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LYON, France — Short films by Brady Corbet, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Céline Sciamma are joining the international sales catalogue of Paris-based MK2 Films, which is expanding its collection of lesser-seen works by established filmmakers.

The acquisitions, unveiled during Lyon’s Lumière Film Festival, headed by Cannes director Thierry Frémaux, and its International Classic Film Market (MIFC), span nearly two decades, from Corbet’s 2008 “Protect You + Me” to two recent works: Sciamma’s “Tutti Frutti” and Mendonça Filho’s “South of Tehran.”

The acquisitions are part of a broader push by MK2 Films to develop its short-film catalogue alongside its established feature film business.

“These short films create a dialogue with the feature films of iconic filmmakers represented in the MK2 Films collection, offering a different perspective on their creative vision and cinematic language,” said Frédérique Rouault, head of collections at MK2 Films. “They also open up new programming opportunities for festivals and cinemas, allowing audiences to discover rarely seen works by some of today’s most influential directors.”

The new acquisitions join Jia Zhangke’s “Torino Shadow,” which screened at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and in the New York Film Festival’s Spotlight Shorts program. The catalogue also includes early works by two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, notably “Le Chant du Rossignol,” acquired through MK2 Films’ recently announced deal with their production company Les Films du Fleuve.

Sciamma’s 44-minute “Tutti Frutti” draws on personal footage she had shot since 2022, exploring filmmaking as a solitary practice. Commissioned by the Centre Pompidou and produced by Lilies Films, it premiered in Paris in June during a retrospective devoted to the director of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and won the Jury Prize at the 2026 Villa Medici Film Festival.

MK2’s catalogue already includes Sciamma’s 2023 short “This Is How a Child Becomes a Poet,” a tribute to Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli that premiered at Venice Days. The company also represents her complete feature filmography, including “Petite Maman” and new 2026 cuts of “Tomboy” and “Girlhood.”

Mendonça Filho’s nine-minute “South of Tehran” features Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi recalling his earliest encounters with cinema. Produced by Emilie Lesclaux and Film at Lincoln Center, it was shot during the 2025 New York Film Festival, where the two directors were presenting their latest features, and grew out of conversations between them. It premiered at the New York fest earlier this year as the inaugural project of NYFF Encounters, an annual initiative commissioning filmmakers to shoot shorts during the festival.

MK2 already handled international sales on Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” winner of the 2025 Cannes Palme d’Or, and Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” which earned the Brazilian director Best Director and Wagner Moura Best Actor the same year in Cannes.

The third acquisition looks further back in its director’s career. Shot by cinematographer Darius Khondji, Corbet’s “Protect You + Me” offers audiences an opportunity to discover the director’s early work, long before his mainstream breakthrough with “The Brutalist,” the acclaimed historical drama that won three Oscars, including Best Actor for Adrien Brody, and earned Corbet the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice in 2024.

Back in 2009, the short received an Honorable Mention at the Sundance Film Festival.

The acquisition strengthens MK2 Films’ ties with Corbet, who appeared as an actor in Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” recently added to the company’s catalogue, and Gregg Araki’s “Mysterious Skin,” which MK2 is preparing to re-release theatrically in a new 4K restoration.

The Lumière Film Festival runs in Lyon through Oct. 18 with the MIFC wrapping on Oct. 16.

Marvel and Sony’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” involved nearly 2,000 VFX shots and just 24 weeks of post-production, with 445 shots delivered in a single week, overall VFX supervisor Jerome Chen revealed at View Conference in Turin on Wednesday.

“In one week, we did about 445 shots,” Chen said, comparing the feat with his first film as a supervisor in 1999, which contained 450 shots in total and took two years to complete.

About three-quarters of “Brand New Day’s” VFX work was delivered during the final six weeks, he added, making an already demanding schedule even more intense.

Next, Chen recalled that preparations began with a scouting trip to New York in December 2024, before he had received a finished script. Director Destin Daniel Cretton wanted a more grounded, street-level Spider-Man, with the city itself integral to the story. But most filming would take place in the U.K., where Pinewood Studios, London and Glasgow doubled for New York. Production designer Charles Wood’s concept art helped establish a relatively restrained palette, punctuated by saturated colors at key emotional moments.

The team preserved usable street-level photography and digitally replaced or extended much of what lay above it. “We just found basically a recipe of a half dozen or so things that tell you that it’s New York,” Chen said. Those included hanging traffic signals, scaffolding, water towers and the correct power lines. Even the yellow markings along British curbs had to disappear.

