News

Miuccia Prada’s fashion brand Miu Miu has unveiled the talent-packed program of its Tales & Tellers conversations lineup which will unfold at the Palais d’Iena during the Art Basel Paris. Miu Miu is an official partner of the public program.

Tales & Tellers was conceived by Polish artist Goshka Macuga and curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. An immersive, site-specific art project and series of short film screenings and conversations, Tales & Tellers was influenced by Miu Miu’s collaborations within the worlds of filmmaking and art.

Kicking off with a chic vernissage on Oct. 15 on the eve of opening of Art Basel Paris, this year’s inaugural Tales & Tellers program will bring together directors, talent and artists coming from different horizons who have participated in Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales and/or collaborated with the brand on the fashion shows.

Five panels hosted in two days,...

The Giornate Degli Autori, simply known as Venice Days, has unveiled its 2024 lineup.

The independently run event, which takes place alongside the Venice Film Festival, will this year follow a theme of creatures “poised over an abyss, walking a tightrope.” “To reach the other side, or else to escape from something behind them, or just because, seen from above — lost in time, lost in space — things look very different,” event organizers said.

The only Italian title in competition is Ciro De Caro’s Taxi Monamour, about two women who lose their way yet stubbornly persist in living life as they wish. Dutch filmmaker Jan-Willem Van Ewijk’s third feature film, Alpha., follows a troubled father-son relationship set high in the Swiss Alps.

French filmmaker Marie Losier revisits the feminist singer and performer Peaches and a 14-year-long friendship in Peaches Goes Bananas, shot over the course of 17 years, while the directorial debut of Shahab Fotouhi,...

Films directed by women dominate the Venice Film Festival’s independently run Giornate Degli Autori, which has unveiled a lineup full of first works and special events including “Peaches Goes Bananas,” French filmmaker Marie Losier’s tribute to iconic Canadian electropop provocateur Peaches.

Shot over the course of 17 years, “Peaches Goes Bananas” provides an intimate portrait of the former schoolteacher, who during the 1980s moved from Canada to Berlin and became a queer feminist icon, breaking taboos and “transforming her body into art,” as the doc’s synopsis puts it.

The competition of the Giornate – which is also known as Venice Days – comprises 10 world premieres, six of which are first works, within a selection that artistic director Gaia Furrer described in her notes as “rigorous” and “stylistically eclectic.”

Furer underlined that 16 out of the section’s 25 titles are directed by women, a fact she called significant “because many of them...

The Busan film festival’s Asian Project Market is set to welcome several of the region’s top auteurs either as producers or prospective directors at its next edition in October.

Apm organizers Thursday unveiled 30 projects to be presented during a four-day round of one-on-one meetings and pitching sessions.

India’s Rima Das (“Tora’s Husband”) will pitch “Malti My Love.” Japan’s Fukada Koji will pitch “Nagi Notes.” Indonesia’s Makbul Mubarak (“Autobiography”) will pitch “Watch It Burn.”

Among the successful producers adding their weight to Apm contenders are: Patrick Mao Huang selling Peter Ho’s project “Appetite for Desire”; Jeremy Chua, pitching Rafael Manuel’s “Filipinana”; Ichiyama Shozo (“Ash Is Puirest White”) pitching Song Fang’s Japan-China collaboration “Full Moon”; Fran Borgia pitching Aakash Chhabra’s “I’ll Smile in September”; and Tan Chui Mui (“Barbarian Invasion”) pitching Jian Xiaoshuan’s “To Kill A Mongolian Horse.”

The project...

With his nineteenth feature film - an incredible number given that he didn't appear on the scene until 2001 and also has a number of shorts, television projects and anthology projects to his credit - Malaysia's James Lee returns to the sort of arthouse drama where he made his name.Lee has worked a great deal in commercial film in recent years, enough that it's easy to forget how surprised people were when one of the founders of arthouse film collective Da Huang Pictures - along with Amir Muhammed, Tan Chui Mui and Liew Seng Tat - first stepped in to the genre world with the ultra bloody Histeria. But Lee is back with Da Huang for If It's Not Now, Then When and it's...

In a city often derided as art-phobic and money-obsessed, the Hong Kong International Film Festival provides an annual opportunity for local audiences to contextualize their own regional cinema alongside the breadth of international contemporary filmmaking. While the glitz of the Hk movie industry is paraded in various galas and a high-wattage opening award ceremony, the programmers have left plenty of room throughout the festival’s seventeen days of screenings for the usual arthouse suspects, student-director and avant-garde showcases, and a strong focus on new Chinese-language cinema. With this diverse slate spread out across multiplex theaters throughout the city, it’s surprising that Hkiff also manages to maintain a certain level of coherence, partly due to the atmosphere created by what seems to be a dedicated viewership and the visibility of well-known Sinophone cinephiles like Tony Rayns and David Bordwell. Since I had just four whole days in the city, I...

