The decision was subsequently made to shoot the film in Poland. Dimitri Rassam’s Chapter 2 and Lorenzo Gangarossa of Circle one completed the line-up of producing collaborators.
At that stage, Our Films signed a contract to develop the script and began working on the overall financing structure of the film. Around the same time, Our Films had just entered into a financing and distribution pact with Mubi. Together, they worked closely to assemble the financing and move the project forward in a very short timeframe. Fatherland is eyeing a theatrical release in the near future in Poland with a North American bow sometime in the fall timed to awards season.
Our Films’ next project with Mubi is the feature Let Love In starring Luca Marinelli and Charlotte Vandermeersch from 2022 Cannes Jury Prize winning The Eight Mountains filmmaker Felix van Groeningen. That pic is largely an Italian-Belgin co-production.
Other recent Our Films projects include the HBO Max Italian series Portobello from filmmaker Marco Bellocchio. The series tells the story of Enzo Tortora, the famous host of the television program Portobello, who was accused by some for being part of a Camorra organization dedicated to drug trafficking. Our Films also has Feel My Voice, the Italian adaptation of France’s La Famille Bélier.
Our Films recently renewed their financing and distribution agreement with Mubi which was first inked in 2025. Paris-based Entourage Ventures has also teamed with Our Films to invest in movies they produce in collaboration with Mubi.
