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Netflix Doc Shorts

Netflix has revealed the 10 winning filmmaker teams from its inaugural UK Documentary Talent Fund. A total of £400,000 in financing will be handed out to back 10 short documentary projects, each 8-12 minutes long and answering the brief “Britain’s Not Boring And Here’s a Story”. Winners are: Beya Kabelu’s The Detective & The Thief; Daisy Ifama’s Twinkleberry; Dhivya Kate Chetty’s Bee Whisperer; Jakob Lancaster & Sorcha Bacon’s Seal In The City; Jason Osborne and Precious Mahaga’s Love Languages; Ngaio Anyia and Aodh Breathnach’s Tegan; Sean Mullan and Michael Barwise’s Hyfin; Shiva Raichandani and Shane ShayShay Konno’s Peach Paradise; Tavie Tiffany Agama’s Women Of The Market; and Tobi Kyeremateng & Tania Nwachukwu’s ÓWÀMBÈ.

Berlinale Audience Award

The Berlin Film Festival will introduce a new audience award during its planned summer event. Due to run June 9-20, attendees will have to chance...

Two-time Oscar nominated Italian cinematographer Dante Spinotti will receive this year’s Pardo Alla Carriera Achievement Award at August’s 74th Locarno Film Festival. Locarno will also host screenings of two of Spinotti’s standout films resulting from his long-time partnership with director Michael Mann: Oscar-nominated “The Insider” and classic heist thriller “Heat.” Spinotti will receive the prize in a ceremony at the Piazza Grande on Aug. 12, and hold an audience-led conversation the following day.

Spinotti’s prolific and consistent output has crossed genres and cinematic trends for four decades. His feature debut work was in Sergio Citti’s “Il minestrone” in 1981, but he was quickly off to Hollywood where he made an impact with the diversity and quality of his efforts, working on films like Sam Raimi’s Western “The Quick and the Dead,” Garry Marshall’s rom-com “Frankie and Johnny” starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer, and...

Swiss festival will screen Michael Mann’s The Insider and Heat for which Spinotti was Oscar-nominated.

Italian cinematographer Dante Spinotti will receive the Locarno Film Festival’s lifetime achievement award at its upcoming 74th edition running August 4 to 14, 2021.

Having spent the first 15-years of his career in his native Italy, Spinotti was given the opportunity to work in the US by compatriot producer Dino De Laurentis on Michael Mann’s 1986 mystery horror Manhunter.

It would mark the beginning of a long creative partnership with Michael Mann on a raft of titles including The Insider and Heat, for which Spinotti was Oscar-nominated.

The Venice Film Festival will honor Oscar-winning Italian actor/director Roberto Benigni with its 2021 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

Benigni, whose “Life Is Beautiful” – which he co-wrote, directed and starred in – won three Oscars in 1999, including best actor, recently returned to the big screen playing Geppetto in Matteo Garrone’s live-action adaptation of “Pinocchio.”

“Pinocchio,” which was a box office champ in Italy in 2019, has been recently released in the U.S. by Roadside Attractions and is nominated for 2021 Oscars in the best costume design and makeup and hairstyling categories.

Benigni’s last directorial effort is “The Tiger and the Snow,” in 2005, in which he also starred. In recent years the beloved Italian showman has been active with his stage adaptation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which toured in Italy and around the world.

In praising Benigni Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera noted that “few artists have equaled his ability to combine explosive comic timing,...

The Berlinale continues to unveil its lineup, today announcing films selected for its Forum category: an independent section of the festival, organized by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, celebrating its 50th anniversary.

This intermeshing of old and new runs throughout the selection. The category offers challenging and thought-provoking films that bring together cinema with the visual arts, theatre and literature. Many of the 35 films in this year’s program — 28 of which are world premieres — are distinguished by how they navigate between past and present.

Included in the selection is late Chilean director Raúl Ruiz and his widow Valeria Sarmientos’ “The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror,” which opens this year’s Forum. Ruiz, who died in 2011, shot the material in Chile in 1967, but was unable to complete it before going into exile in 1973. His widow Sarmiento has now transformed the footage into a finished film.

The...

At the time of his death by apparent suicide on Friday, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain was most recently linked to Italian actress and director Asia Argento. The two started dating in 2016 after meeting on season 8 of his CNN travel show Parts Unknown.

“[Asia] has spent a lifetime in film since she was 9 years old,” Bourdain told People in an 2017 interview. “She comes from generations of filmmakers on both sides of the family. She’s a really accomplished director and writer along with being a longtime actress and a real sponge for culture, music, literature. So she’s enormously helpful and inspiring.

Actor known for his roles in the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Franco Citti, who has died aged 90, made a memorable screen debut playing the title role of a pimp in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first film, Accattone (1961), which was inspired by several characters whom Pasolini had met in the barren areas on the impoverished Roman outskirts.

