Planet in Focus International Film Festival

October 13-17, 2010: Toronto, Canada

Planet in Focus, Canada’s leading environmental media arts organization, today announced the complete line-up of the 11th annual Planet in Focus International Environmental Film & Video Festival at a press conference held at the Royal Ontario Museum’s Schad Gallery of Biodiversity in Toronto, Canada.

Executive Director Sarah Margolius and Director of Programming Kathleen Mullen unveiled this year’s line-up, which includes over 100 environmental films from 32 countries. Director Ron Mann (Opening Feature: In the Wake of the Flood), Dr. Allan Baker, Head, Department of Natural History & Senior Curator, Ornithology of the Royal Ontario Museum (featured in the film Red Knot: Flying on the Edge) and Earth Rangers trainer Meghan Woodworth with Sonic (a Barn Owl), also took to the stage during the launch.

“This is a tremendously exciting year, with an unprecedented number of films that deal with stories and issues taken right from the headlines. As with all environmental films, what happens after you watch them is as important as what takes place on-screen: these films help us imagine more possibilities, and promote a deeper understanding of our world, inspiring us to think more about how we live.” said Executive Director Sarah Margolius. “

“This year we have films from places as diverse as the Solomon Islands, Bangladesh, Niger, Iran, Australia, the USA and from all parts of Canada. Our filmmakers prove that important environmental stories are everywhere, and we have worked hard to make available the most engaging stories from all over the planet..” said Director of Programming Kathleen Mullen.

The festival launches Opening Night at the brand new TIFF Bell Lightbox with Director Ron Mann’s In the Wake of the Flood. The film follows acclaimed Canadian author Margaret Atwood as she sets out on a journey around the world, using her latest novel The Year of the Flood to inspire audiences into awareness and civic action. Atwood’s novel and Mann’s film brings further attention to the plight of birds on our planet. Prior to the opening of the film, both Margaret Atwood and her partner and fellow novelist Graeme Gibson will be presented with this year’s Planet in Focus' Canadian Eco Hero Award for their role in promoting environmental education and awareness.

Closing Night features Director Brian Hill’s Climate of Change, a globally focused documentary profiling those who are working to combat the effects of climate change. From child activists in India to residents in Appalachia this documentary will leave audiences inspired to make changes in their own lives – a fitting way to end the festival. The film is paired with narration written by celebrated British poet Simon Armitage and read by Oscar winning Actress Tilda Swinton.

HIGHLIGHTS [THURS, FRI, SAT, SUN] Many Directors in attendance
Complete Listings daily listings available.

Canadian environmental stories are showcased. Director Liz Marshall’s Documentary Water on the Table , recently nominated for a Gemini for the Donald Brittain Award for Best Social, Political Documentary, follows Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians as she works to have water declared a human right, during her term as Senior Advisor on Water to the 63rd President of the U.N. General Assembly. This July, the U.N. passed a resolution making water a human right, with Canada abstaining from this historic vote. Both Maude Barlow and Liz Marshall will be present for a post-screening discussion.

Burning Water tells a story from Rosebud, Alberta when one family’s land becomes toxic after their farm water is contaminated by chemicals used in gas extraction. This feature is screened in conjunction with Life in the Fast Lane, a short film about Highway 401 in Toronto, Ontario and how a once-200-acre farm is directly affected. Green Heroes: Sarah Harmer, profiles the award-winning singer’s fight to protect the Escarpment in the region of Halton, Ontario.

Realizing that our children are our future, the inspiring NFB documentary Hope Buildersis about teacher Dominique Leduc and his classroom of kids in rural Quebec who take on a community project to effect change in their hometown.

Celebrating an unusual urban farm, Cement Roots introduces us to La Ferme Pousse Menu, the only concrete building in downtown Montreal with farm status from the Government. Through innovative practices like vermi-composting, Philippe Robillard produces one ton of highly nutritious, organic sprouts every week.

One of the last semi-nomadic hunting people of Canada, the Mushuau Innu of Labrador are profiled in Nutshimit- On the Land, a film they commissioned to create a visual legacy of their continuing life on the land. The film screens in tandem with Tshiushuas, a short by Christine Poker, an Innu filmmaker, who will be in attendance at the festival.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of CBC’s award-winning program The Nature of Things with David Suzuki with a special screening of For The Love of Elephants, a poignant documentary portrait of an elephant-human bond that develops at an Elephant rehabilitation centre near Nairobi, Kenya.This event kicks off the brand new $5 screening events at the festival, taking place at 5 p.m. daily on Thursday and Friday and at 11 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

Cultivating a New Generation of ‘Green’ Film Lovers. Saturday’s programming includes a day of free children’s activities at Theatre Direct’s Wychwood Theatre and The Stop Community Food Centre at Artscape Wychwood Barns. Events include short film screenings for 3-6 year olds and 7-13 year olds, a Farmer’s Market Scavenger Hunt and an animation workshop courtesy of the National Film Board. Pre-registration is required; spaces are limited.

Supporting Youth Environmental Filmmakers. Sunday’s programming includes the free Green Sprouts! Youth Filmmakers’ Showcase at the Bata Shoe Museum, featuring films made by youth for youth. Planet in Focus’ Youth Camera Action! Videos premiere as well as other films from around the world.

Imagining a Sustainable Future: 21st Century Visionaries. Two exceptional documentaries profile visionaries. Transcendent Manfollows the best-selling Author and Futurist Ray Kurzweil, a man whose ideas and inventions have earned him 17 honorary doctorates and cult-legend status. A Road Not Takenprofiles US President Jimmy Carter’s visionary move to install a set of solar panels on the White House and the shift in ideals when Reagan takes office a year later.

Nature’s Greatest Defender profilesNational Geographic's Lifetime Achievement Award winner George Schaller. The globally recognized conservationist is seen here returning to the sites of some of his iconic studies to see what has happened to some of these extraordinary animals and their habitats.

