Bernardo Bertolucci’s Unfinished Film ‘The Echo Chamber’ Being Shopped at Toronto Film Festival

Italian screenwriters Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi have completed the screenplay for The Echo Chamber, the unfinished project by Bernardo Bertolucci he worked on before his death.

Italian producer Indigo Films acquired the dramatic feature in 2018 and now has the project in active development and being shopped for co-production partners at the Toronto Film Festival. Bernardini penned the Italian series Corpo Libero and Rampoldi was a writer on Max’s Gomorrah gangster drama.

Bernardini and Rampoldi wrote the first draft of the screenplay for The Echo Chamber with Bertolucci, and have finished the screenplay. Carolina Iorio is producing the $6 million English language feature that centers on a love story in a single house. Leo, a successful music producer struggling with addiction, starts a relationship with Layla, a passionate, yet enigmatic physiotherapist.

There’s no word on casting for The Echo Chamber, as talks on an Italian director for the project continue.

Also in Toronto, Italian director Enrico Parenti is looking for international collaborators for the documentary Nanyang, about the daughter of former Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong. Her father, Li Rui, wrote a diary now in the hands of Stanford University and the subject of a lawsuit by the current government in China to keep the document under wraps.

“China stands on a very tightly-controlled house of cards and the ideas they’re propagating worldwide might fall,” Parenti explained should a U.S. court rule the diaries can be made public. The 90-minute documentary from Elliot Films in Italy already has co-production partners in Denmark’s Final Cut for Real, and financing from Arte France and Rai Italy.

Nanyang centers on Nanyang Li, who went from the halls of power in Beijing during Mao’s reign, where her father was eventually purged, to becoming a self-trained mechanical engineer at CERN and Berkeley.

“It’s the story of someone who believes in the illusion of utopia of those early years of communism and then slowly realized that the system wasn’t working and that her father, who had criticized Mao, was right,” Parenti explained.

He and Iorini on Saturday took part in the Spotlight Italy co-production forum at TIFF, organized by the Italian Trade Commission, Cinecitta and Telefilm Canada, among others. “Movies, documentary , animation co-productions and other collaborations are a growing and promising sector of cooperation between our two countries,” Luca Zeiloli, counsel general of Italy in Toronto, explained.