Fans of The Name of The Rose author Umberto Eco turned out in NYC, boosting the documentary on medieval scholar turned novelist and social commentator to over $9.1k on one screen – a nice showing by The Cinema Guild for a foreign language documentary on a solid weekend for some indie and arthouse fare.
Umberto Eco: A Library Of The World explores the life and work of the famed Italian writer and semiotics professor, whose bestselling novel was turned into a 1986 film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater as a medieval monk detective and his apprentice.
Director Davide Ferrario, who worked with Eco a year before the writer’s death on a video project for the 2015 Venice Biennale, gained access to his Milanese library of more than 30,000 contemporary books and 1,500 rare and antique volumes. In the doc, the prolific author and original thinker, who has waxed eloquent on blue jeans and comic books, holds forth on the value low-brow books, the origins of fascism, the psychology of conspiracy theorists and brilliant mistakes in history.
Ferrario was in NYC this weekend for the opening at Film Forum, and for shooting on the third in a trilogy of literary documentaries, this latest on Italo Calvino. His 2006 film, Primo Levi’s Journey (La Strada Di Levi), retraces the steps of Italian scientist and writer as he and other Auschwitz survivors set off on an eight-month trek home to Turin in 1945. Levi’s words, mainly from his book La Tregua (The Reawakening), describe what he experienced.
Focus Features continued its theatrical release of Asteroid City into week three at an expanded 1,900 theaters and a no. 9 ranking at the box office with a projected three-day gross of $3.8 million. The Wes Anderson comedy set at the Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention in a fictional American desert town circa 1955 is looking at per theater average of $2k and estimated domestic cume of $18.1 million.
Focus also premiered the documentary Every Body. Julie Cohen’s exploration of the experience of intersex individual, took in $145K at 225 theaters. NY and LA were the film’s strongest markets followed by Chicago, Boston and Austin. That’s a PTA of $569 for the Tribeca Festival-debuting doc produced in partnership with NBC Studios. Great reviews (100% Rotten Tomatoes critic’s score), tough topic, the film follows actor and screenwriter River Gallo, political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel, and Ph.D. student Sean Saifa Wall, now leaders in a fast-growing global movement advocating for greater understanding of the intersex community and an end to unnecessary surgeries.
A24’s Celine Song holdover Past Lives continued a strong runwith an estimated three-day weekend of nearly $1.55 million on 906 screens in week five. Grosses projected through July 4 Tuesday will bring the cume $6.58+ million, with the best same-theater hold in the top 20, the distributor said, as it plans to continue its theatrical run through the summer and beyond.
Music Box Films’ Revoir Paris grossed a projected $6.4k on three screens for a PSA of $2,121. The Cannes 2022-premiering French drama by Alice Winocur, starring Virginie Efira, has a projected cume of $120.4k in week 3.