Dr. Allan Baker, Head, Dept. of Natural History & Senior Curator, Ornithology of the Royal Ontario Museum is the focus of Red Knot: Flying on the Edge. Over the last decade, this migratory shore bird that moves from Argentina to the Arctic and back annually, has seen its population plummet from 52,000 individuals to a mere 15,000. Dr. Baker has dedicated his life to recovering the species.

Championing Everyday Activists. Bag It: Is Your Life Too Plastic?is a terrific documentary driven by one charismatic father-to be who tackles the number one consumer item in the world, the plastic bag. Two guerilla journalists (literally) confront over-consumption in the USA in Dive! Living Off America’s Waste.

Highlighting International Perspectives.Winner of the best documentary at the African Movie Academy Awards in 2009 (Africa’s top film prize) For The Best and For The Onion! follows Yaro, a farmer in Niger, as he fights to successfully harvest his Galmi purple onion crop all to provide enough funds and community respect to support the wedding of his daughter.

Into The Dragon’s Lairdetails a perilous expedition by Jacques Cousteau’s former cinematographer and diver Didier Noirot in Botswana to find one of nature’s most fearsome predators: the Nile Crocodile. Walter and the Tigers breaks down our fear with a spectacular film about free diving with Tigers Sharks.

Built in the far north permafrost of Svalbard, Norway, Seed Warriors introduces us to the 'Doomsday Vault', a construction containing seeds from around the world in order to safeguard our diverse plant species from potential extinction.

The town of Pascua Lama is put on the map in Cry of the Andes when it is caught in a war between corporate and social values. Barrick is poised to develop the world's largest open pit gold mine threatening the way of life for the local indigenous people.

German Perspectives on Innovation In The 4th Revolution – Energy Autonomy the film shows that a complete changeover of world's energy-supply system to renewable energies can - and must - take place. The film includes thoughts from much-lauded environmental thinkers. A series of German filmmakers explore tradition, innovation and sustainability, with many in attendance this year.

Focusing on the urban environment. As China emerges as the new economic powerhouse of the 21-century, no one can disrupt the biggest construction boom in the world's history. New Beijing, Reinventing a City looks at China’s future. Regarding Vancouver mixes archives and contemporary elements of Vancouver in order to rediscover urban decay and development.

Fostering Green Film Projects and Productions. Friday October 15 brings together filmmakers, broadcasters and distributors in a series of interactive panels and events, including the innovative Free Green Screen Toronto Workshop to provide assistance in reducing film productions’ environmental footprint.

Planet in Focus is Canada's leading non-profit environmental media arts organization, producing year-round programming across Canada and around the world and fostering a new generation of environmental filmmakers. The 11th annual Planet in Focus International Environmental Film & Video Festival runs from October 13 to 17 in Toronto. Visit planetinfocus.org.

For the complete line-up, ticket info and day-by-day schedule, please visit: http://www.drop.io/planetinfocus

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The winners of 2010 Shriekfest Horror Film Festival

The winners of 2010 Shriekfest Horror Film Festival have been announced. The 10th annual Shriekfest Horror Film Festival is “the oldest continually running genre festival in Los Angeles, California. Shriekfest took place on Sept 30-Oct 3 at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood.



Shriekfest screened 36 films and had 32 screenplay finalists and 12 original song finalists. It…awards films in the science fiction, fantasy, and thriller categories. Prizes include trophies, as well as cash, product awards, and publicity.” The full list of all this year’s winners at the Shriekfest Horror Film Festival is below.

Best Horror Feature Film: Ashes
Best Sci Fi Feature Film: Transfer
Best Super Short Film: Rise of the Appliances
Best Short Film: Serum 1831
Best Under 18 Film: On the Other Line
Audience Choice:
Best Feature Screenplay: Dead Crows
Best Under 18 Screenplay: Ain’t No Wolves ‘Round Here
Best Short Screenplay: Carbon Dating
Best Webisode: Shady Texas
Best Original Song: Rekindled

source: shriekfest.com

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Cincinnati Film Festival: October 8-16 2010

A Regional Festival of International Films

The Cincinnati Film Festival focus on the "LIVE Experience". The organizer believe that the film festival experience should be set apart from just going to your average theater to watch a movie. This is a Festival, and therefore a Live, Interactive environment no matter if you're an audience member, a filmmaker, or an industry professional.

The organizer accomplish this by bringing in as many of the filmmakers as they can to interact with audiences after the films, provide multiple special events ranging from panels to workshops, receptions, meals, galas, lounges, concerts, you name it... to allow filmmakers, industry, and audiences to interact directly with each other every chance we get. Audiences and industry are allowed to not only rate, but actually write reviews about the films they've seen, and let the filmmakers respond to them (and learn from them). There's a reason filmmakers and audiences alike request to come back to Cincinnati year after year.

Visit CFF official website for more information.

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Hamptons International Film Festival : October 7-11, 2010

The famous Hamptons International Film Festival starts Thursday, October 7th and continues through Monday, October 11, 2010. Celebrating its 18th year, the festival is held in East Hampton with additional venues in Southampton, Sag Harbor and Montauk.

The popular festival celebrates independent film and in 2008, it featured the East coast premiere of Slumdog MIllionaire, which later went on to win eight Academy Awards. This year's Festival features a wealth of new films including some world premieres, North.

For more information, please visit Hamptons Film Festival official website.

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London Children’s Film Festival

30 Oct - 7 Nov 2010

Welcome to the biggest celebration of film for children in the Capital!



Now six years old, the London Children’s Film Festival gives families the chance to watch the best feature and short films from around the world, create their own films and participate in a wide range of arts activities.

'A glorious concoction of film, special events and hands-on celluloid craziness….we’re so overexcited, we can’t sleep.' - The Guardian more information

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National Schools Film Week 2010

This year’s dates are:
England, Wales & Northern Ireland – 14-22 October 2010
Scotland: 28 October-5 November 2010
National Schools Film Week (NSFW) provides teachers and their students the opportunity to see a wide range of films at local cinemas entirely free-of-charge.

