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They claim the Flemish cultural sector will now suffer without De Schutter’s expertise and international contacts.

Over 150 leading figures from the European and international industry have signed an open letter in support of Christian De Schutter, former managing director of Flanders Image, whose sudden removal from his role was announced in a short email sent by Koen Van Bockstal, CEO of Flanders Audiovisual Fund (Vaf), on December 20.

“We’re all flummoxed by the situation and as his longtime colleagues we think we deserve some sort of explanation. We know that many people in Belgium, including your leading filmmakers, are also confused and angered,...

Dan Jackson (right) was the winner of the Documentary Australia Foundation Award for Australian Documentary

The 63rd Sydney Film Festival closed last night at the State Theatre, with the festival.s award winners announced before a screening of Whit Stillman.s Love and Friendship. . Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho was the recipient of the $63,000 Sydney Film Prize for Aquarius. Jury president Simon Field said the film, starring Sonia Braga, had .effortless verve and intelligence.. .Aquarius is a compelling and relevant statement about contemporary Brazil, and the power of the individual standing up for what she believes,. he said. Sydney filmmaker Dan Jackson picked up the $15,000 Documentary Australia Foundation Award for Australian Documentary for his debut feature In the Shadow of the Hill, also set in Brazil. . Jackson lived in Rio De Janeiro slum Rocinha, which has been under police occupation since 2011, for over a year, documenting the story of a...

Asia Pacific prizes also awarded to Hany Abu-Assad for The Idol, Alexey German Jr for Under Electric Clouds and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing for The Assassin.Scroll down for full list of winners

Cemetery of Splendour, by Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, has won best feature film at the 9th Asia Pacific Screen Awards (Apsa) in Australia.

The Thai-language drama, which debuted at Cannes, centres on a middle-aged woman who experiences strange visions while tending a soldier with sleeping sickness.

The awards, announced at a ceremony at Brisbane’s City Hall, saw films honoured from Thailand, Russia, Turkey, China, Japan, Palestine, Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Australia.

The Apsa Unesco Award for outstanding contribution to the promotion and preservation of cultural diversity through film was awarded to Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad for The Idol, which debuted at Toronto.

Speaking from the set of his latest production, the director said of the award: “Thank you dear jury for this great...

Love in Khon Kaen

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul // Writer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Though he premiered a medium length film at Cannes 2012, Mekong Hotel, Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul hasn’t debuted a feature length since his 2010 Palme d’Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. His latest, Love in the Khon Kaen (formerly known as a project called Cemetery of Kings) promises to be another mystical enigma from the provocative director, described as a film about a lonesome middle-age housewife who tends a soldier with sleeping sickness and falls into a hallucination that triggers strange dreams, phantoms, and romance. Weersethakul collaborates once more with familiar castmembers, including Jenjira Pongpas (Boonmee; Syndromes and a Century) and Banlop Lomnoi (Tropical Malady).

Cast: Jenjira Pongpas, Banlop Lomnoi

Producers: Kick the Machine Films’ Simon Field (Mekong Hotel), Illumination Films’ Keith Griffiths (Berberian Sound Studio)

U.S. Distributor: Rights available

Release Date: Apparently in post-production,...

Documentaries from Latin America were the big winners at this year’s Visions du Réel (April 25-May 3) in Switzerland’s Nyon.

The Sesterce d’Or for best feature length film in the international competition was awarded to Mexican filmmaker Hatuey Viveros Lavielle’s n, which also received a special mention from the interreligious jury.

The international jury of UK producer Simon Field, German director Nicolas Humbert and French philosopher Marie-José Mondzain said that it appreciated the “patient perspective” of “this extremely sensitive film [which] explores the relation between emancipation and tradition, proximity and separation at the heart of an indigenous family.”

Paraguay’s Arami Ullón received the Sesterce d’Argent prize in the Regard Neufs competition and a special mention from the C-Side Prize jury for his debut El Tiempo Nublado.

The Chilean Mafi collective picked up the George Foundation Jury award for the most innovative medium-length film for Propaganda, about the presidential election campaign of autumn 2013, while...

Tonislav Hristov’s Love & Engineering is to open the 20th edition of the Visions du Réel documentary film festival.

The film about a Bulgarian computer engineer searching for a formula to create irresistible seductive power for four desperate digital geeks searching for analogue love will open this year’s festival in Nyon, Switzerland tomorrow (April 24). The festival runs from April 25 to May 3.

The German-Finnish-Bulgarian co-production won the Audience Award at DocPoint Helsinki and is set to be screened at Hot Docs Toronto and the Tribeca Film Festival this month.

Nyon’s 2014 edition will see the festival celebrating two anniversaries: in 1969, the Festival international de cinéma Nyon was founded by the later Berlinale director Moritz de Hadeln, and the name change to Visions du Réel was taken by present artistic director Luciano Barisone’s predecessor Jean Perret in 1995

19 feature-length documentaries from 17 countries in the festival’s main competition will be judged by an International Jury comprising UK producer...

