Thai Cinema Night took off on day three of the Cannes Film Festival. A special screening of Mekong Hotel, the latest film of the 2010 Palme d'Or recipient Apichatpong Weerasethakul preceded the event. In the audience of the Salle de Soixante was French veteran film director Agnes Varda. The film touches on the theme of reincarnation of his previous film LUNG BOONMEE RALUEK CHAT (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives). Another of his films featured at Cannes was Tropical Malady (2004).C...
Sarah Neal is a jury member at Queer Palme Cannes 65th.
Sarah is the Head of Programming at Brisbane Powerhouse, a major producing and presenting contemporary arts centre in Australia. Sarah is also the Festival Director of the Brisbane Queer Film Festival, which enters its 13th year in 2012. Sarah has written and direc...
Near the end of the Cannes film Festival comes a film that just blows it all in a new direction, clearly the most visceral, and a well crafted film at that. Every shot is loaded with punch and some of the montage sequences recall the principles of Eisenstein for the creation of pathos.
Paperboy is a gritty narrative, shockin...
From the clear blue waves from the Mediterranean washing up on the
shore, to a new film by Jackie Chan, and nearly non-stop fireworks every
few days, the city of Cannes is nothing less than spectacular in
ushering in 12 days of cinema magic at the 65th Cannes Film Festival.
This is an inferno of media, fans, celebrities and press. Churches stay
open at night, street singers set up stages, and red carpets are out
everywhere. Hundreds of people ascend "les steppes"...
The Carnival in Cannes benefit event on May 18th was presented by Giorgio
Armani in support of Sean Penn's J/P HRO, Paul Haggis' Artists for Peace
and Justice and Petra Nemcova's Happy Heart's Fund for their united and
extraordinary work in Haiti.
"Carnival in Cannes" , a c...
Thai Cinema Night took off on day three of the Cannes Film Festival. A special screening of Mekong Hotel, the latest film of the 2010 Palme d'Or recipient Apichatpong Weerasethakul preceded the event. In the audience of the Salle de Soixante was French veteran film director Agnes Varda. The film touches on the theme of reincarnation of his previous film LUNG BOONMEE RALUEK CHAT (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives). Another of his films featured at Cannes was Tropical Malady (...
Thai Cinema Night took off on day three of the Cannes Film Festival. A special screening of Mekong Hotel, the latest film of the 2010 Palme d'Or recipient Apichatpong Weerasethakul preceded the event. In the audience of the Salle de Soixante was French veteran film director Agnes Varda. The film touches on the theme of reincarnation of his previous film LUNG BOONMEE RALUEK CHAT (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives). Another of his films featured at Cannes was Tropical Malady (2004...
Snapshots from my first day in Cannes, images worth 1000 words.
Diner sitting right of Tim Berners Lee (inventor of the Internet) "God" as his fellows at W3C nickname him. I gave a keynote on film and Web (Friends or Foes)
Morning moment at the City Hall with Bernard Brochand (Mayor of Cannes: my former Boss says Hi)
Meeting at Dubai Film Festival's booth at Pantiero
A quick check at Rendez Vous des Exploitants to get my badge (run by Coté Cinéma), RDV to attend Uni...
Queer Palm President Julie Gayet
The 2012 Queer Palm Jury was announced this week - which will bestow the LGBT
Cannes Film Festival Queer Palm award on the best film with a gender,
and LGBT perspective on May 27 in Cannes. The films are selected from
the Official selection, Un Certain Regard, Semaine de la
Critique, Quinzaine des Réalisateurs and ACID (selection of independents
film-makers) - about 100 films.
Last year that prize was given to Oliver Herma...
There may not have been much to chew on in Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code but there are stronger signs of female power at Cannes making this festival one of the best. First of all there is the veteran actor- the magnifique Gena Rowlands featured in Paris, Je T'Aime in Un Certain Regard and gave a Master Class on acting commencing with a standing ovation. Almost everything that comes out of the mouth of this veteran actor is inspirational and provocative:
"We actors do not need to die to be r...
Multiple Academy Award winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) describes himself as ”a huge Bergman fan”. He will visit Fårö off the coast of Sweden on July 1-2 and introduce the screening of his film The Ice Storm and also talk about his favourite Bergman film, Wild Strawberries under the heading “My Flavour of Strawberries”.This year's "Bergman Week" presents a program filled with exciting guests representing three generations of filmmakers, a string of rarely seen Bergman film...
This is a film made by a Swede - now how do you define that? By blood, by territory, by residency, by a hyphenated ethnic identity? Miko Lazic is actually a second generation Swede. He's a Serbian-Swede. His film ...
At a special gala ceremony at the Museum of World Culture, the Göteborg Film Festival Nordic Film Award went to the director Dagur Kári for Dark Horse (Voksne Mennesker), which, “with a young careless rebel in focus, with insight and humour unites fragments from an alienated society into an artistically challenging unity”. The award consists of 150 000 SEK and the Filmdraken (Film dragon)statuette."To be nominated for an award like this is like having a race horse", expressed a happy Dagur...
