Ari Folman
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Trailer Watch: Ari Folman’s The Congress
At turns mesmerizing and confounding, Ari Folman’s The Congress was one of the more talked about titles of any Cannes sidebar last year. Though Drafthouse Films scooped up the rights less than a month after its Director’s Fortnight premiere, it’s only just now making it’s way toward theaters, with an official release set for August 29. A loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, Folman’s followup to the Oscar nominated Waltz with Bashir positions Robin Wright as a fictionalized version of herself, who agrees to replicate her once commodifiable actress for a movie studio’s gain. Playing on recurrent themes of aging in the film […]
by Sarah Salovaara on May 27, 2014 -
Cannes 2013: Five Questions with The Congress Director Ari Folman
It’s been five years since Ari Folman came out with the Academy Award-nominated Waltz with Bashir, an animated personal combat story. He’s back with an incredibly ambitious project, The Congress, that blends real life with fantasy in an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s celebrated book. The movie opens with actress Robin Wright being scolded by her agent, played by Harvey Keitel, for all the poor choices she’s made throughout her career. Faced with a sick child and no job prospects, she meets with Jeff, the studio head of Miramount, a daunting figure played impeccably by Danny Huston. Jeff is sick of […]
by Ariston Anderson on May 28, 2013 -
Cannes 2013: Portraits of Purgatory
Portraits of purgatory dot this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with movies that run the gamut in terms of styles and techniques: epic drama, cheeky comedy, documentary, animation, and surrealism. No matter what the setting, the plight is the same, with characters stuck in a cycle of emotional limbo where hope for happiness floats tantalizingly but incessantly out of reach. The most accomplished of the group is The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s voluptuously crafted riff on La Dolce Vita and a masterful study of 65-year-old Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a dilettante journalist still coasting on the acclaim of a single early-career […]
by Stephen Garrett on May 22, 2013 -
Cannes 2013 Opens with 3-D Glamour, Call Girls & Sci-Fi Animation
This year’s 66th Cannes Film Festival opened with a venerable love fest at the Jury Press Conference on Wednesday. Led by Steven Spielberg, this year’s panel drew an incredible mix of cinema talent Ang Lee, Nicole Kidman and Christoph Waltz, as well as Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and Scotland’s Lynne Ramsay. Spielberg and Lee admitted to the assembled press that they absolutely worshipped each other, despite being pitted up against each other at the Oscars this year. Although Spielberg said he was ready to judge, he claimed, “I look at this as two weeks of celebrating film, not two weeks […]
by Ariston Anderson on May 18, 2013 -
Astra Taylor, Examined Life
CORNEL WEST IN DIRECTOR ASTRA TAYLOR’S EXAMINED LIFE. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS. Still in her twenties, documentarian Astra Taylor has already brought a philosophical bent to non-fiction filmmaking and is looking to push the form in new and exciting directions. Taylor was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1979 and grew up in Athens, Georgia. She studied first at the University of Georgia and then got an MA in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 2001, she co-produced and co-directed the 45-minute documentary Miracle Tree: Moringa Oleifera, about infant malnutrition in Senegal, […]
by Nick Dawson on Feb 25, 2009 -
Drawing From Memory
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Waltz With Bashir writer-director Ari Folman for our Fall ’08 issue. Waltz With Bashir is nominated for Best Foreign Film. It’s been said that the job of the filmmaker is to put on screen things that have never been seen before. And while cinema is essentially an infant art form, these days there are still relatively few films that move into genuinely new territory. Waltz with Bashir, which […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009