This year’s BigPond Adelaide Film Festival will present 20 world premieres of new Australian works, and a total of 48 local features and shorts.

The 12 films competing for the International Award for Best Feature Film have also been announced: Four Times (Italy, dir: Michelangelo Frammartino); Here I Am (Australia, dir: Beck Cole); Tuesday After Christmas (Romania, dir: Radu Muntean); Incendies (Canada,dir:: Denis Villeneuve); Meek’s Cutoff (USA, dir: Kelly Reichardt); Mysteries of Lisbon (Portugal, dir: Raoul Ruiz); Nostalgia For the Light (Chile, dir: Patricio Guzman); October (Peru, dir: Daniel Vega Vidal and Diego Vega Vidal); Piano in a Factory (China, dir: Zhang Meng); Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (Australia, dir: Matt Bate); Whisper with the Wind (Iraq, dir: Shahram Alidi); and Year Without a Summer (Malaysia, dir: Tan Chui Mui).

The films will be judged by Julietta Sichel (jury president/Karlovy Vary Film Festival), Pierre Rissient (Cannes), Hossein...

Yesterday, festival director Rutger Wolfson presented what's been confirmed for the upcoming International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) starting at the end of January.

The 2011 edition promises to be a special one as it's an anniversary: the Iffr turns 40. In Roman numerals that reads as "Xl" and this is the current buzzword: everything will be slighty larger starting with the number of locations. And not just venues either: Rotterdam will be peppered wth cinema-related art installations all across town.

On top of that there is a festival section for Western films made in the old Soviet Union back in the fifties and sixties, movies which were hugely popular in the Ussr but never shown outside of the country. The Iffr has 15 of those in the program.

Another section focuses on 80 years of Chinese Wuxia films, showing a selection of 20 martial arms movies made from 1930 till 2010. Fingers crossed for some interesting recent titles!

This year's Palme d'or winner (Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) is a glowing example of exact purpose that the Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival Rotterdam serves: supporting national cinemas and filmmakers through various stages of production. The Fund’s Fall 2010 Selection Round includes one of our profiled Ioncinephile filmmakers in Mexico's Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio, who won over critics and film festival prizes (2010 Tiger Award) with Alamar, and who is now in the development phase of his next project entitled, Sombra del arbol (Tree Shade). In total, four projects from Mexico are receiving well-needed coin. Here are the selected projects: Postproduction & Final Financing Ausensias (Absences) - Milagros Mumenthaler; Argentina Black Blood - Miaoyan Zhang; China Flying Fish - Sanjeewa Pelanwattage; Sri Lanka The Old Donkey - Li Ruijun; China Paraísos Artificiales (Artificial Paradises) - Yulene Olaizola; Mexico Digital Production If It Is Not Now,...

Yes.

It's an award-winning film which can now be watched, for free, over the Internet.

 

 

Each January brings us a new International Film Festival Rotterdam, and 2010 will not be an exception. The festival is best known for its mix of indie and foreign films (especially Asia is always well represented), but the Iffr also experiments with mixing different types of media. This includes looking for ways to use the Internet as an opportunity instead of a threat for cinema.

 

For this year's edition some cool web-related content is planned like online sponsoring of film projects (more on that in a later article), but for now I'd like to point to the Iffr's YouTube site.

Ok, having a page on YouTube is maybe not too innovative but what the Iffr is providing as free content is quite spectacular: besides the usual trailers and announcements you can find full shorts and even some feature-length films.

From January the 27th till February the 7th, my hometown of Rotterdam will be hosting its International Film Festival (the 39th in fact). And although the full line-up won't be published until January the news about the contents are dribbling in on a daily basis.

I'll be posting an overview soon, but first I'd like to point towards one of this year's sections, tentatively called "Where Is Africa?". Not only will the Iffr highlight the work of African filmmakers but also show different views on Africa by directors worldwide, and several of these have created shorts specifically for this festival.

 

Setting up this event is Iffr-veteran programmer Gertjan Zuilhof and he keeps a blog about it.

Now we don't push too many (other) blogs here on Twitch but for this one I happily make an exception. Gertjan travelled through Africa for months and took several guest directors with him on different parts of his tour,...

ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands -- The 36th edition of the International Film Festival of Rotterdam ended Friday night with the announcement of four Tiger Award winners -- marking the first time a jury has split one of the three awards.