Small pieces of script could produce enormous technical assignments. An introduction involving Spider-Man and a tank expanded from a handful of words into 11 shots and roughly 52 seconds of footage. Physical tabletop models helped the crew determine how a vehicle should crash through a building when there was no time for elaborate previws. In another sequence, a compact camera rig mounted on a helmet captured Tom Holland’s performance from near his face, with a blurry red shape added in compositing to suggest the inside of his mask. “Sometimes the easiest tricks are the most effective,” Chen said.

The movie also gave Chen his first opportunity to work on Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk. Because the character appears in a more savage, telepathically controlled state, the team explored a different physique from earlier Marvel outings, adjusting his proportions, muscular definition, hair color and the relative size of his hands and feet. Chen consulted Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige about how Hulk’s appearance had evolved across the franchise.

“I realized that nobody had ever looked closely at Hulk’s toenails before,” Chen joked. “That was something that we had to do.” Earlier versions looked unnaturally green, while the team also considered how the character’s skin would react to different lighting. They lengthened his arms, reduced his body fat and gave him grayer hair. A subtle shift in eye color, from green to brown, signals a moment when Hulk regains his humanity. Full-scale, 10-foot Hulk standins helped actors and camera crews judge his dimensions on set, and even his pants required careful attention.

A climactic energy wave involving Jean Grey proved harder to solve creatively. Chen initially resisted the rainbow-like chromatic aberration familiar from other screen depictions of superpowers. But with five weeks remaining, he reversed course, deciding the established visual vocabulary served the film better than something overly electronic. “I thought it was the weakest part of the film,” he admitted. “I wish we had come up with something better.”

Time, he argued, often determines the quality of VFX more than the artists’ abilities. “If you go to a movie and you see that there’s a visual effects shot that doesn’t look that good, it’s not because there are bad artists on it,” he said. “You can tell they just ran out of time.” Chen advised supervisors facing decision fatigue to review shots within their sequences rather than obsess over individual frames.

Finishing so rapidly could also have consequences for the industry: “We may have done ourselves a disfavor by actually finishing this movie in 24 weeks because once again we’ve proven that it can be done on time.”

The final challenge was unexpectedly modest. With the vendors already finished, a last-minute review revealed a sweat stain under Spider-Man’s arm. “You can’t have superheroes sweating into their suit,” Chen recalled. A small team at Marvel’s Burbank offices removed it in about 47 minutes, delivered the corrected shot and sent Chen home from a nearly empty parking garage beneath the studio.

Christy Carlson Romano is claiming she was paid half of Shia LaBeouf‘s salary on the Disney Channel series “Even Stevens,” despite the two being “co-leads” with “the same screen time.”

Romano opens up about her time on the show, which ran from 2000 to 2003 and followed the antics between a brother and sister with clashing personalities, in her new memoir “Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Fall and Rise of a Child Star.” In an Instagram post about the book, which is out now, Romano revealed the alleged pay disparity.

“I was a kid and the female lead on ‘Even Stevens.’ I was paid half of what Shia was paid; we were co-leads and had the same screen time,” Romano said, adding that while penning her memoir, she found a handwritten letter her mother wrote her agent in 2000 “asking for equal pay and admitting we were deep in debt.”

A photo of the letter is included in the post. It reads: “Shia receives $12,000 per episode and Christy $6,000. With 30% going into trust, we can’t make it here financially. This show also holds her up from other work that pays more. Christy wants what Shia is getting.”

In her post, Romano continued: “By then, my paycheck was keeping us afloat. My mom was fighting for me, and she was also fighting for a household that depended on a teenage girl. It took me years to understand I could love her for advocating for me and still wish I had gotten to just be a kid.”

She added that “Shia earned every dollar, and this book is not about him or any other famous name you might recognize.” Rather, she said her memoir is about “a girl who grew up too fast, and a business that decided she was worth half.”

Representatives for Disney and LaBeouf did not immediately respond to Variety‘s request for comment.

Romano has previously spoken about her relationship with LaBeouf while filming the show, saying they were “like oil and water” on the “Not Skinny but Not Fat” podcast last month.

“I was being raised and brought up to be this type A, I mean exactly like Ren Stevens. Like, you know your lines, you hit your marks, you don’t mess up,” she said. “You’re a New York kid, like that comes with a certain echelon… I was trying to go to pre-college Juilliard… everything we were doing, my mom called it cross-training, came with a certain dollar amount of training.”

In contrast, LaBeouf had a tumultuous childhood and has spoken about living with his recovering addict father, which was the inspiration for his 2019 film “Honey Boy.”

“He was a Venice Beach kind of bum kid,” Romano said. “It’s like that kind of vagrant fun, but also very chaotic and very scary lifestyle, and he was very young to be having that.”