The program for this year’s Viennale has just gone live. V’13 will open with the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis on October 24 and close on November 6 with Steven Knight’s Locke. In between, there’ll be a big Jerry Lewis retrospective, tributes to John Torres, Will Ferrell, and Gonzalo García Pelayo, screenings of two major serials—Louis Feuillade‘s Tih-Minh (1918) and Jacques Rivette‘s Out 1 (1970/1990)—a program of new Asian genre cinema in 3D, another focusing on early Austrian documentaries, a survey of the work of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, and a varied selection of independent, experimental cinema.
Update, 10/19: The Jerry Lewis retrospective has been organized by the Austrian Film Museum and is not only already underway but it’ll also run through November 24. This’ll be “the first attempt in decades to stage an extensive overview of Lewis’ work as actor and director, in 35mm prints only.” Here‘s more background; and the schedule’s here.
AFI FEST 2013, opening on November 7 with John Lee Hancock’s Saving Mr. Banks and closing on November 14 with Llewyn Davis, has followed up on its announcement of its Centerpiece Galas (Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, and Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) with the lineup for the New Auteurs and Shorts programs. Among the many highlights: Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat, Ben Russell and Ben Rivers‘ A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, and Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant.
The eighth edition of the Rome Film Festival (November 8 through 17) is all lined up. Among the world premieres in the 18-title competition are Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Seventh Code; Takashi Miike’s The Mole Song; and Isabel Coixet’s Another Me with Sophie Turner, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Rhys Ifans, and Geraldine Chaplin. Premiering out of competition are Wes Anderson’s eight-minute short Castello Cavalcanti, Miike’s 60-minute Blue Planet Brothers, and, as Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli notes, Mark Turtletaub’s Gods Behaving Badly, “a comedy about Greek gods living in contempo New York who intervene in the lives of a young couple… The Gods ensemble cast includes Christopher Walken playing Zeus, John Turturro as Hades, Alicia Silverstone and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the young couple, and Sharon Stone as Aphrodite.”
Also: “Rome has secured the world preem of Jonathan Demme’s Fear of Falling, which reunites Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, following their cult collaborations on Louis Malle’s My Dinner With André and Vanya on 42nd Street. Demme’s latest, which is based on Gregory and Shawn’s contempo adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play The Master Builder.”
SXSW Film 2014 has announced its first round of Film Conference sessions and its first-ever Film Keynotes. The speakers: Lena Dunham and producers Jason Blum and Casey Neistat. Spring’s best break happens from March 7 through 15.
AWARDS
“Two wildly diverse takes on modern love and obsession have taken the top prize Asia’s largest film festival,” reports Relaxnews. “Jurors in the New Currents award at the 18th Busan International Film Festival lauded Korean director Ahn Song-Kyoung’s Pascha for its ‘intimate, highly original expression of an unusual love story.’ At the same time, they hailed Remote Control, from Mongolia’s Byamba Sakhya, as a ‘sharply observed portrait of the tensions between city and country, reality and fiction.'” Variety has the complete list of winners.
“The Golden Méliès was awarded this weekend during the International Fantastic Film Festival of Sitgès,” reports Cineuropa. “The Golden Méliès is a unique reward since it covers several festivals, as part of the European Federation of Fantastic Film Festivals. Each of the nine participating festivals each year awards a Silver Méliès to one of its competition’s films, and then, at the end of the season, these films compete against each other for the ultimate award.” The surprise winner this year is Vincent Lannoo’s In the Name of the Son, which “tells the story of the vengeful odyssey of Elisabeth, a traditional Catholic mother, whose world collapses after her son, who was molested by a paedophile priest, commits suicide.”
QUICK WRAPS
The Vancouver International Film Festival wrapped on Friday, and you’ve seen Sean Axmaker‘s dispatches here in Keyframe on the Dragons & Tigers program as well as his reviews of films from Iran and Europe. I’ve tweeted links to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson‘s outstanding coverage as it’s appeared, but a few of those entries need mentioning again here.
First, David Bordwell: “Two actors exchanging lines in a continuous, unmoving take was one building block of mature sound cinema. Today’s directors almost never resort to it.” So whatever happened to the “sustained and stable two-shot”? Well, he’s found several in films screened in Vancouver. “All were from Asia.” And he’s got a collection of short reviews, “VIFF extremes.”
Kristin Thompson‘s posted two rounds of reviews. In the first, she considers Bruno Dumont’s Camille Claudel, 1915, Detlev Buck’s Measuring the World, Jeremy Teicher’s Tall as the Baobab Tree, and Hosoda Mamoru’s Wolf Children. And in the second: Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi‘s Closed Curtain, Mohammad Rasoulof‘s Manuscripts Don’t Burn, Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, Parviz Shahbazi’s Trapped, and Yossi Madmony’s A Place in Heaven. She’s also posted a report on the Film and Television Forum.
Also dispatching from Vancouver: Sean Gilman (Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, Chai Chunya’s Four Ways to Die in My Hometown, Flora Lau’s Bends, Manoel de Oliveira‘s Gebo and the Shadow, and more), Teresa Nieman (Twitch), and Josh Timmermann, who’s also ranked his top ten VIFF 2013 films.
“The first full day of the 32nd Giornate del Cinema Muto, the world’s most prestigious silent-film festival, took place exactly 86 years after The Jazz Singer premiered in New York,” writes Pamela Hutchinson in her overview for the Guardian. “There were no mournful faces in the town of Pordenone, Italy, where the Giornate is held, however. In this corner of the world, for one week only, it is not quite as if the talkies never arrived, but rather that they failed to stop the party.”
David Cairns was there: “Orson Welles’s Too Much Johnson at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival—a perfect conjunction of film and event, since this is Welles’ only silent film apart from Hearts of Age (of which he said, ‘That’s not a film!’) and it contains references to Mack Sennett and Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and the film was rediscovered right here in Pordenone.”
The US premiere is tomorrow at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and here’s a little something via Ray Pride:
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