Cannes 2021 Title: The Holdovers

From Deadline: 

"Alexander Payne has set Paul Giamatti to star in The Holdovers, a David Hemingson-scripted film that Mark Johnson is producing. FilmNation will rep international rights and CAA Media Finance will handle domestic as the film is shopped in the Cannes Virtual Market next week. Production will begin early next year in New England.

Payne and Giamatti teamed memorably on the 2004 wine-tasting road-trip comedy Sideways, which won Payne and Jim Taylor Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay. The Holdovers is a comedy, with the poignancy and grounded characters of past films including Nebraska, The Descendants and Sideways.

Billions star Giamatti plays a universally disliked teacher at the prep school Deerfield Academy. His non-fans include his students, fellow faculty and headmaster — who all find his pomposity and rigidity exasperating. With no family and nowhere to go over Christmas holiday in 1970, Paul remains at school to supervise students unable to journey home. After a few days, only one student holdover remains — a troublemaking 15-year-old named Angus, a good student undermined by bad behavior that always threatens to get him expelled. Joining Paul and Angus is Deerfield’s head cook Mary, an African-American woman who caters to sons of privilege and whose own son recently was lost in Vietnam. These three very different shipwrecked people form an unlikely Christmas family, sharing comic misadventures during two very snowy weeks in New England, and realizing that none of them is beholden to their past."

Read the whole Deadline article here.