‘Senna’ Producer Gullane Preps Sequel to Animated Film ‘Noah’s Ark’ (EXCLUSIVE)

São Paulo-based production company Gullane, responsible for the upcoming Netflix series “Senna,” has begun development on a sequel to the animated film “Noah’s Ark.”

Produced by Gullane and Walter Salles’ Videofilmes, “Noah’s Ark” has been sold to 45 countries through Edward Noeltner’s CMG Management. It has grossed $4.25 million in the territories where it has been released.

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Imagem Filmes will show “Noah’s Ark” in Brazil on more than 1,000 screens, a huge distribution in a country with 3,300 screens. Rodrigo Santoro, Alice Braga and Julio Andrade are among a cast full of Brazilian voices. It looks to be the biggest release ever of a Brazilian film in Brazil, said Fabiano Gullane Variety from Toronto, where the company will host the world premiere of Fernando Coimbra’s “Carnival Is Over.”

“Noah’s Ark” is inspired by classic nursery rhymes by Bossa Nova pioneer Vinicius de Moraes. The 3D animated film focuses on two male mice, Vini and Tito, who sneak onto Noah’s Ark, despite the fact that there is only one male and one female of each species on the map.

The sequel will pick up the story of Vini and Tito and the female mouse Nina, plus the other ark animals, once they land on dry land. Sergio Machado, co-director of the original with Alois Di Leo, is currently writing a screenplay for the sequel. Gullane is also planning a TV series based on the same characters “but a little bit simplified and maybe in 2D,” Fabiano Gullane said.

Le Pacte in France, Beta Fiction in Spain and IDC in Spanish-speaking Latin America are counting on the film’s original distributors. Major territories available for sale include the US, Canada, the UK, Germany and Japan.

Produced by Fabiano and Caio Gullane and directed by Vicente Amorim, whose credits include “Good” with Viggo Mortensen and “Yakuza Princess,” and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, “Senna” was created in collaboration with the Senna family. The eight-episode fictional miniseries follows Senna’s personality and personal relationships, from his move to the United Kingdom in 1981 to race with a Formula Ford team to becoming the youngest three-time Formula One champion and the fateful San Marino Grand Prix in 1994.

Netflix will release the six-part film “Senna” worldwide on November 29.

That’s the busiest month ever for Gullane, whose 66 features range from his first fiction film, Lais Bodanzky’s 2001 “Brainstorm,” which introduced Rodrigo Santoro, to Hector Babenco’s Oscar-nominated “Carandiru,” to Fernando Coimbra’s “A Wolf at the Door,” hailed as one of the decade’s most promising debuts, to 2015’s Sundance winner “Second Mother” and Karim Aïnouz’s 2024 Cannes competition entry “Motel Destino.”

“Carnival is Over,” Coimbra’s second Brazilian feature, is Gullane’s seventh feature in Toronto. Sold by France’s Playtime, it weighs in as a tellingly fitting transposition of “Macbeth’s” themes of hubristic ambition and a self-destructive vortex of violence to the tropical context of Rio de Janeiro, its carnivals and the jogo de bicho illegal gambling mafia.

Leandra Leal, who won Best Actress at the Rio de Janeiro Film Festival for her lead role in “A Wolf at a Door,” plays Regina, who incites her husband Valerio (Irandhir Santos) to murder his uncle. The plan is intended to quickly escape the mafia’s silence. But it takes the couple deeper.

“Fernando is one of the best screenwriters and directors in Brazil,” said Caio Gullane. “This is a powerful film, made in Fernando’s style as a thriller, but it deals with Brazilian politics and especially with family relationships.”

“The Carnival is Over” is produced by Gullane and Portugal’s Fado Filmes and is a co-production of Globo Filmes, Telecine, Pavuna Pictures, TC Filmes, Playtime and Paris Filmes. The film will hit Brazilian theaters on November 21, after the Rio Festival’s Premiere Brazil competition opens.

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