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The one-question-poll
Our pick of the week today is from a debut filmmaker, and how about the UK’s own media merger, the takeover of All3Media - much more on that below!
Right now though, we’re going to dive straight in to a one-question-poll about the area of filmmaking you would like to know more about.
Over the years we’ve been lucky enough to host the movie industry in some epic spots around the world. Our community are film and tv lovers and a happy mix of the indie industry in all its forms.
We’d be thrilled to find out exactly what more you’d like to know about in the filmmaking process. It’ll help shape the sort of info we can pass along, behind-the-scenes like…
Please do vote below…
Which area of filmmaking would you really like to understand more about?
Really appreciate you taking part in this one.
Banijay swallows All3Media for a cool $8bill
So I feel like the indie giants just got a little less indie, and a lot more giant.
It's done: Banijay Entertainment and RedBird IMI-owned All3Media have closed their $8 billion merger, creating what the pair reckon is the biggest independent production company on the planet.
Despite Banijay's Parisian roots, the combined outfit, keeping the Banijay Entertainment name, will be run out of London, a decent shot in the arm for the UK's creative sector. It's a 50/50 split between Banijay Group and RedBird IMI, consolidated by the former. Jeff Zucker chairs.
The logic’s gotta be scale Big Brother x Peaky Blinders x The Traitors and plenty more. Together the footprint is across 25 territories and one of the industry's deepest catalogues, north of 265,000 hours. On a combined 2025 basis, the new entity would have turned over more than €4.3 billion ($4.9bn), with roughly $57 million in cost synergies penned in within a year.
Zucker framed it as the start of something, and a new heavyweight in the category. Bassetti billed the merged group as a global entertainment force and a natural buyer-up of rivals, with promises of heavier investment in creativity and new talent.
OUR PICK OF THE WEEK
Sophy Romvari's debut belongs to that recent wave of thirtysomething filmmakers sifting through camcorder clips and hazy childhood memory to process grief. But it's no imitator; its somewhere stranger and more daring.
It's auto-fiction, drawn from Romvari's own childhood and built out of her 2020 short Still Processing - the culmination of a decade's work. Late-90s Vancouver Island: eight-year-old Sasha lives with her brothers and troubled older sibling Jeremy in a Hungarian immigrant family just moving into a new house, hoping for a fresh start they won't quite get. The parents slip into their mother tongue when they don't want the kids to follow. Everyone's near breaking point. Jeremy - near-silent the whole way through - grows increasingly erratic and dangerous: shoplifting, vanishing in the rain, punching through windows at night.
Romvari catches how the dysfunction runs along gender lines. Sasha is wounded by Jeremy in a way her brothers aren't; their mother is quietly furious at being the sole disciplinarian while dad retreats into his darkroom.
And then the small mercies. On a beach outing, Jeremy mock-threatens to stomp on Sasha's little stack of stones and shells - before gifting her a shoplifted blue heron keychain to crown it. An act of love from a boy who can't reach anyone.
Then a twenty-year jump to an adult Sasha, now a filmmaker interrogating her brother as a kind of cold case, that makes the whole thing more moving. No neat answers, just rage at him and rage for him. Possibly the most devastating film of the year and, somehow, the most comforting.
See you soon.
Ed
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