Why was Heath Ledger (Ennis) nominated for Brokeback Mountain for the Golden Globes, and not Jake Gyllenhaal (Jack)? The Hollywood Foreign Press managed to nominate all the Desparate Housewives! But not the desparate ones from Brokeback Mountain (Michelle Williams, Anne Hatheway), their roles not really fleshed out. If 'love is a force of nature', as the film poster states, why not equal awards to both actors? Could it be that it is assumed that it is harder to play someone coming to terms wi...
Why make a King Kong film now? You have to ask Peter Jackson. Why is a white woman still held in high esteem by a gorilla? Why is a white woman in a white dress walking through the streets of New York in 0 degree weather to find her 'Kong'? Why a group of white men, one white woman , one Asian man and one black man on a boat to the mysterious 'Skull Island'? Why recreate a group of spirit possessed black islanders (New Zealand Maori) subdued by the militarism of a ship's primarily whitecrew and...
The Göteborg Film Festival, now in its 29th year will be held 26th January to 4th of February, becoming the Nordic film branch headquarters for ten days. The festival head is the esteemed film critic Jannike Åhlund who has been active for nearly three decades on the Swedish film scene and a member of the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes 2003. The festival is both a public forum as well as a branch meeting place with 450 features, shorts, and documentaries from 60 countries.George Clooney’s ...
Juan Solanas' Nordeste won the Best Film award at the Stockholm International Film Festival (Novemeber 17-27). Solanas received the Bronze Horse award at a star-studded ceremony at Lydmar Hotel in Stockholm, the hub of the festival for the press and visiting directors and actors including Park Chan-wook, whose film Sympathy for Lady Vengeance closed the festival. The award was presented to Solanas by Eva Fröling, acclaimed dramatic actress from Ingmar Bergman films and actor Sven Wolter. Solana...
"Lifetime Achievement Award" recipient David Cronenberg cut the 'ribbon' - a strip of celluloid - at the Stockholm Film Festival kick off November 17. "Are you sure you want to give me those scissors--that's kind of dangerous", he quipped to fest director Git Scheynius, and introduced the opening film: A History of Violence. He joked as he cut that he was going to do some fast editing of his latest feature, the one he is most proud of, the one he admits to "selling out" on because of its huge bu...
The winners were announced for the best films at the 62nd Venice International Film Festival.Critic favorite Ang Lee´s "Brokeback Mountain" won the Leone d´Or, a film about two cowboys who fall in love in the 1960's. George Clooney´s "Good Night and Good Luck", a favorite at the festival since its debut early in the week won two awards: David Strathairn who plays TV journalist Ed Murrow was awarded best actor (Coppa Volpi) and George Clooney won for best script along with Grant Heslov. The N...
The "Arca Cinema Giovani" announced three awards that will be presented tomorrow at the Golden Lion ceremony: Prize for the movie that has best treated the theme "Passagi d'Occidente: encounters, diversities, contrasts": Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener, "for having chosen such a difficult and up-to-date subject; for the intense elaborated artistic direction." (France/Germany, 2005) Prize for Best Italian Film: Cristina Comencini's Don't Tell, "for having harmonized the stories of eve...
The Italian journalists so far think that George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck is the best film in the international competition but the journalists don’t select the awards. Still, often what film critics think turns out to be right. Add to the list Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener , screened today at the fest, another strong contender for the Lion. The Venezia 62 international jury is composed of the Chinese scriptwriter and author Acheng, French filmmaker Claire Denis, Israeli ...
Patrice Chereau’s Gabrielle based on The Return by Joseph Conrad is the story about an upper class woman, Gabrielle (Isabelle Hubert), who writes a letter to her husband that she is leaving him for another man. She later returns home to her husband Jean (Pascal Greggory)the same day. The decision to project letters and plot developments onscreen as mega texts is one of the problems of Chereau’s film. The other is the cinematography by Eric Gautier who tries to enhance the story with more vi...
Fellini’s Il Casanova and the competition film Sympathy for Lady Vengeance by Park Chan-wook brought world class art cinema to the screens of Venezia 62 yesterday. There is Casanova, and there is Il Casanova. Fellini’s Il Casanova is required viewing before or after the popular success of Lasse Hallström’s Casanova. The restoration of Fellini’s 1976 print began in 2001 and was supervised by Giuseppe Rotunna, the photographer of the film present at the press conference at Venice today a...
Lasse Hallström’s out of competition film Casanova is the story of Casanova, a man searching for way out of being condemned to death for his amorous adventures. He needs a wife or maybe a new perspective. Soon he meets Francesca (Sienna Miller),a young Venetian who writes under the name of Bruno Guardia. Jeremy Irons plays the inquisitor Pucci who searches for both Guardia and Casanova (Heath Ledger). Lisa Olin, Hallström’s real life wife plays Francesca’s mother, and Oliver Platt, a lar...
Out of competition films: Final Fantasy VII, Advent Children, Tsui Harks Seven Swords (Qi jian), the opening film , and The Art of Love, Mine Ha Ha by John Irvin set the Venezia 62 in motion August 31. Tsui Hark explained why he has made another martial arts film. Because ‘the stories are still compelling’. Seven Swords is concerned with the origins of martial arts in 1600 China when peasants wanted to defend themselves from rogue bandits. Both Charlie Young and Honglei Sun evoke the stro...
