With the Oscars come and gone, attention now turns to the festivals ahead, starting next week with SXSW. The festival’s announced that this year’s edition, running from March 10 through 19, will close with Daniel Espinosa’s Life, featuring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds. Also added to the lineup is David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde with Charlize Theron, Parker Smith’s Ramblin’ Freak, a tenth-anniversary screening of Gary Hustwit‘s Helvetica, and two virtual reality projects from Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël.
Big Ears, happening in Knoxville from March 23 through 26, has announced its film lineup.
The program for the Essay Film Festival, happening in London from March 24 through April 1, is now live.
The 2017 San Francisco International Film Festival (April 5 through 19) will close with The Green Fog, a new score by composer Jacob Garchik performed live by the Kronos Quartet, accompanying a “visual collage” by Guy Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson. The festival’s added two more live events, Parallel Spaces: Will Oldham and Jerome Hiler and Terence Nance‘s “experimental dual live performances” 18 Black Girls / Boys Ages 1–18 Who Have Arrived at the Singularity and Are Thus Spiritual Machines. And the Centerpiece event will be Geremy Jasper’s Patti Cake$.
May, of course, sees the big one, Cannes, running from the 17th through the 28th. The guesswork regarding the lineup has already begun. See Fabien Lemercier (Cineuropa) and Alex Ritman and Scott Roxborough (Hollywood Reporter). Among the many, many names dropped: Roman Polanski, Todd Haynes, Leos Carax, Sofia Coppola, Hong Sangsoo, Yorgos Lanthimos, Lucrecia Martel, Michael Haneke, Lynne Ramsay, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Carlos Reygadas, Philippe Garrel, Sergei Loznitsa, Joachim Trier, Mathieu Amalric, Bruno Dumont, the list goes on and on.
Way on into the year, Toronto, running from September 7 through 17. As Jeremy Kay reports for Screen, TIFF will be slimming this year’s program down 20% from last year’s 296 features and cutting the City to City and Vanguard strands.
The Story of the Re-Evaluated from The Royal Ocean Film Society
Back to the Berlinale for a moment. “The repertory and restoration beat on the festival circuit is the coward’s path—I know because I usually opt for it.” As Nick Pinkerton notes in his piece for Film Comment, one of this year’s highlights was Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972), “a miniseries comprised of five feature-length episodes amounting to eight hours’ runtime.” Its “emergence represents nothing less than the discovery of a vital missing link in the director’s filmography, one that may represent his clearest vision of an achievable, incrementally better world.”
“I recklessly wandered through without submitting to any one particular program,” writes Travis Jeppesen for Artforum. “Bruce LaBruce’s latest, The Misandrists, made a splash in the Panorama section. Here, LaBruce returns to his enduring obsession with radical leftist clans, this time bringing back The Raspberry Reich’s (2004) Susanne Sachsse as the leader of an underground lesbian-separatist enclave on the rural outskirts of Berlin. With its international mix of professional actors and beautiful scenesters, The Misandrists is LaBruce’s radical feminist hijacking of the ‘women-in-prison and ‘girls’ school’ B-movie genres, demonstrating how humor as a political weapon is infinitely more tactical than didacticism… especially when it’s combined with didacticism! It is one of his best films in years.”
For photogénie, Irina Trocan looks back on the Forum section and, in the Notebook, Yaron Dahan writes about one of the Competition films I missed, Liu Jian’s animated Have a Nice Day: “The humor is dark, the murders multiple.”