The Festival's goal is to support classroom teaching by providing schools with a powerful experience for their students that links directly to elements of the curriculum, supported by an on-line library of resources related to individual films and more generic topics, essentially an extension of the classroom.

Over 400,000 students and their teachers attended the Festival in 2009 and this year the Festival, which operates on a scale and with a degree of sophistication unknown in any other country (2,800 screenings at 540 cinemas across the UK) celebrates its 15th birthday.

We welcome bookings of all sizes. Some schools will bring an entire Year group or Key Stage while others attend on a class-by-class basis. We absolutely do not limit places to any number of students or schools to any number of bookings. As long as there is space in the cinema, you are welcome!

more information please visit the official website at http://www.nsfw.org

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Lesbian Short Film Festival (VVAA, 2006)

Wolfe proudly presents "The Ultimate Lesbian Short Film Festival" featuring 10 short films full of intrigue, fantasy, suspense, and of course, sex! Short films include: Dani & Alice, A Woman Reported, Frozen Smile, everything Good, Saint Henry, Blow, Transit, Half Laughing, Tina Paulina: Living on Hope Street and The Black Plum.

BLOW (2001) directed by Marie Craven (7 mins., Australia)
In this clever comedy, a teenage girl finds that coming out just might be the only way to overcome her sneezing fits

The shorts


A WOMAN REPORTED ... (2004) directed by Chris J. Russo (5 mins., USA)
Official Selection: Sundance Film Festival. Moira Kelly (The West Wing, One Tree Hill) stars in this thriller about the moments that occur just before a hate crime, inspired by the Ambrose Bierce short story An Incident At Owl Creek Bridge.

DANI AND ALICE (2005) directed by Roberta Marie Munroe (12 mins., USA/Canada)
Lesbian icon Guinevere Turner (Go Fish) co-stars with Yolanda Ross (Stranger Inside) in this taut drama that depicts the final hours of an abusive lesbian relationship.

FROZEN SMILE (2005) directed by Silas Howard (7 mins., USA)
From the co-director and star of By Hook Or By Crook, comes this delightfully absurd comedy about three generations of women who convene to pay tribute to the family's late patriarch.

EVERYTHING GOOD (2004) directed by Elizabeth McCarthy (17 mins., USA)
An American woman suffering from doubts about her attractiveness orders up some sex with a broad while abroad in Amsterdam, and discovers the true meaning of beauty.

SAINT HENRY (2004) directed by Abigail Severance (19 mins., USA)
Ashleigh Ann Wood (Bloodknot) stars as a girl named Henry who enlists her gay best pal (Max Van Ville, The Standard) to help search for her father in this moody and gorgeously produced drama.

BLOW (2001) directed by Marie Craven (7 mins., Australia)
In this clever comedy, a teenage girl finds that coming out just might be the only way to overcome her sneezing fits

TRANSIT (2003) directed by Kerry Weldon (4 mins., USA)
In the middle of the night, a woman is riding a subway train heading downtown when she exchanges glances with an alluring stranger. Will it change her life?

HALF-LAUGHING (2003) directed by Michelle Ehlen (12 mins., USA)
A lesbian with a buzz cut returns home for a family funeral and must deal with her homophobic mother.

TINA PAULINA: LIVING ON HOPE STREET (2005) directed by Barbara Green and Michelle Boyaner (10 mins., USA)
A riveting and inspirational documentary portrait of a Latina lesbian living on the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

THE BLACK PLUM (2006) directed by Meredyth Wilson (15 mins., USA)
A poignant, evocative fantasy about a young tomboy's journey away from her restrictive home. Stars Kip Pardue (Loggerheads, Thirteen, But I'm a Cheerleader).

download the movie here

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MIFF Festival Program Launched!

The MIFF Box Office opens today at The Forum Theatre!
154 Flinders St (cnr Russell St).

Mon 14th July - Thursday 24th July 11am - 7pm.

Friday 25th July - Sunday 10th August 10am to start of last session.

Phone bookings available on 03 9662 3722.
Monday 14 July - Thursday 24 July 11am to 9pm.
Friday 25 July - Sunday 10 August 10am - 9pm.



Or buy online! Check out our program HERE on the website.
Single tickets, festival passes and Opening & Closing Night tickets are available for purchase NOW.

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Film festival that aims to sparkle without glitz

£3 or a tray of home-baked cakes will get you into a Scottish answer to Cannes

If you could imagine the opposite of Cannes, this would be it. A new film festival, which Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton is founding in her hometown of Nairn, north-east Scotland, is to have no red carpets, no ranks of paparazzi and no designer evening dresses. Entry to the films will cost you £3 or a tray of home-baked cakes; and the audience will sit on beanbags.

Needless to say, the festival will have its own kind of glamour. Aside from the presence of Swinton, Joel Coen, one half of the Coen brothers, will programme two evenings of films for the event. His choices are being kept secret at the moment but, according to co-organiser Mark Cousins: "They are as daft as a brush. If you went through 5,000 films, you would never guess them."


The idea for a festival on the Moray Firth came when Swinton, "on a quixotic whim", according to Cousins, decided to rent an old ballroom in the town, known as the Ballerina, where Pink Floyd and the Who once played.

She asked friends, including Cousins, a former director of the Edinburgh international film festival, to help. "We started making a list of films we wanted to show, and we clicked immediately," he said. "We were attracted to the wondrous, childlike qualities of certain films; films with highly coloured, dreamlike elements."

Though the programme has not been announced, the films of Powell and Pressburger are bound to be featured - "you can't talk to Tilda for more than half an hour without her mentioning Powell and Pressburger," said Cousins. "She started throwing out names and they were things like Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple; and I suggested a lot of African and Iranian films. It won't be what you expect: we will show a Björk video before All About Eve, for example. It's very irrational."

What will draw the programme together, he said, is a certain fantastic, expressionist, anti-realist aesthetic. Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers will be shown and Federico Fellini's 8½ will close the festival.

In contrast with more conventional film festivals, The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams (as it is to be called) will not centre around premieres.

Part of the impetus behind the festival is Swinton's and Cousins' idea that "money dictates the festival circuit too much, and fogs the pure, romantic obsession with film".

