MALALA YOUSAFZAI INKS APPLETV PARTNERSHIP: Malala Yousafzai has signed a content agreement with Apple‘s TV division. The Nobel laureate will create and develop original programs, including documentaries, children’s fares and dramas. “I believe in the power of stories to bring families together, forge friendships, build movements, and inspire children to dream,” she said in a statement Monday. “And I couldn't ask for a better partner than Apple to help bring these stories to life. I'm grateful for the opportunity to support women, young people, writers, and artists in reflecting the world as they see it.”
LUPITA NYONG’O TALKS AFRICA’S MEDIA BOOM: Lupita Nyong’o cried the first time she saw Super Sema, an animated series about a Kenyan girl with superpowers. Nyong’o was a member of the voice cast on the show, which has bowed on YouTube. She told Variety: “I am grateful that these women are helping to eradicate the scarcity of Black female protagonists in television and am honored to work alongside them,” adding, “This is an entrepreneurial, thriving, super-creative continent and the content that is coming out if it is telling a very different story that the story of Africa we’ve heard in the past.”
HULU PICKS UP TRANSGENDER DRAMA: Hulu has picked up the U.S. rights to the New Zealand transgender series Rurangi from The Yellow Affair. Max Currie directs the series, which has also been cut as a movie. Rurangi follows the story of transgender activist Caz Davis who returns to a remote community after a decade of estrangement from his father.
SOPHIA LOREN TALKS CONFIDENCE: For Variety, the Oscar-winning Sophia Loren wrote about gaining confidence in Italy with her unmarried mother: “At home, my sister and I could not understand the hatred, but my mother taught us to be strong, to be proud, to rise up from this prejudice and to build an identity not shaped by the approval of others but from our own sense of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. It wasn’t easy.”