The Toronto International Film Festival revealed today the 48 titles from international filmmakers that make up the Festival’s Contemporary World Cinema slate. Among them is Shirin Neshat’s Looking for Oum Kulthum. This year’s programme features a powerful lineup that covers disparate regions of the world with a strong presence from Latin America, Scandinavia, and Central Europe. The schedule includes an eclectic mix that showcases the visions of returning filmmakers, as well as Festival first-timers from 43 countries. “Each film in Contemporary World Cinema offers a much-needed look at another part of the world through the eyes of a storyteller embedded…
Author: World Cinema Reports' Editors
The Toronto International Film Festival announced more of its 2017 lineup today, and high on the list is a film directed by comedian Louis C.K. I Love You, Daddy, which was made entirely in secret and shot on 35mm film, marks his return to feature film directing, 16 years after his film Pootie Tang. That movie crashed and burned upon release, though in the years since, it has gained some kind of reputation as a cult movie. Historically, TIFF has tended to be one of the most Oscar-friendly film festivals, with many movies kicking off their awards seasons campaigns there.…
Hundreds of thousands of theater-goers will flock to Broadway this year to escape the reality of Donald Trump’s presidency and its never-ending onslaught of foibles, fabrications and faux pas. That is, after all, what live theater is for: a temporary respite from our neuroses, a chance to be suspended, in fiction, in real time. Michael Moore, though, is betting on just the opposite. With his new Trump-centric one-man show, The Terms of My Surrender, the documentarian and liberal firebrand is taking on the president seven days a week, using his powers of pomp and provocation to inspire in audiences the…
The opening gala at the St James Theatre in Gore may not have the glitz and glam of the Cannes Film Festival but rest assured the wine and nibbles will flow freely. The New Zealand International Film Festival will begin the first of its regional events at Gore on Thursday, bringing with it a showcase of local and international films to Southland. Now in its fifth year, theatre manager Peter Cairns said the festival run in Gore has grown in popularity slowly over the years. From as far afield as Queenstown and Alexandra, people were making the trip to see…
Five Plaques Adorn Celebrity Homes. Five plaques, commendation tablets, were installed at the residences of contemporary artists and literati on Monday in Tehran. The front wall of the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was adorned with the plaque, Mehr News Agency reported. An initiative of Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization (ICHHTO), the plaque is an ornamental tablet, typically of metal, porcelain, or wood, fixed to the wall in commemoration of a person or event to celebrate cultural and natural heritage, including intangible heritage. The tablet bears the names of the personality, their profession and other particulars. Kiarostami’s plaque was placed…
The first and last time I ever saw Stephen Bannon was last May at the Cannes Film Festival, where his film Clinton Cash was screening for overseas buyers. The documentary, a strategically timed takedown of Hillary Clinton centring on her alleged ethical lapses and dubious financial dealings, was based on Peter Schweizer’s 2015 book of the same name. While I interviewed Schweizer in an empty ballroom of a Croisette hotel, Bannon – who wrote and produced Clinton Cash – paced outside, occasionally stealing a furtive glance our way through an open door. I was familiar with Bannon’s work as a…
Four more Irish films have been added to the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) line-up. David Freyne’s The Cured will receive its world premiere at TIFF, screening in Special Presentation at the festival, while Rebecca Daly’s Good Favour will be presented in TIFF’s Contemporary Wold Cinema strand, with both films receiving their world premieres at the festival. Brian O’Malley’s The Lodgers will also debut at the world-renowned festival; premiering in the Contemporary World Cinema strand and fresh from its triumph at the Cannes Film Festival, Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer will screen in Special Presentations. These four Irish titles join previously announced Irish films…
After two short films, emerging Georgian filmmaker and graduate of the historic Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film University (TAFU) Ana Urushadze has directed her debut feature film, Scary Mother [+], which focuses on the position and the role of women in today’s society in Georgia. Scary Mother has just had its world premiere in competition in the Filmmakers of the Present section of the 70th Locarno Film Festival. Manana (Nato Murvanidze) is a 50-year-old housewife who has an untamed passion for writing. No one in her family really supports her need to become a writer, but they prefer to tolerate…
The latest in director Emmanuelle Bercot’s relentless crusade against social injustice, La Fille de Brest takes on the story of real-life whistleblower Dr Irène Frachon, who single-handedly fought a corrupt system to withdraw the harmful Mediator drug from the market. Mediator was originally marketed to overweight diabetics but often given to healthy women as diet pills. Between 1976 and November 2009, five million people were prescribed the medication, which claimed as many as 500 lives. The ensuing scandal grabbed headlines nationwide. In an effort to remain truthful to events, Bercot painstakingly recreates the bureaucratic clashes between Frachon (Sidse Babett Knudsen) – a lung specialist at Brest Hospital in Brittany who first alerted…
Czech master filmmaker Karel Zeman draws liberally from literary and cinematic history to create his sumptuous and whimsical fantasy adventure The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, made with his signature flair. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen begins with a virtuoso sequence in which the evolution of flight is traversed by the frame accelerating up towards the stars. Along the way it passes a variety of aeronautical animals and contraptions, both real and imagined, rendered in stop-motion animation. From a final aeroplane, the camera continues into space. Almost a decade before man’s first steps on the moon, Zeman imagines footprints in the dust. In…