Cemetery of Kings

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Writer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Producers: Simon Field, Keith Griffiths, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available

Cast: Jenjira Widner, Banlop

It surprisingly takes an international film community (coin coming from several sources) to keep Palme d’Or winner Thai Joe (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) in business of feature filmmaking but it takes very little to motivate him as an artist: his generous output is visible in art installations, short films, to medium-sized items such as Mekong Hotel. While this appears to raid from his chest of films from his last decade and certainly brings a vague sense of familiarity with performance, obsessions, and use of physical borders, Cemetery of Kings might be the last of film to come out of a certain comfort zone.

Gist: A small town in Thailand, twenty-seven soldiers come down with a strange case of sleeping sickness.

Plus: Pool, as played in 60s Chicago; How many witch-trials were there? Has a non-human ever been elected?

Why is The Postman Always Rings Twice so called? The title seems to have no relevance to the story.

James M Cain suggested the term "postman" was not meant to be taken literally. Rather, the title refers to fate or justice eventually catching up with the perpetrator of a crime, even if they were not punished for the original offence. In Cain's novel (spoilers ahoy) protagonist Frank Chambers helps his lover Cora to kill her husband, but due to machinationsand double-crossing in the courtroom both walk free. However, Cora is later accidentally killed in a car crash and Frank, the driver, is wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The "postman" whose ring was missed on the first occasion, has "rung" again, and everyone hears his second ring.

In the 1946 film...

Raúl Ruiz The International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) will be paying tribute to Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, who died in August at age 70, with a screening of his first film, La Maleta (1963) and one of his last, Ballet Aquatique (2011), at 8 p.m. tomorrow, Jan. 31. Among those expected to reminisce about Ruiz are actor Melvil Poupaud, producer François Margolin, Australian journalist and "Ruiz expert" Adrian Martin, and former Iffr director Simon Field. Ruiz's widow, film editor Valeria Sarmiento, was invited to the Rotterdam film festival, but she had to decline because she is currently directing Lines of Wellington, which was to have been her deceased husband's next project. Much like Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon, the historical drama is to be released both as a feature and as a television miniseries. Set at the time of one of the various Napoleonic Wars, when French forces tried to invade Portugal, Lines of Wellington...

#35. Berberian Sound Studio Director/Writer: Peter StricklandProducers: Mary Burke (Submarine), Illuminations Films' Simon Field and Keith Griffiths (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives)Distributor: Rights Available (Match Factory) The Gist: Berberian Sound Studio is one of the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed and sharpened in this studio. Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a shy and nondescript sound engineer from the UK is hired to mix the latest giallo film by horror maestro, Santini (Antonio Mancino) and he soon finds himself caught up in a forbidding world of bitter actors, capricious foley artists and confounding bureaucracy...(more) Cast: Toby Jones toplines. List Worthy Reasons...: The Silver Bear (2009 Berlin Film Festival) and The European Film Academy's Discovery of the Year award winning Katalin Varga announced that the arrival of helmer Peter Strickland. I have a penchant for films about...

Toby Jones is set to star in Berberian Sound Studio . You might recognize this actor from his work in Captain America: The First Avenger (as Arnim Zola) or as the bad-ass grocery store clerk in The Mist . Jones will play a sound engineer whose work for an Italian horror studio becomes a terrifying case of life imitating art. Peter Strickland will direct from his own script. Mary Burke ( Submarine ), Simon Field and Keith Griffiths are producing. Here's a lengthy synopsis - this could be a good one, we'll keep our eyes out for more on the film: 1976: Berberian Sound Studio is one of the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed and sharpened in this studio. Gilderoy, a naive and introverted sound...

Berlin’s twin city Tokyo will host the first Talent Campus in Japan from November 21-26, 2011 during the Tokyo FILMeX film festival.

Talent Campus Tokyo will invite about 15 talented young directors and producers from East and Southeast Asia to attend workshops, masterclasses and panel discussions with high-profile experts and filmmakers. Young filmmakers from these regions will be able to apply from June 1, 2011, as stated in a press release.

Talent Campus Tokyo will be held in cooperation with the Berlinale Talent Campus and the Goethe-Institut Tokyo.

In 2010, a pilot programme entitled “Next Masters Tokyo”, featured 20 young filmmakers from nine different Asian countries and regions. These filmmakers included Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Amos Gitai, Simon Field, Emilie Georges and Iranian filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami and Amir Naderi.”...

Above: From left to right, Tokyo FilmEx festival directors Kanako Hayashi and Shozo Ichiyama; and Nobuteru Uchida's prize-winning film, Love Addition.