Franco was one of the non-professionals cast in the film after Pasolini had met him through his brother, the writer and director Sergio Citti. The producer Alfredo Bini, who took over Accattone after its stuttering start with Federico Fellini’s production company, accepted Pasolini’s choice of Franco, but insisted that his dialogue be postsynched by a professional, something that Pasolini later regretted. However, Franco’s extraordinarily expressive face was more important than his voice in the film which, respecting the director’s love for Masaccio’s paintings and the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer,...

Special Mention: Dead Ringers

Directed by David Cronenberg

Written by David Cronenberg and Norman Snider

Canada, 1988

Genre: Thriller / Drama

Dead Ringers is one of David Cronenberg’s masterpieces, and Jeremy Irons gives the most highly accomplished performance of his entire career – times two. This is the story of Beverly and Elliot Mantle (both played by Irons), identical twins who, since birth, have been inseparable. Together, they work as gynecologists in their own clinic, and literally share everything between them, including the women they work and sleep with. Jealousy comes between the two when Beverly falls in love with a new patient and decides he no longer wants to share his lady friend with Elliot. The twins, who have always existed together as one, have trouble adapting and soon turn against one another. Unlike the director’s previous films, the biological horror in Dead Ringers is entirely conveyed through the psychological...

Every year, we here at Sound On Sight celebrate the month of October with 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles. I’ve also decided to publish each post backwards this time around for one reason: that is, the new additions appear lower on my list, whereas my top 50 haven’t changed much, except for maybe in ranking. Enjoy!

Special Mention:

Outer Space

Written and directed by Peter Tscherkassky

Austria, 2000

Outer Space has gained a reputation over the years as being a key experimental film alongside the works of such legends as Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow. Horror buffs will recognise the actress in the short as Oscar nominee Barbara Hershey.

Italian screenwriter, novelist and poet who formed a successful partnership with the film director Roberto Benigni

Although he was a respected novelist and poet, Vincenzo Cerami, who has died aged 72 after a long illness, was perhaps best known as a screenwriter, thanks to his long partnership with the director Roberto Benigni. The pair co-wrote six films and had their greatest success with La Vita è Bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997), which starred Benigni as a Jewish internee in a concentration camp, desperately pretending to his young son that it is all a game. The film won three Oscars and had a further four nominations, including for best screenplay. "Knowing Vincenzo was a gift," said Benigni, "because he taught people's hearts to beat."

On their early films together, Cerami was not able to totally sublimate Benigni's excesses as an actor. Nevertheless, Il Piccolo Diavolo (The Little Devil, 1988), Johnny Stecchino (1991) and Il Mostro (The Monster,...

Throughout the month of October, Editor-in-Chief and resident Horror expert Ricky D, will be posting a list of his favorite Horror films of all time. The list will be posted in six parts. Click here to see every entry.

As with all lists, this is personal and nobody will agree with every choice – and if you do, that would be incredibly disturbing. It was almost impossible for me to rank them in order, but I tried and eventually gave up.

****

Special Mention:

Shock Corridor

Directed by Samuel Fuller

Written by Samuel Fuller

1963, USA

Shock Corridor stars Peter Breck as Johnny Barrett, an ambitious reporter who wants to expose the killer at the local insane asylum. In order to solve the case, he must pretend to be insane so they have him committed. Once in the asylum, Barrett sets to work, interrogating the other patients and keeping a close eye on the staff.

On October 30, 1975, three days before he was murdered, Pier Paolo Pasolini was in Stockholm to present what was to be his last film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, to Swedish critics. A roundtable discussion was recorded with the intent of turning it into a radio broadcast but news of the filmmaker's death oddly resulted in the withholding of the recording rather than, as would surely happen today, an immediate publication. Eventually, the recording was lost, but as Eric Loret and Robert Maggiori tell the story in Libération, Pasolini's Swedish translator, Carl Henrik Svenstedt, a passionate archivist, recently discovered his own private copy. In December, the Italian newsweekly L'espresso posted the audio recording and published an Italian transcript. Here, for the first time, is an English translation. After a couple of informal questions, the roundtable officially opens with "Ladies and gentlemen…"

What do you know about Swedish cinema?

I know Bergman,...

Debbie Rochon, often described as a scream queen herself, wrote in an article originally published in Gc Magazine that "a true Scream Queen isn't The Perfect Woman. She's sexy, seductive, but most importantly 'attainable' to the average guy. Or so it would seem." Nastassja Kinski Films: To the Devil a Daughter (1976) [1] Cat People (1982) [2] The Day the World Ended (2001) [3] Inland Empire (2006) [4] Kinski will always be remembered for the iconic photograph shot by Richard Avedon (with a snake coiled around her body) and her role in Paul Schrader's (not so good) remake of Cat People. Needless to say, it was a hit at the box office and Kinski deservingly received a Saturn Award for Best Actress. Caroline Munro Films: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) [5] Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972) [6] Dracula A.D. 1972 [7] Maniac (1980) [8] Faceless (1987) [9] Demons 6 (1989) [10] Caroline Munro seduced audiences in her Hammer roles in films like Dracula A.D. 1972, but for gore hounds,...