EXCLUSIVE: Arrested Industries Talent has signed The Smell of Apples co-writer Christopher Ciancimino and actress-director Bryerly Long.
The talent management division of Anthony Kimble’s Arrested Industries has been building its international talent roster since launching in February, and will represent Ciancimino and Long going forwards.
Ciancimino has over 20 years’ experience in TV and film as a writer and exec, and most recently co-wrote wrote the upcoming adaptation of the acclaimed South African novel The Smell of Apples with John Trengove for Portobello Productions.
His other credits include the Zimbabwean wine-tasting comedy Blind Ambition with co-writer Nathan Boyd for Impact X and Goodgate Media, and producing Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, John Krasinski’s directorial debut, with a cast that included Timothy Hutton, Corey Stoll, Will Forte and Julianne Nicholson. The film was produced by Woodshed Entertainment, a company that Ciancimino co-founded and that was also home to his debut feature, an adaptation of David Gilbert’s novel ‘The Normals’.
He is in development on another, yet-to-be-announced, Portobello Productions project, as well as co-writing a feature with director Stephanie Wang-Breal for Ley Line Entertainment and producer Ted Hope.
Long began her career as an actress. She is known as the first person in the world to star opposite a real android robot, both on stage and in the 2015 feature film Sayonara, which was directed by Cannes-awarded filmmaker Koju Fukada and counted Long as a producer.
She has since produced and directed short films that have played at the likes of the New York Shorts Festival and won awards at the Philip K Dick Film Festival and the Sherman Oaks Film Festival. Her scripts have been in competition at the ScreenCraft Feature Competition and the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards.
Long is American, but speaks fluent Japanese, having previously lived in Tokyo for more than a decade. Arrested has already negotiated a deal for her to write the script for a soon-to-be-announced international feature set partly in Japan and drawing on issues around recent Japanese history. This will mark her debut as a feature film director.
“I am thrilled to welcome Bryerly Long and Christopher Ciancimino to the growing Arrested Industries Talent roster,” said Kimble. “Both are extraordinary talents with distinctive voices, honed from years of working in various roles across the film and television sectors. I am looking forward to raising their profiles still further and helping them to find incredible projects that their involvement will undoubtedly only serve to elevate.”
Arrested Industries Talent will sit within Kimble’s Arrested Industries, the content development, financing and production company he runs out of L.A., London and Cape Town. The well-known international exec launched the talent unit to identify and curate talent from smaller markets and expand their international careers.
The debut roster comprised writer/director Christiaan Olwagen, writer/director/author Etienne Fourie, director Tina Gharavi, Edinburgh Fringe breakout Lyndon Chapman, and actors Daniel Fox, Daniel Schultz and Sam Benjamin, as we revealed earlier this year.
