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Documentarian Vittorio De Seta’s first narrative feature, Bandits of Orgosolo, builds upon several of the director’s shorts about the Sardinian region where the film is set. Featuring a cast of non-professionals, the film follows the shepherd Michele (Michele Cossu) as he and his young son, Peppeddu (Peppeddu Cuccu), end up fleeing deeper into the mountainous countryside when the father is wrongly suspected of livestock rustling and murder. With carabiners on his trail, Michele leads his child and his sheep into higher and rockier ground, and as vegetation and water become increasingly scarce, starvation rips through the flock. Eventually, and in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, circumstances force Michele into the sort of crimes of which he was initially innocent.

This overarching narrative recalls Vittorio De Sica’s seminal Bicycle Thieves. But where De Sica’s neorealist drama took a snapshot of postwar Italy’s shattered economic and moral torpor,...

Jacques Perrin as the grown-up filmmaker in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso Photo: Filmitalia With a career that spanned contributions both behind and in front of the camera producer, director and actor Jacques Perrin, who has died at the age of 80, had been a fixture in European and global cinema over the decades.

Bleached blonde and youthful: Jacques Perrin in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort Photo: UniFrance Many will recall him fondly as the grown-up filmmaker Salvatore looking back on his childhood in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning nostalgia trip Cinema Paradiso. He started out as an actor in the 1950s, winning his first main role opposite Claudia Cardinale in Valerio Zurlini’s Girl With A Suitcase, which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1961. And he was still just 20 when he appeared with Marcello Mastroianni in Family Diary in 1962. Three years later he won the Coppa...

French actor, director and producer Jacques Perrin, a fixture for decades in both French and Italian cinema — where he was best known for his role in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning “Cinema Paradiso” — has died. He was 80.

“The family has the immense sadness of informing you of the death of filmmaker Jacques Perrin, who died on Thursday, April 21 in Paris. He passed away peacefully,” Perrin’s family announced in a statement sent to news agency Agence France Press by his son, Mathieu Simonet. The cause of death was not specified.

Born in Paris on July 13, 1941, Perrin, starting in the 1950s, starred in more than 70 films and co-directed others, including the Oscar-nominated “Winged Migration” (2001), in tandem with Philippe Labro, about the voyage of migratory birds which used in-flight cameras and was a box office hit.

The soft-spoken thesp had landed his first leading role starring opposite Italy’s Claudia Cardinale in Valerio Zurlini...

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) has unveiled the first docu films selected for its 33rd edition, including 30 titles heading from Berlin, Sundance and Cannes, among other festivals. The lineup also comprises 10 titles selected by Gianfranco Rosi for the Top 10 program. As previously announced, the fest will take place Nov. 18-29 with a hybrid format mixing physical and virtual events.

“This year more than ever, IDFA honors the festivals that, in spite of incredible circumstances, continue to champion the art of documentary filmmaking. The initial Best of Fests selection highlights both audience favorites and award-winning masterpieces. More titles to be announced,” stated Idfa.

The Best of Fest roster includes “The Truffle Hunters” by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, which premiered at Sundance and was part of Cannes and Telluride selections; Elizabeth Lo’s “Stray,” an award-winning film from Hot Docs and Tribeca portraying Turkish city life through the eyes...

The Amsterdan event is planned as a hybrid physical-digital edition.

International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Idfa) has unveiled the first titles selected for edition, which is set to go ahead as a mix of physical and virtual events from November 18-29.

The festival will screen 30 documentaries first selected for the Berlinale, Sundance and Cannes under the banner Best of Fests.

Scroll down for full list of titles

The titles include The Truffle Hunters by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, which debuted at Sundance before being being selected for both Cannes and Telluride (although neither took place); and Elizabeth Lo’s Stray,...

The year’s best-curated selection of cinema begins this Friday at Film at Lincoln Center: the New York Film Festival. Now in its 57th edition, the event will kick off with one of its most high-profile world premieres in years, Martin Scorsese’s 3.5-hour crime epic The Irishman. What will follow is 17 days of the finest world cinema has to offer.

Since you are surely aware of their more high-profile selections–including Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or winner Parasite, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, and a certain jokester–in our preview we’ve sought out to highlight some films that are either flying a bit under the radar or go beyond their Main Slate selections. Check out 12 films to see, along with all reviews thus far, and return for our coverage. See the full schedule and more here.