The festival will run from August 15-23, and screen three films a day in the 200-seat (or beanbag) ballroom. Some tickets will be available in advance, but most will be sold on the day.

If the festival is successful, the organisers hope to make it an annual event. Aside from a small grant, costs have been so far met by Swinton.

source: http://film.guardian.co.uk

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Los Angeles Film Festival

The Los Angeles Film Festival showcases the best of American and International independent cinema. With an attendance of over 80,000, the festival screens hundreds of narrative features, documentaries, shorts, and music videos.

Los Angeles, CA
United States
www.lafilmfest.com

For more information contact:
1.866.345.6337
LAFilmFest@FilmIndependent.org

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It's indie movies vs. Indy's movie at Cannes fest

As the blitz of films, parties and industry schmoozing started Wednesday, the question was whether the independent movies beloved by Cannes critics could hold their own against "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which plays this weekend.

Cannes' dual nature is apparent to anyone strolling the Croisette, the festival's main drag. On one side is Cannes' official poster: indie filmmaker David Lynch's arty photo of a mysterious blond bombshell. On the other, a hotel facade dressed up for "Indiana Jones" festivities to look something like a plastic temple of doom.

It opened with "Blindness," Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles' tale of an epidemic that causes people to lose their vision, starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal and Danny Glover, and based on a novel by Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago.

While critics pondered the symbolism of "Blindness" in a darkened cinema, paparazzi were hitting the beach to capture Jack Black pulling a publicity stunt for "Kung Fu Panda," DreamWorks' tale of a pudgy panda with a love of martial arts.

Black made a dramatic entrance by boat, then strolled down a pier among 40 people dressed in giant panda suits. Black, who voices the title character, showed off some kung fu moves as the pandas crowded behind him.

"Kung Fu Panda," which has its Cannes premiere Thursday, and "Indiana Jones" aren't competing for prizes. The jury, led by Sean Penn and including Alfonso Cuaron, Natalie Portman and comic book artist-director Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis"), will hand out awards May 25.

"Blindness," which is up for the top prize, was a departure for Cannes, which usually opens with a movie that's more festive, glitzy or crowd-pleasing. Past openers include "The Da Vinci Code" and "Moulin Rouge."

"To be honest, I still don't think that this is the best film to open the festival," Meirelles joked. He said it was a "big honor" as well as a "big pressure" to launch Cannes.

One highlight of the films vying for the top prize, the Palme d'Or, is Clint Eastwood's "Changeling," a missing-child drama starring Angelina Jolie. Eastwood is a regular at Cannes. He led the jury in 1994 and has showed films including "Mystic River" but has never won the top prize.

Also competing for prizes are James Gray's "Two Lovers," a romantic drama starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, and Steven Soderbergh's 4 1/2-hour marathon "Che," starring Benicio Del Toro as Argentine revolutionary Ernesto Guevara.

Dark themes abound as usual in the competition films. Palme d'Or laureates Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who took top honors at the 1999 and 2005 festivals, are back with a gritty drama about an illegal immigrant and her sham marriage, "Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna's Silence)."

Israeli writer-director Ari Folman's "Waltz With Bashir" an animated film tackles the subject of war and repressed memories. And Italian film "Gomorra," by director Matteo Garrone, takes on the Naples-based Camorra mob.

___

On the Net:

http://www.festival-cannes.fr

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More celebs in updated Cannes line-up

BRAZIL'S Fernando Meirelles and US director James Gray have been added to the list of talent to compete for the top prize at this year's Cannes film festival, organisers said today.

The coveted Palme d'Or, which crowns the May 14-25 event, will be handed out by Robert de Niro.

Niro will be stepping up the Cannes red carpet among a bevy of celebs as the star of Barry Levinson's film What Just Happened in which he plays the role of a fading Hollywood producer.

That film will close the world's paramount film festival, to be opened by Blindness, a drama by Meirelles - best-known for his Oscar-nominated City of God or more recently The Constant Gardener - about a city whose residents are struck by a mysterious loss of sight.

Also a last-minute entrant to the competition for the Palme is Gray's Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a New Yorker torn between Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw, a first sentimental drama by the maker of mafia crime chronicles such as Little Odessa and We Own The Night.

A third French film - Between The Walls (Entre Les Murs) by Laurent Cantet - has also been selected, bringing the total number of films running for the honour to 22.

Other top contenders in the race are veteran directors Clint Eastwood, Steven Soderbergh and Wim Wenders.

Much awaited also are the movies selected to be screened out of competition and getting their world release, including the latest from top-name directors Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg will be bringing the year's most-awaited movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - the fourth installment in the box office-busting series starring Harrison Ford as the archaeologist adventurer who had his first outing way back in 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Woody Allen, a longstanding favourite at Cannes, brings his Spanish-set Vicky Cristina Barcelona, along with its stars Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem for a walk up the red carpet.

Source: www.news.com.au

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Kim Ki-duk retro at MoMA (NY)

April 23–May 8, 2008

The Department of Film presents the first complete U.S. retrospective of writer-director Kim Ki-Duk (b. 1960, Bonghwa), a self-taught maverick Korean filmmaker whose work has enriched international cinema with its luminous intensity. This fourteen-film exhibition includes several features never before seen in the U.S., giving audiences a rare chance to chart the development of the director's sensuous, sensational imagery and wild and haunting narratives.

Kim Ki-Duk was a factory worker, soldier, priest-in-training, and, between 1992 and 1995, a street artist in France, where he discovered cinema through films like Leos Carax's Les amants de Pont-Neuf and Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (both 1991). After winning a screenwriting competition in Korea, Kim was able to make, without any formal training, his first feature, Crocodile (1996). Kim's debut film, long out of circulation, heralded the arrival of a furious young self-taught talent with a vision that, brutal though it is, is grounded in redemption. Over the next eleven years, thirteen more films followed, including three of his best-known films in the United States, the libidinous The Isle (2000), the Buddhist-inflected Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003), and an elliptical treatise on invisibility, 3-Iron (2004).