Headed by Piers Handling, director of the Toronto Film Festival, the international jury gave awards to "Love Conquers All" by helmer Tan Chui Mui of Malaysia and "The Unpolished" from Germany's Pia Marias.

The split award went to Morten Hartz Kaplers of Denmark for the spoof documentary "AFR" and Brazilian director Claudio Assis for his "Bog of Beasts". The winning titles will be released in Dutch cinemas this year and later broadcast on local TV.

The Fipresci Award went to Spanish director Rafa Cortes for "Yo" (Me), an intriguing tale of a man in search of his identity.

The Public Award was won by the German Oscar-contender "The Lives of Others".

AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands -- Fifteen titles have been selected to compete for the International Film Festival Rotterdam's €10,000 ($13,000) Tiger Award, organizers said Monday in announcing the festival's main competition lineup. The award comes complete with guaranteed distribution in the Netherlands.

The 2007 competition offers a diverse array of titles, festival director Sandra den Hamer said.

"In terms of style, choice of subjects and countries of origin, the Tiger Award offers this year many variations," she said. "We have psychological dramas, offbeat rock 'n' roll and very visual sparkling experiences. Some titles are very baroque and some are very subtle. All the directors show a lot of talent and originality."

The competing titles are "Bog of Beasts" by Claudio Assis (Brasil), "Bunny Chow" by John Barker (South Africa), "Me" by Rafa Cortes (Spain), "How is your Fish Today?" by Xiaolu Guo (China), "The Man of No Return" by Katya Grokhovskaya (Russia), "Afr" by Morten Hartz Kaplers (Denmark), "Fourteen" by Hirosue Hiromasa (Japan), "La Fine del Mare" by Nora Hoppe (Germany), "Rock 'n' Roll Never Dies" by Juha Koiranen (Finland), "Does it hurt?" by Aneta Lesnikovska (Netherlands), "Ex Drummer" by Koen Mortier (Belgium), "The Unpolished" by Pia Marais (Germany), "Tides" by Diego Martinez Vignatti (Belgium), "The Antenna" by Esteban Sapir (Argentina) and "Love Conquers All" by Tan Chui Mui (Malysia).

AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands -- Fifteen titles have been selected to compete for the International Film Festival Rotterdam's €10,000 ($13,000) Tiger Award, organizers said Monday in announcing the festival's main competition lineup. The award comes complete with guaranteed distribution in the Netherlands.

The 2007 competition offers a diverse array of titles, festival director Sandra den Hamer said.

"In terms of style, choice of subjects and countries of origin, the Tiger Award offers this year many variations," she said. "We have psychological dramas, offbeat rock 'n' roll and very visual sparkling experiences. Some titles are very baroque and some are very subtle. All the directors show a lot of talent and originality."

The competing titles are "Bog of Beasts" by Claudio Assis (Brasil), "Bunny Chow" by John Barker (South Africa), "Me" by Rafa Cortes (Spain), "How is your Fish Today?" by Xiaolu Guo (China), "The Man of No Return" by Katya Grokhovskaya (Russia), "Afr" by Morten Hartz Kaplers (Denmark), "Fourteen" by Hirosue Hiromasa (Japan), "La Fine del Mare" by Nora Hoppe (Germany), "Rock 'n' Roll Never Dies" by Juha Koiranen (Finland), "Does it hurt?" by Aneta Lesnikovska (Netherlands), "Ex Drummer" by Koen Mortier (Belgium), "The Unpolished" by Pia Marais (Germany), "Tides" by Diego Martinez Vignatti (Belgium), "The Antenna" by Esteban Sapir (Argentina) and "Love Conquers All" by Tan Chui Mui (Malysia).

PARIS -- Director Laurent Cantet and his jury have chosen six filmmakers for the 14th annual session of the Residence du Festival taking place March 1-July 15, Festival de Cannes organizers said Wednesday.

The Residence program, inaugurated in 2000 by the festival's Cinefondation, invites foreign filmmakers to the Festival de Cannes and shepherds them in the writing and development of their feature films.

This year's class, chosen from a field of 140 competitors, are Rusudan Chkonia of Georgia (for his project "Keep Smiling"), Turkey's Pelin Esmer ("K and Ali"), Milagros Mumenthaler of Argentina ("Absences"), Malayan Tan Chui Mui ("Living Quietly"), Mitra Farahani of Iran ("Coq, Legendes urbaines") and Israeli Naday Lapid ("Le Policier").

In addition to lodging at the festival residence in Paris while working on their projects, the selected helmers will attend next year's Festival de Cannes and screenings of their films will take place in Paris next June.