Cannes Film Festival
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Marion Cotillard Added to Gotham Honorees
Last week it was announced that Matt Damon, David O. Russell and Jeff Skoll will be presented with career tributes at the 22nd Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards™. Today, Marion Cotillard is joining their ranks. Cotillard is a critically acclaimed actor, who has built up an enviable filmography, working with some of the industry’s most renowned directors, domestically and abroad. “Marion Cotillard is not only a delight to watch, she is one of the most talented women working in cinema around the world today,” said Joana Vicente, Executive Director of the IFP. “Her acting choices are always challenging and rewarding, and her performances […]
by Billy Brennan on Oct 9, 2012 -
VIFF Critics Notebook #1
My fifth year in a row of attending the Vancouver International Film Festival in my hometown has been unique thus far—I’m at the precise halfway point of the 16-day event as I write this—in that it’s the only time that I’ve already caught many of the films playing thanks to my trip to Locarno in August. This has afforded me the freedom to venture beyond the “festival-of-festivals” programming of obligatory Cannes leftovers and such, to explore, among other things, the Dragons & Tigers section for which VIFF is renowned. For those that don’t know, Dragons & Tigers is a long-running […]
by Adam Cook on Oct 5, 2012 -
Director Ted Kotcheff on Wake in Fright
Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright was a hit at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, but as the film made its way across the Atlantic, its stateside distributor decided to do a bit of rebranding. Against Kotcheff’s will, his intense fish-out-of-water tale was released in New York the following winter as Outback, a perfectly bland title for a movie that’s anything but. If the new name threw some film-goers off the trail, United Artists’ failure, as Kotcheff recalls it, to “spend 25 cents on publicity” made certain that the rest of its potential audience never heard about it in the […]
by Kevin Canfield on Oct 1, 2012 -
POV @ 25: Jennifer Fox and Cristina Ibarra on Women in Film
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, acclaimed documentarian Jennifer Fox — whose 20-year project, My Reincarnation, kicks off the 2012 POV season today — and The Last Conquistador director Cristina Ibarra, a relative newcomer to the non-fiction scene, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Despite radically different backgrounds and, at the time of the conversation, being literally continents apart — NYC resident Fox was […]
by Nick Dawson on Jun 21, 2012 -
COMING OF AGE IN CANNES
Cannes No.64. Côte d’Azur. Film, film, film and more films. As a matter of fact, more films than you can even imagine are made. That was my first impression last year as I popped my cherry at the Palais, bringing my 30-minute short film, The Sea Is All I Know, starring Oscar winner Melissa Leo (above), to the festival. It was overwhelming. How could so many films be made? Where are they seen? Where does the funding come from? How does one sell them? Who were these people selling the films? What are pre-sells? How is that different than distribution? […]
by Jordan Bayne on May 25, 2012 -
BILL MURRAY’S SLIGHTLY TIPSY TOUR OF “MOONRISE KINGDOM”
Bill Murray has been in every Wes Anderson movie bar one (“Bottle Rocket, still not seen that one”), so who better to give you a tour of the set of Anderson’s latest opus, Moonrise Kingdom, than Murray himself. The film — which received rave reviews when it opened Cannes last week, and we love so much that we put Anderson on the cover of our Spring issue — opens stateside on Friday. Keep your eyes peeled for a Moonrise Kingdom giveaway in this space later in the week. Oh, and just to warn you, Murray was under the influence of […]
by Nick Dawson on May 22, 2012 -
LUCY WALKER & TRUDIE STYLER ON WOMEN IN FILM
The Guardian has been taking the lead in coverage of the controversy surrounding the complete absence of work by female filmmakers in this year’s Cannes Competition section. Last week, it published the English translation of an open letter by the French feminist group La Barbe, and over the weekend interviewed Trudie Styler (who runs Maven, a production company specifically supporting women in film) and Lucy Walker, the Academy Award-nominated documentarian who was one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces in 2002, about gender imbalance within cinema. Here’s an extract from Walker and Styler’s conversation about the difficulties facing women in the […]
by Nick Dawson on May 21, 2012 -
LA BARBE’S OPEN LETTER ON WOMEN & CANNES
The French feminist collective known as La Barbe (French for “The Beard”) printed an open letter in France’s daily newspaper Le Monde earlier this week addressing the complete absence of films directed by women in the Competition section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. La Barbe is made up of actress Fanny Cottençon, writer/director Virginie Despentes and director Coline Serreau, who have also set up an online petition which has been signed by numerous luminaries, including feminist icon Gloria Steinem and filmmakers such as Ry Russo-Young, Gillian Armstrong and Ava DuVernay. The British newspaper The Guardian ran a translation of the […]
by Nick Dawson on May 18, 2012 -
WES ANDERSON IN CANNES AND NYC
Wes Anderson, the cover star of the latest issue of Filmmaker, kicked off the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday with his new film, Moonrise Kingdom, which opens Stateside on next Friday. (The estimable David Hudson, now operating at Fandor, collects the critical consensus on the movie here.) If you, like me, are not on the Croisette this year, you can still get your Anderson fix via the Cannes website, which takes a special look at Anderson’s body of work through the prism of his use of pop music, collecting together clips from a string of movies plus an interview with […]
by Nick Dawson on May 18, 2012 -
Nanni Moretti, We Have a Pope
Deeply shrouded in mystery, the election of the Pope is a strange amalgam of modern democracy and ancient ritual. It is also a circumstance that seems ripe for farce. At least Nanni Moretti, perhaps Italy’s most revered contemporary filmmaker, seems to think so. His newest film, We Have a Pope, which premiered last year in Cannes as Habemus Papam, is an often funny, sneakily moving investigation of the Vatican’s less-than-infallible process of choosing the divine, and one man’s rejection of his supposedly divine calling. Starring Michel Piccoli as a would-be Pope who disappears after his election and Moretti himself as […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 4, 2012