Atlantics (Mati Diop)

Somewhere along the stretch of Senegalese coastline where...

Above: Italian 2-foglio for Loves of a Blonde (Miloš Forman, Czechoslovakia, 1965).As the 54th New York Film Festival winds to a close this weekend I thought it would be instructive to look back at its counterpart of 50 years ago. Sadly, for the sake of symmetry, there are no filmmakers straddling both the 1966 and the 2016 editions, though Agnès Varda (88 years old), Jean-Luc Godard (85), Carlos Saura (84) and Jirí Menzel (78)—all of whom had films in the 1966 Nyff—are all still making films, and Milos Forman (84), Ivan Passer (83) and Peter Watkins (80) are all still with us. There are only two filmmakers in the current Nyff who could potentially have been in the 1966 edition and they are Ken Loach (80) and Paul Verhoeven (78). The current Nyff is remarkably youthful—half the filmmakers weren’t even born in 1966 and, with the exception of Loach and Verhoeven, the old guard is now represented by Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodóvar,...

Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money

The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...

"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director

Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France

Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)

A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)

Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)

Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...

Cinema Made In Italy, London

Though we don't get to see that much of it here, Italian cinema is still going strong. This renamed festival shows some of the depth, with new films at Ciné Lumière, and older stuff at the Italian Cultural Institute. The new movies cover some familiar Italian preoccupations: organised crime (boxing thriller Tatanka, from a story by Roberto "Gomorrah" Saviano), family (Kryptonite) and coming of age (Summer Of Giacomo). But there are also new angles on Italian culture, such as Li And The Poet, dealing with a Chinese immigrant in Venice, and sci-fi The Last Man On Earth. Many of the films on show are UK premieres, including Scialla!, and there are films selected by the Corriere della Sera's top critic, TV sporting dramas and a tribute to the late Sicilian documentarian Vittorio De Seta.

Ciné Lumière, SW7, Sat to Thu; Italian Cultural Institute, SW1, Thu to 30 Mar

Flatpack Film Festival,...

Italian film director celebrated for his insightful short films

The film director Vittorio De Seta, who has died aged 88, was best known for his short films. A selection of these, made in Sicily and Sardinia in the 1950s, was presented by Martin Scorsese at the 2005 Tribeca film festival in New York. Scorsese described De Seta's style as that of "an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet". The film historian Goffredo Fofi has hailed De Seta as an Italian director "to be remembered alongside the Rossellinis and De Sicas, the Antonionis and the Fellinis"; he also deserves to be remembered alongside the great poetic documentary makers, such as Robert Flaherty, Humphrey Jennings and Basil Wright.

De Seta was born in Palermo, Sicily, to an aristocratic landowning family from Calabria. He enrolled in the navy during the second world war and, after the armistice in 1943, refused to sign allegiance...

La Stampa is among the Italian papers and other news sources reporting on yesterday's passing of director and screenwriter Vittorio De Seta. When MoMA presented a retrospective in 2006, the curators noted that De Seta "was born into a noble Calabrian family in Palermo," studied film in Rome in the 1940s and broke "from the official cinema in the 1950s with a series of acclaimed documentaries made in Sicily, Sardinia and Calabria. Characterized by beautiful color, keen observation, and ambient soundtracks without narration, these works depict the customs of rural Italian laborers and families."

Just last month, the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival presented a series of De Seta's work: "In 1953, he worked as an assistant to French director [Jean-Paul] Le Chanois. His first documentary, Easter in Sicily, was filmed the following year. As a documentarian, he has visited villages, sulfur mines, and the remote Sardinian mountains. The Time of the Swordfish received an award at Cannes,...

With 2010 only a week over, it already feels like best-of and top-ten lists have been pouring in for months, and we’re already tired of them: the ranking, the exclusions (and inclusions), the rules and the qualifiers. Some people got to see films at festivals, others only catch movies on video; and the ability for us, or any publication, to come up with a system to fairly determine who saw what when and what they thought was the best seems an impossible feat. That doesn’t stop most people from doing it, but we liked the fantasy double features we did last year and for our 3rd Writers Poll we thought we'd do it again.

I asked our contributors to pick a single new film they saw in 2010—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they saw in 2010 to create a unique double feature.