Kim's films cohere into a vivid and compelling body of work characterized by sweeping camera movements and long, richly composed shots. They are populated by characters, uneasy in their social situations, who adopt silence as a protection and whose reactions tend to be brutal; what distinguishes these narratives is what follows this savagery. His films take place in a world sometimes circumscribed by water, but always situated in a cinematic space a couple of degrees sharper than reality. All films are directed by Kim, from South Korea, and in Korean with English subtitles, unless otherwise noted.

---------------------------------
Organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art; and Hahn Dong-Sin, founder, Open Work, New York. This retrospective is presented in collaboration with the Korean Cultural Service (Song Soo-Keun, Director), New York, and with the support of the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Korean Film Council, and Korean Film Archive in Seoul. The Department of Film is grateful to the Korean producers of Kim Ki-Duk's films (Cineclick Asia, Prime Entertainment, Dauri Entertainment) and the American distributors (Tartan Films, Sony Pictures Classics, Lifesize, Empire Pictures) for the loan of 35mm English subtitled prints for this retrospective.

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Aspiring Filmmakers Rub Elbows at Festival

Aerial shot of Manhattan. Camera pans down to office building. Dissolve. Behind a desk, a movie producer reads a script for “Northanger Abbey.”

Smash cut to close-up of producer’s lips as we hear: “Jane, honestly. Bath, in England, really? Why not Weimar Germany? How about Shanghai, present day? A remake of ‘Blade Runner’! But with an edge!”

Fade to black.

Strictly speaking, none of this happened at the Tribeca Film Festival last week. For one thing, Jane Austen has been dead since 1817.

But for 20 New York City high schoolers, ages 15 to 19, the festival was a deep-end-of-the-pool immersion into the modern film business. They got to ask many questions, and each wore a big yellow credential that read “Filmmaker.”

They were enrolled in Tribeca Film Fellows, a program that began Monday and will end on May 4. The fellowship program, which began in 2004, is intended to start young people on careers in film through mentorships with filmmakers, workshops, panel discussions and the filming of a collaborative documentary titled “CityScapes.”

On Thursday, the teenagers met executives at Miramax Films on the Avenue of the Americas in SoHo. A few participants grimaced when David Greenbaum, vice president for production and development, declared, “Ninety-five percent of what comes across my desk, I say no to.”

On the other hand, Mr. Greenbaum said, approving a film project involves weighing commercial potential, artistic merit and so many mystery factors that executives like him often get it wrong.

For example, Mr. Greenbaum, 32, turned down a script that involved masochism and a young woman’s obsession with her boss. “I was almost physically offended” by it, he said.

The completed film, released by another company in 2002, was “Secretary,” starring James Spader, and was Maggie Gyllenhaal’s breakout film.

The teenagers, by way of introduction to the Miramax executives, named their favorite movies.

Some said “No Country for Old Men,” directed by the Coen brothers, winner of the 2008 Academy Award for best picture, and co-financed by Paramount Vantage and Miramax.

Others said “The Science of Sleep” (2006), “Cinema Paradiso” (1988), “Dancehall Queen” (1997), “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), “Persepolis” (2007), “L’Auberge Espagnole” (2002), “Amores Perros” (2000) and “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962).

Kendra Dennis, 16, from Murry Bergtraum High School in Manhattan, said she loved “Goldfinger,” made in 1964. “Filmmaking has evolved since then,” Kendra said, “but the way it was shot is still so beautiful.”

There have been 21 James Bond movies so far. But Kendra had never seen any of the earlier films starring Sean Connery.

The Miramax executives also showed trailers of their upcoming films, including an adaptation called “Blindness,” starring Julianne Moore. Gleb Mikhalev, 17, of the Beacon School in Manhattan, told the executives that he had just finished reading the novel by José Saramago and that he was surprised by the coincidence.

Gleb was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. His mother is a documentary filmmaker who lives in Iowa City. “The first movie I ever saw,” he said, “I was in it, and it was shot by my mother.”

Later in the afternoon, the teenagers got to meet filmmakers at the Tribeca Film Center in mentor sessions.

“He asked me how old I am,” exclaimed Wei Ling Chang, referring to her mentee, Daniel Kharlak, of Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn. “He’s only 18 and I’m 33!”

Both, however, share a love of film noir, said Ms. Chang, who does indeed look like a teenager. In 2007, she shot a 16-minute short inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, called “The Good Husband.” And she has also directed, produced or written numerous television shows, including episodes of MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16.”

“Daniel doesn’t really have a story yet,” said Ms. Chang about the story pitch that he is working on. “He’s got a beginning but not an end.”

Another mentor, Dan Castle, 41, whose Australian surfing drama, “Newcastle,” is scheduled to be released this year, came prepared with a video iPod on which he showed the trailer for his movie.

Several teenagers gathered around him. Where do you put the camera when the wave hits? How do you keep it steady in the bobbing water? He passed the iPod from student to student, showing his solutions.

“I’m not technically that knowledgeable,” said Mr. Castle, of Los Angeles. “I don’t know what camera to use, I don’t know what film stock is best and all that stuff. But I know what I want it to say, and I know what I want it to look like. And that’s what I told them.”

For Alma Osorio, 16, of the LaGuardia Arts high school in Manhattan, the day had been exhilarating. The daughter of a janitor and a traffic enforcement agent, she said her favorite movie was “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“It’s told through the eyes of a young girl,” she said.

Source: NYTimes

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European Union Film Festival

The 11th European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 14, through Thursday, April 3, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 20; for a full festival schedule visit siskelfilmcenter.com.

Darling An enjoyable if paper-thin Swedish drama about a vain young beauty (Michelle Meadows) whose callous indifference finally catches up with her, causing a precipitous fall in her social and economic standing. Forced into a job at a fast-food restaurant, she’s befriended in the workplace by an aging divorcee (Michael Segerstrom) whose optimism and kindness in the face of his own trials prompts her to reevaluate her priorities. Writer-director Johan Kling rescues the story from sentimentality with a welcome dose of ambiguity toward the end, and Meadows turns in a subtle performance, finding complexity beneath her character’s chilly self-absorption. The movie’s one misstep is Segerstrom’s unlikely character, whose decency borders on saintliness. In Swedish with subtitles. 90 min. (Reece Pendleton) Arrow Fri 3/14, 8 PM, and Wed 3/19, 6 PM.

The Inner Life of Martin Frost Relaxing at a friend's empty country house, a reclusive New York novelist (David Thewlis) is inspired to write a new story and the next morning wakes up alongside a mysterious and seductive graduate student (Irene Jacob) who quickly becomes his muse and lover. Paul Auster, who made his directing debut with Lulu on the Bridge, provides the voice-over narration for this 2007 second feature, which was drawn and expanded from an interpolated story in his own novel, the engrossing Book of Illusions. The sad irony is that his storytelling gifts, Thewlis's resourcefulness, and Jacob's beauty only postpone one's awareness that the material is too literary to work as cinema. The plot becomes increasingly arch (with the arrival of characters played by Michael Imperioli and by Auster's teenage daughter, Sophie) and self-consciously metaphysical, and mannerism gradually overtakes visual and narrative invention. 94 min. (JR) Arrow Sat 3/15, 7 PM, and Tue 3/18, 8:15 PM.

It’s a Free World . . . Writer Paul Laverty and director Ken Loach have produced some powerful dramas—My Name Is Joe, Bread and Roses, Sweet Sixteen—but this 2007 feature doesn’t compare with them despite its timely subject, the exploitation of illegal aliens. Newcomer Kierston Wareing is strong as the lead character, an unscrupulous but not entirely unsympathetic single mother who loses her job at a London employment agency and then partners with a flatmate (Juliet Ellis) to open her own such establishment. But Loach and Laverty’s didactic side ultimately becomes obtrusive, even as they challenge our identification with the heroine. I emerged from this story feeling sadder and wiser but was never fully engaged. 93 min. (JR) Arrow Sat 3/15, 7 PM, and Thu 3/20, 6 PM.

The Rest Is Silence Nae Caranfil, whose Philanthropy (2002) satirized contemporary Romanian capitalism, leaps back to the early days of cinema for this ambitious but rather unwieldy 2007 historical drama. A young movie director in Bucharest wins the financial backing of a vainglorious theater owner to shoot an epic about the Romanian struggle for independence against the Ottoman Empire. Caranfil based his script on the true story of Independenta Romaniei (1912), a two-hour film that at the time was the longest movie ever made, and clips from the real-life film are sprinkled throughout this fictionalized tale. The comic scenes are deftly handled, but a subplot involving the director’s relationship with an aspiring theater actress goes off the rails, and chronicling the birth of a national cinema proves too weighty a burden. In Romanian with subtitles. 140 min. (JJ) Arrow Sat 3/15, 4:15 PM, and Thu 3/20, 7:45 PM.

Roman de Gare After a series of missteps (e.g. The Courage to Love), French New Wave veteran Claude Lelouch bounces back smartly with this masterful and constantly surprising thriller (2007). The multilayered plot involves a celebrated crime novelist (Fanny Ardant), her missing ghostwriter, and a serial killer. Slyly exploiting audience expectations and prejudices, Lelouch calls into question our very ways of seeing, even as he and his longtime writing partner, Pierre Uytterhoeven, craft an elegant meditation on loss and rebirth. With Audrey Dana and Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen). In French with subtitles. 103 min. (AG) Arrow Sun 3/16, 3 PM.

The Sky Turns Distinguished only by Alberto Rodriguez’s impressionistic cinematography, this 2004 documentary by Mercedes Alvarez surveys her hometown, the fading rustic village of Aldealseñor in northern Spain. The filmmaker makes some ambitious thematic leaps: the Roman conquest of nearby Numantia is compared to the imperial ambitions of George W. Bush (as bombers soar overhead to Baghdad), dinosaur fossils are likened to elderly villagers, and a medieval Moorish castle being redeveloped as an upscale hotel is linked to new Moroccan immigration. But Alvarez’s pacing is tortured, and her metaphor of a nearly blind painter recording a dying culture is heavy-handed. In Spanish and Arabic with subtitles. 106 min. (AG) Arrow Sun 3/16, 3 PM, and Tue 3/18, 6 PM.

Summer ’04 Martina Gedeck (The Lives of Others, Mostly Martha) powers this unnerving 2006 drama as a woman vacationing on Germany’s Baltic coast with her husband (Peter Davor), her teenage son (Lucas Kotaranin), and the boy’s much younger girlfriend (Svea Lohde). Their idyll is disrupted when the young woman goes sailing alone with a handsome new neighbor (Robert Seeliger) and the mother, feeling responsible for her underaged guest, confronts the stranger, only to plunge into deeper waters than she imagined. Stefan Krohmer directs with remarkable sophistication and dexterity, particularly in his quicksilver shifts from nature’s allure to its menace. In German with subtitles. 97 min. (AG) Arrow Sun 3/16, 5:15 PM, and Mon 3/17, 6 PM.

ALSO SCREENING

Autumn Ball Arrow Sat 3/15, 4:30 PM, and Wed 3/19, 8 PM.

Dying in Athens Arrow Fri 3/14 and Mon 3/17, 8 PM.

Ex Drummer Arrow Fri 3/14, 6 PM, and Tue 3/18, 8:30 PM.

56 Drops of Blood Arrow Mon 3/17, 8:15 PM, and Thu 3/20, 6 PM.

Return of the Storks Arrow Sat 3/15, 9 PM, and Mon 3/17, 6:15 PM.

Saturn in Opposition Arrow Sun 3/16, 5 PM, and Thu 3/20, 8 PM.

Tell No One Arrow Sat 3/15, 9 PM, and Tue 3/18, 6 PM.

To the Limit Arrow Fri 3/14, 6 PM.

Source: www.chicagoreader.com

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Middle East huge for Sundance

Fest to feature four films from region

BEIRUT -- Palestinian hip-hop, tall tales in Jordan, the gritty realities of war in Lebanon and a pair of star-crossed lovers straddling the Arab-Israeli divide. The Sundance Film Festival has lined up a record number of films from the Middle East for its Park City outing in 2008.

"It's an exciting time for film in that part of the world," says Alesia Weston, associate director of the international feature-film program at Sundance and creative director of the Sundance Institute's 4-year-old screenwriting lab in Jordan, run jointly with the country's Royal Film Commission. "And it's not just politically earnest films. There's a lot of creativity bubbling up."

There are three features and one documentary from the region competing in the World Cinema Competition at Sundance, an initiative that splintered off the domestic competition in 2005. That's double the number of Middle Eastern films at Sundance in 2006 and 2007. Last year's festival included two Israeli films, Shimon Daton's "Hot House" and Adama Meshugaat's "Sweet Mud."

In 2006, Lebanese director Jocelyne Saab's "Kiss Me Not on the Eyes," about love, lust and longing in contempo Cairo, went head to head with Yoav Shamir's "5 Days," from Israel.

This year, the selection is not only larger but more varied.

Amin Maltaqa's "Captain Abu Raed," from Jordan, is a rumored favorite going in with its human story of an airport janitor who spins wild stories of elaborate adventures for an audience of youngsters who mistake him for a pilot.

French-Lebanese filmmaker Philippe Aractingi is following up his debut "Bosta" with "Under the Bombs," a more sober tale from his war-torn country. The Israeli filmmaking team of Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv delves into the lives of an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman who have a passionate affair during the 2006 World Cup soccer finals in Germany for "Strangers."

Mahmoud al-Massad's "Recycle," about the mounting frustration of a family man living in the rundown Jordanian city of Zarqa, which also happens to be the hometown of late Islamist militant Al-Zarqawi, is competing in the international documentary category.

As 2008 marks Jordan's first blip on the Sundance radar, it seems that the country's push to establish a major film industry to rival Morocco and Egypt on one side, Dubai and Abu Dhabi on the other is paying off.

But filmmakers are a notoriously feisty lot. Al-Massad, a graduate of one of the screenwriting labs at Sundance, says: "What Sundance gave me I've never had in my life. They are interested in you as an artist."

While Al-Massad says he looks forward to the day a film can be made from start to finish in Jordan without outside financing or expertise, he is a bit wary about contributing to a national film culture, one being spearheaded, after all, by Jordan's king.

"I don't want to have the perspective of the government," he says, "the government of any country."

Source: www.vanityfair.com

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Baghdad Film Fest on as planned

Dates shifted forward by two weeks

BAGHDAD -- The dates have been shifted by two weeks, but the Baghdad Film Festival is definitely going ahead, say the organizers, denying rumors the fest had been cancelled.

The first major cinematic event in war-ravaged Baghdad in more than two years, the festival will unspool Dec. 26-29 instead of mid-December as originally planned, said Ammar al-Arradi of the Assn. of Iraqi Filmmakers Without Borders, which is organizing the event.

"Around 55 films have been submitted from countries including Egypt, France, Denmark, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Singapore, the Philippines, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar," Arradi said, adding that some pics had screened in other fests and a few had won awards.


He said films will be screened at a hotel from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a one hour break, adding, "It's all that the security situation will allow at the moment."

-- Bryan Pearson


Source: http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=festivals&jump=story&id=1061&articleid=VR1117977076

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TEMPO DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 07

8-11th November, 2007 in Stockholm
Sweden's Official Festival for Documentary Films

The 8th Tempo Documentary Festival presents new and creative documentary films with a main focus on the “New Europe”. More than 30 films from Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and Sweden will have Swedish premieres, and many of the directors will attend the festival.

Join us on a guided tour to one of the last milkbars in Poland, spend a weekend in a datja, attend a casting session for politicians. Visit a Bulgarian concentration camp, meet brutal resistance in the streets of Minsk and go underground in Prague. As a final; why not an adventurous detective documentary?

Meet among others Marcel Lozinski, Polands most wellknown documentary filmmaker with experience from the fight for freedom during the communist years. In his HOW IT’S DONE we get to meet a PR-consultant who arranges crash courses for politicians to be. The prize-awarded Miroslaw Dembinski and principal character Franak Viachorka present A LESSON OF BELORUSSIAN, a film about young activists who are fighting for a free Belarus in new ways, for example through music videos. Also visiting is Lucie Králová (Czech Republic) who has made LOST HOLIDAY, Andrey Paounov (Bulgaria), the director of the opening film at the Cannes Film Festival and critically acclaimed THE MOSQUITO PROBLEM & OTHER STORIES and Robert Lakatos (Romania/Hungary), one of the five directors of ACROSS THE BORDER. There will also be a Swedish premiere for MILKBAR by Terese Mörnvik and Ewa Einhorn, a history about two stubborn women who against all odds is running an old milbar from Poland’s communist years.

We also recommend some selected international prize-winners, the filmmakers of tomorrow from film schools and the nominees of the STHLM.DOC-competition.

The festival ends with a grande party at Södra Teatern with film, DJ and a live performance with Fanfara Shavale. Don’t miss it!


visit the official website

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Academy to Open Film Museum in 2012

In New York we have the Museum of the Moving Image. I just assumed there was a similar kind of museum on the west coast, but I guess in all these years Hollywood never established something so obvious. Now, though, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has finally announced a plan to build a museum dedicated to cinema, or at least cinema through the eyes of the Oscars. Apparently it will be called The Academy Museum and is set to be open in 2012, three years after construction begins in 2009. So far the plan has no plans, or budget, but the Academy has hired French architect Christian de Portzamparc, best known probably for designing Paris' "Cite de la Musique (City of Music)" and NYC's LVMH Tower. The site for the museum has been chosen as a two-block, eight-acre plot near the Kodak Theater (home of the Academy Awards show) in Hollywood, which will allow the building to face the famous Hollywood sign.

According to Reuters, the museum is being planned as the world's largest and most ambitious of its kind. The report also has an interesting quote from de Portzamparc, who claims he's the perfect choice because he has "a true passion for cinema and often link this art to architecture: the art of motion, art of light, editing, sequencing of the time and the life, celebration of the living." Over at AP, there's another great quote from Academy president Sid Ganis, who wants the museum to be a "monument to the art of film." He told the newswire: "I want people to understand how film relates to the world around us, how storytelling in the film sense is accomplished and how, through film, we move ahead in our lives to some degree. I hope that's not too highfalutin', but that's what I'm hoping for." We'll have to wait and see if the museum is more dedicated to the history of film in all its glory or more dedicated to the history of the Oscars and the glory it thrusts upon specific films and branches of cinematic technique.

source: www.cinematical.com

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TIFF 2007 blog: Toronto's worldview

One thing that a large film festival like Toronto can offer is a snapshot of specific countries and their cultural/social traditions as reflected through their cinema. Herewith are some ruminations on three countries of particular interest.

1. Israel: In a recent interview in Time Magazine, festival Executive Director Piers Handling pointed to the richness of Israeli cinema as one of the highlights of this year's event. He's right, but that richness has been apparent for some years now with the release of such provocative and compelling Israeli movies as Broken Wings, James' Journey to Jerusalem, Walk on Water, The Bubble, The Syrian Bride, Sweet Mud and Close to Home, most of which were also screened at TIFF.

This year, five Israeli films have been selected, the most I can recall in 22 years of covering the festival and likely the most since the festival honored Israeli cinema back in 1980. The recognition was premature back then, but this year's Israeli feature film lineup, though of uneven quality, is a testament to the variety of subject matter Israeli filmmakers are tackling.

Amos Gitai looks at the contentious recent Israeli pullback from Gaza in his Disengagement. Avi Nesher's The Secrets is a story of lesbian romance, fundamentalism and mysticism in Safed, the center of Kabbalah and the place where two young women go to study Judaic texts and the Torah. Jellyfish, from hot Israeli writer Etgar Keret and his partner Shira Geffen, is an amiable Short Cuts-type movie that gently links the lives of a disparate group of people—including a depressed waitress, a Filipina caregiver and a newlywed couple—in Tel Aviv. The Band's Visit, from neophyte director Eran Kolirin, is a sweet quasi-romance between the head of an Egyptian police band and an Israeli woman who meet up when the musical group is mistakenly stranded in a small town where nothing ever happens.

I'm partial to Jellyfish and The Band's Visit, while Disengagement is your typical overwrought, pointless and dramatically inert Gitai movie, and The Secrets, though intelligent, is pretty dull. But all four movies, along with the Israel documentary Children of the Sun, an examination of what it's like growing up in Israel's revolutionary communal farm (kibbutz) system, add up to a complex, highly diverse portrait of a country that is a far cry from the exclusively conflict-ridden place that most people, largely because of the media, perceive it to be. Without Israeli cinema, good or bad, or a personal visit there, they wouldn't have any idea of what Israel is really like.

2. France: Out of curiosity, I recently looked up the ages of some of France's best-known, longest-working directors and discovered that Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer are all in their late 70s to late 80s (Rohmer is 88). Incredibly, they're all still making movies, and three of them have films at this year's festival.

Rohmer's Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon is a playful, romantic and comedic roundelay set in an imagined 5th-century Celtic village. Rivette's Ne touchez pas la hache (Don't Touch the Axe) is a tragic drama about the doomed relationship between a married duchess and a career soldier in 19th-century France. Chabrol offers up another of his smartly acute dissections of the evil that people can do in the name of love in La Fille coupée en deux (The Woman Cut in Two).

The Rohmer and Chabrol movies fare best, while Rivette's is disappointingly flat, largely because of Guillaume Depardieu's one-note performance as the soldier. But they all hearken back to a respectful French cinematic tradition that allows the country's filmmakers to practice their art as long as they're physically able, even into their very old age and even if they're not the box office successes or critical darlings they once were. In the U.S, by contrast, with the notable exception of the late Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet, who's in Toronto with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, that's generally not been the case.

3. Canada: I was very moved by Jeremy Podeswa's sensitive and touching Fugitive Pieces, based on Anne Michaels' much-praised novel about a young Jewish boy saved by a Greek archaeologist during the Holocaust. But the other English Canadian films I caught at TIFF suffer from the typical deficits afflicting our cinema, namely conventional, clichéd or undeveloped stories, obvious this year in Bruce Sweeney's risible and over-the-top revenge drama American Venus and Clement Virgo's unimaginative Poor Boy's Game, about a boxer trying to redeem himself after bring released from prison. Another Holocaust-related film, Paolo Barzman's slight Emotional Arithmetic, gave an undeserved chance to a director who simply doesn't have the cinematic chops to make the transition to the big screen from television.

It's all part of the recent emphasis of Telefilm Canada, Canada's main film-funding body, on the commercial possibilities of Canadian movies to the exclusion of the country's typical arthouse fare. Those are still being made, too—see Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg—but they're not the main concern of Telefilm anymore. Granted, our more avant garde filmmakers—Atom Egoyan and Maddin—are over-praised talents, but veering in the direction of the Hollywood model isn't the answer, either. Nor is allowing genuinely good directors, and I include Virgo and especially Sweeney, whose Last Wedding was great, to float any old, ill-thought-out script they want and funding them in the process, a solution to Canada's perpetual box office woes.

Unfortunately, and at least partially because we're not funding the right films, English Canada has been unable to replicate the Quebec model, where directors like Denys Arcand—whose L'age des tenebres (The Age of Ignorance), his third film in the acclaimed trilogy that began with The Decline of the American Empire and The Barbarian Invasions, is showing here—and Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y.), among others too numerous to mention, regularly manage to combine the best facets of arthouse and commercial fare. Despite the occasional gratifying exception like Fugitive Pieces, that dire reality isn't likely to change anytime soon. —Shlomo Schwartzberg

For complete coverage of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, search boxoffice.com using keyword "TIFF 2007."

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