Hunt will direct "The Double Hour" remake, says Marantonio

(AGI) Rome, April 19 - The U.S. remake of Giuseppe Capotondi's groundbreaking 2009 movie, 'The Double Hour' ('La doppia ora'), will be made and directed by Courtney Hunt, who won multiple awards for her debut film 'Frozen River' in 2008. The news was revealed to AGI by Giulio Marantonio, a 32-year-old Italian producer who has been working in Los Angeles for a decade and was Executive Producer of 'Kicks', which opened the Tribeca Film Festival. "With Nicola Giuliano of Indigo Film, who produced Paolo Sorrentino's 'The Great Beauty' and 'Youth', we will now film the remake of the Italian thriller 'The Double Hour', which was very well-received abroad," Marantonio affirmed. "We've worked on this film for a long time and an opportunity finally presented itself with Courtney Hunt directing and a well-known American actress, who I can't talk about yet." 'The Double Hour' was presented at the 66th edition of the Venice Film Festival in 2009 as Giuseppe Capotondi's cinematic debut after years of directing music videos. It features Filippo Timi and Ksenia Rappoport, who won the Volpi Cup award for Best Actress. The film was successful in the U.S., where it made more at the box office than in Italy - 1,515,000 dollars. Marantonio presented 'Kicks', the debut work for director Justin Tipping, at the Tribeca festival in New York. "It was a wonderful evening, the cinema was packed," he told AGI. "The film was a hit, the audience seemed enthusiastic. Tipping is a young and talented filmmaker and his short movie, 'Nani', was nominated for an Academy Award. For 'Kicks', we decided to place emerging actors like Jahking Guillory, Christopher Meyer, Christopher Jordan Wallace, and Kofi Siriboe side by side with experienced actors such as Mahershala Ali. It looks like that paid off," he added. Following its success at the Tribeca, where host Robert De Niro recommended it as the "portrait of a young man drowning in the expectations of machismo", Marantonio will handle its distribution - entrusted to Focus - and that of another film he produced, 'Shangri La Suite', starring Luke Grimes, Emily Browning, Ron Livingston and Ashley Greene, which he will distribute with Universal Studios. "The first week of May I'll be on the set of a dramatic movie that focuses on the world of insurance fraud. It will be filmed entirely in the neighbourhood of Brighton Beach, which is only a handful of metro stops from Manhattan but is almost wholly populated by Russians. A surreal place, in other words" he said. "After this film, I'll make Indigo Film's remake of 'The Double Hour' with Nicola Giuliano. We are also developing three more films with Nicola for 2017." Marantonio's field of action, however, is not limited to the U.S.. "I'll film an English-language thriller, 'Goat of Mendes' in Italy; it will be Mauro Loverre's debut as director." (AGI). .