Editor

The 29th Göteborg Film Festival offers a broad variety of films. Asian horror meets French-Armenian love and Swiss every day life in a monastery and all of the other combinations possible when 450 short-, feature and documentary films from 60 countries are screened during a ten day period.

Friday January 27th the festival will open with a screening of Sturla Gunnarsson’s Icelandic-Canadian epic Viking tale Beowulf & Grendel with Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård in one of the leading parts. Beowulf & Grendel is also one of the nominees for the Göteborg Film Festival’s Nordic Film Award and one of many films in competition with English dialogue. Closing film will be Mel Brook’s The Producers.

In order to make it easier for the audience to find their way through the extensive program, a number of new headlines have been created. Some of these new sections are Gala, for the big films with the big names, It’s all true, for documentaries, First cut, for debutants, Worldwide, for a selection of the best films in the world and Another View presenting films pioneering in their form. In addition to these categories the festival also present a number of themes such as music, Canada, Danish trilogies and Love, Actually! The festival also celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Glasnost by screening a retrospective of ten films.

British documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto will be this year’s director in focus. She visits the festival to give a Master class on her way of filmmaking. Other notable guests are Stellan Skarsgård (Beowulf & Grendel), Gavin Hood (Tsotsi), Roger Donaldson (The World’s Fastest Indian), Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y), Bingjian Zhang (Suffocation), Phil Morrison (Amy Adams in Junebug) and Yoav Shamir (5 Days).

Göteborg Film Festival’s programme is distributed in 110 000 copies all over Sweden. During the ten day period of the festival 450 films from 60 countries will be screened at 14 theatres. In addition to this Nordic Event at the Göteborg Film Festival, the festival’s market place for new Nordic films, will arrange closed screenings for invited buyers, distributors and festival programmers from all over the world.

The Swedish programme, Swedish Images 2006, includes 228 films. All of the Swedish feature films released in 2005 are screened and ten brand new Swedish feature films will have their World première during the festival as will more than 120 Swedish short films.

The Göteborg Film Festival programme also includes a large number of high profiled seminars under the headline Cinemix. This year’s seminars take a closer look on themes such as suburbia on fire, witchcraft in Africa, Swedish short films and Danish film.

This year’s festival will be opened with a big party featuring among others The Gothenburg Opera ballet, Juli & the Monoliths with Nina Persson (The Cardigans), The Sounds and The Embassy.

For further information please contact Åsa Larsson at +46 31 339 30 12 or +46 707-61 38 01 or through e-mail: press@filmfestival.org.

Göteborg Film Festival takes place January 27 to February 6. Tickets are available at www.filmfestival.org.

P.S!
1. The American Golden Globe nominations usually gives a hint about what films will be likely to get an Oscar. The most popular films this year were: Good Night and Good Luck - George Clooney’s directing debut, Walk the Line about Johnny Cash, the musical The Producers and München, Steven Spielberg’s film about the attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich 1972.
- All of those films are screened at the Göteborg Film Festival!

2. South African film Tsotsi was awarded a Golden Globe as best foreign film this year. The film is also South Africa’s Oscar nominee competing for an Oscar in the category best foreign film together with:
El Aura – Argentina
C.R.A.Z.Y. – Canada
Something Like Happiness – Czech Republic
Cave of the Yellow Dog – Mongolia
The Death of Mr Lazarescu - Rumania
Totally Personal – Bosnia-Herzegovina
Stolen Eyes – Bulgaria
Play – Chile
Al Otro Lado – México
Zozo – Sweden

- All screened at the Göteborg Film Festival!

3. The Göteborg Film Festival 2006 has a fantastic music section, Music Unlimited, starting with a sneak preview during the week before the festival with screenings of Walk the Line, The Last Waltz and George Michael – A Different Story. Music Unlimited also includes films on Argentinean tango, the American singer/songwriter Roky Erickson, Spanish flamenco and Danish jazz.

4. Göteborg Film Festival is the largest film festival in Scandinavia and hosts the Nordic Event, a successful marketplace for new Nordic films with buyers, distributors and festival programmers from all over the world. The Nordic focus is of course also obvious in the Nordic Competition and the section Nordic Ligth where the very best new Nordic films are screened.

5. One of the most rewarding tasks of the film festival is to present new directors from all over the world. This year a whole section is devoted to the up and coming directors and twenty strong debuts are screened there. For anyone who wants a glimpse of the work of the next generation of filmmakers – Göteborg is the place to be.

6. Each year the Göteborg Film Festival Fund in cooperation with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) supports projects in development and postproduction. This year the festival screens six new films that have been supported by the fund. Two of them (Dog Pound and Early in the Morning) are also in competition at the Rotterdam International Film Festival 2006.

7. Ingmar Bergman is the festival’s honorary president, this year he has chosen a series of silent films to be screened at the festival. The films are examples of works that inspired him as a young man and that also gave him ideas for some of his own films.