Last November, I had a conversation with Tokyo FilmEx Festival directors Shozo Ichiyama and Kanako Hayashi. For more than a decade, this duo has helmed Japan’s most serious festival, one dedicated to independent cinema from Asia. Office Kitano, Takeshi Kitano’s production company, has remained its key partner over the years, and helped Japan’s support of Iranian directors as well as groundbreaking figures from China, most notably Jia Zhangke, a regular at FilmEx from the beginning. The festival also revealed the fragile state of art cinema in and from Japan and how a very small, centralized community that has been determining what fits into this category, and what is not allowed in; a community that’s aged while being unable to neither find nor form new heirs.

Well, this is an exciting week for links! I’ve stumbled upon or have been directed to several new sources from which to pull from. Is the underground film blogging boom not far away? This is one of the longer links posts I’ve done.

First up isn’t exactly an underground film site per se. It’s Catherine Grant’s phenomenal Film Studies for Free who puts up encyclopedia-sized links posts that make my weekly compilations seem sad and pathetic by comparison. Semi-underground related, Grant recently posted up 12 videos from a David Lynch symposium that took place back in ’09 at the Tate Modern. Add this site to your RSS reader. I did. Making Light of It has recommended a resurrected blog that I’ve never seen before: Watermelon Rinds by Ekrem Serdar. In his most recent post, Serdar tries to gather some thoughts and ideas on Robert Breer and Keewatin Dewdney.

Cannes Countdown: 16 Days: The Match Factory'sUncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

aka Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat

The Match Factory is one of the most dynamic and important international sales agents. To learn how international independent coproductions of the festival type film get made, you need to know origins of The Match Factory itself. Founder Karl Baumgartner is The Maestro of International Coproduction. He has been producing since 1991 and has at least two production companies, one of which is Pandora which goes back as a German distribution company to the 1950s and which with partner Reinhard Brundig is a partner in The Match Factory.  In 1963 Baumie, as he is known to his friends, prebought Jarmisch's Down By Law which immediately put both Jarmisch and his producer Jim Stark into international play.  Beside their slate of current films, they represent the entire library of Aki Kaurismäki.

Cofounder and partner, Michael Weber...

Yeah, long title, but let’s write it once again, so we could start the story about this movie. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is an upcoming Thai sensitive drama, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Of course, we are here to have a little chat about it, since this film is also scheduled to compete at the Cannes Film Festival 2010 for the Palme d’Or.

Here’s the official synopsis part says: “Suffering from acute kidney failure, Uncle Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form.

Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave – the birthplace of his first life…...

The Producers Network today and tomorrow accept seasoned producers to meet at roundtables hosted by such industry luminaries as Julie Bergeron who is responsible for exporting this version of the Pn from the Cannes Market, Clauia Landsberger who served 8 years as head of European Film Promotion, continues to head up Holland Film and is on the Berlinale selection committee, Alfredo Calvino head of the Mexican based Latinofusion who is awarding Us$60,000 to filmmakers in various competitions, Mexican line producer Carlos Taibo, Hugo Villa, and Strategic Partners' Jan Miller. Each in turn hosts an expert to discuss specific subjects with the participants around a table.

My choice on day one was Carlos Taibo's hosted table for Susan Weeks of the Global Film Initiative which Susan initially founded with Noah Cowan to promote cross-cultural understanding through the medium of cinema. Their model was based on the Hubert Bals Fund and it...

Without a good sound mix horror, more than any other genre, would be far less effective. Imagine movies like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity without their children laughing or things going bump in the night. A good mix makes all the difference, I tell ya! It seems only natural that a horror movie based upon time spent mixing various sounds would come out sooner or later.

According to Screen Daily multi award-winning director Peter Strickland is plotting a new Italy-set horror film. The project, called Berberian Sound Studio, is being made through the UK’s Illuminations Films and digital film studio Warp X. Illuminations’ Keith Griffiths and Simon Field, along with Peter Carlton and Robin Gutch from Warp, are producing the film. The Italian and English-language film is due to shoot later this year.

The film will follow an English sound engineer who goes to work in an...

By R. Emmet Sweeney

Guy Maddin is a hoarder of uncanny images, from the candy-colored Alpine tableaus of "Careful" to the frozen horse heads of last year's "My Winnipeg." A commission from the Rotterdam Film Festival centers around another: Isabella Rossellini blasted out of an electric chair. It's the basis for his new short film, "Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair," part of the Urban Screens series at the festival, which is projecting three works onto office buildings throughout the city. It's an archetypal Maddin film, conflating sex, death and film history in a manic seven minutes. I spoke with him at the festival about the new work, collage parties, Thomas Edison and the hazards of Dutch public transit.

How did you get this assignment, and how did you conceive it?

I was approached by the producers Keith Griffiths and Simon Field, who are both friends of mine. They just...