The Berlinale’s announced that the tenth edition of Forum Expanded has a title: To the Sound of the Closing Door.
The 17 works in the group exhibition create parallel worlds, counter-narratives and—to stick with the language of cinema—both rear projections and multiple ones. Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s video installation Beauty and the Right to the Ugly thus examines a utopian construction project in the Netherlands: a community center originally designed without interior walls—and without doors. In The Nameless, Ho Tzu Nyen spins a yarn full of ambiguities about a triple agent in Southeast Asia, while Constanze Ruhm and Emilien Awada’s Invisible Producers. Kapitel 1: Panoramis / Paramount / Paranormal follows the trail of the ghosts and stories that inhabit the former premises of a French film studio.
The film programs also harness the relationship between written history and that yet to be written to productive effect. Isabelle Prim’s Calamity Qui? brings Western heroine Calamity Jane back to life in a kaleidoscope of cinematic and historical references. In Marwa Arsanio’s film Have You Ever Killed a Bear? Or Becoming Jamila, a young actress takes an in-depth look at an Algerian resistance fighter she is supposed to play. João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s Iec Long retraces the story of a fireworks factory in Macao. All these films understand past, present and future as a realm of possibility whose potential is to be explored in cinematic terms.
Further artists whose works will be shown in the exhibition and film programs include Roy Dib, Kevin Jerome Everson, Pierre Huyghe, Ken Jacobs, Mireille Kassar, Elke Marhöfer, Jenny Perlin, Hans Scheugl, Michael Snow and Anton Vidokle.
The festival, whose 65th edition runs from February 5 through 15, is also teasing this year’s Retrospective program, Glorious Technicolor. From George Eastman House and Beyond, featuring some 30 films, “some of which have been elaborately restored.” Confirmed titles include Gone with the Wind (1939), Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Richard Boleslawski’s The Garden of Allah (1936), George Sidney’s The Three Musketeers (1948), Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz (1939), Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) and John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). The program, put together in cooperation with the Deutsche Kinemathek, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Austrian Film Museum, will head to Vienna in April and to New York in the summer of 2015.
The International Short Film Jury is set: “The prize-winners of 2015 will be chosen by Wahyuni A. Hadi (curator, author and executive director of the Singapore International Film Festival), Halil Altındere (artist, curator and publisher of art-ist Magazine) and Madhusree Dutta (filmmaker, curator and pedagogue).”
Food activists and Slow Food founders Alice Waters and Carlo Petrini will be presented with the Berlinale Camera.
And a Special Teddy Award for Artistic Life Achievement will be presented to Udo Kier. The Teddys will also be celebrating Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who would have turned 70 on May 31, 2015. Ingrid Caven will be singing songs Fassbinder wrote for her.
We’ve just seen the second round of titles slated for the International Film Festival Rotterdam; a few days ago, the IFFR’s co-production market, CineMart, completed its lineup of titles for 2015:
- Ashim Ahluwalia’s Boyfriend.
- Alejandro Almendraz’s The Gray Beyond.
- Fellipe Barbosa’s Gabriel and the Mountain.
- Sergio Caballero’s Bat, Butterfly, Moth.
- Phil Collins’s Mr. Sing Sing.
- Jason Cortlund and Julia Halperin’s La Barracuda.
- Gaëlle Denis’s La Fille de L’Estuaire.
- Isabella Eklöf’s Holiday.
- Hala Elkoussy’s Cactus Flower.
- Khavn’s Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War.
- Alla Kovgan’s Cunningham.
- Carlos Lechuga’s Santa y Delfín.
- Nanouk Leopold‘s Cobain.
- Rodrigo Moreno’s Los Delincuentes.
- Koen Mortier’s Angel.
- Benjamin Naishtat’s Rojo.
- Erwin Olaf’s A Shining Flaw.
- Sacha Polak’s Vita & Virginia.
- Agnieszka Polska’s Hurrah, Wir Leben Noch!
- Antoine Russbachs Ceux Qui Travaillent.
- Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy‘s Luxembourg.
- Nathalie Teirlinck’s Tonic Immobility.
- Syllas Tzoumerkas’s The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea.
- Janus Victoria’s Kodokushi.
CineMart 2015 takes place from January 25 through 28 and the 44th IFFR will run from January 21 through February 1.
“Eliza Hittman (was love at first sight for her directorial debut It Felt Like Love) and Yung Chang (a docu-helmer best known for the award-winning portrait of modern China in Up the Yangtze) are just two of the dozen folks/projects invited to the upcoming Sundance Institute 2015 January Screenwriters Lab,” reports Ioncinema‘s Eric Lavallee. He’s got descriptions of all the projects, but here’s a quick overview.
- Sophia Al-Maria’s Beretta.
- Yung Chang’s Eggplant.
- Elizabeth Chomko’s What They Had.
- Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s Mustang.
- Fernando Coimbra’s The Hanged.
- Nia DaCosta’s Little Woods.
- Brent Green‘s Untitled Loveless Fable.
- Eliz Hittman’s Beach Rats.
- Mark Kindred’s Rogue.
- Jonathan Minard and Scott Rashap’s Archive.
- Olivia Newman’s First Match.
- Christopher Makoto Yogi’s I Was a Simple Man.
The Lab will take place from January 16 through 21 while the festival will run from January 22 through February 1.
Selma director Ava DuVernay and RZA join Mark Duplass on SXSW‘s roster of keynote speakers. The 2015 SXSW Film Conference & Festival runs from March 13 through 17.
And the Edinburgh International Film Festival has announced its new artistic director, the journalist and programmer Mark Adams, succeeding Chris Fujiwara. Phil Miller reports for the Herald. The 2015 edition runs from June 17 through 28.
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