HBO Max Drops Trailer for First Italian Original ‘Portobello’
HBO Max launches today in Italy and several Italian originals will soon follow, the most notable of which is Marco Bellocchio’s limited series ‘Portobello’, which recreates one of the country’s loudest travesties of justice.
The HBO Max streaming service will also launch today, January 13, in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein.
“Portobello” – to which Variety has been given exclusive trailer access – is the true story of popular Italian TV host Enzo Tortora who, among other programs, conducted a primetime game show of the same title that aired for seven seasons on Italian state broadcaster RAI from 1977. The six-episode show is a vivid account of how Tortora rose from a top-rated TV star in 1985 to a wrongful conviction for conspiring with the Neapolitan crime syndicate known as Camorra.
Tortora is played by Bellocchio’s frequent collaborator Fabrizio Gifuni, who starred as former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in Bellocchio’s previous limited TV series “Exterior Night,” about the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of the country’s leader by Red Brigades terrorists.
“Portobello,” which premiered last September to positive reviews at the Venice Film Festival and traveled to Toronto and Busan, will be HBO’s first original Italian production to launch on the HBO Max streaming platform in Italy on February 20.
The series is produced by Our Films, owned by Mediawan, and Kavav Film, in co-production with
Arte France and in collaboration with RAI Fiction and The Apartment Pictures, a Fremantle company.
The film is produced by Lorenzo Mieli and Mario Gianani for Our Films, and by Simone Gattoni for Kavac Film.
Bellocchio’s series is expected to be available on HBO Max worldwide in the coming months, including the US, UK, Latin America and Europe, excluding France and Germany.
Other notable Italian HBO Max originals in the pipeline include “In Utero,” a series set in a fertility clinic in Barcelona starring Sergio Castellitto (“Conclave”), directed by Maria Sole Tognazzi (“Petra”), and produced by ITV-owned Cattleya in association with Paramount Television International Studio. The line-up also includes previously announced docuseries ‘Gina Lollobrigida: Diva Contesa’, which exposes the struggle for the cinema icon’s legacy, and ‘Saman’, which shows the struggle of a young Pakistani woman who was murdered by her own family in northern Italy for refusing an arranged marriage.
Watch the trailer for “Portobello” here:
