Marrakech International Film Festival
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“The Last 50 Years Destroyed Our Old World”: Five Questions for Actress/Director Mélanie Laurent
French actress Mélanie Laurent may be best known to American audiences for her role as Shosanna Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. But in addition to acting in over 35 international roles, Laurent has also directed two feature films. Based on the YA novel by Anne-Sophie Brasme, her latest film Breathe premiered at Cannes this year. Laurent expertly crafts the world of adolescent codependency. She claims she’s learned from every director she’s worked with: one tip she stole from Tarantino is to play music in between scenes to get people to be more comfortable on the set. Laurent served on the […]
by Ariston Anderson on Dec 15, 2014 -
“Finish Your Scene Before You Go to Lunch”: Five Questions for After the Fall Director Saar Klein
First-time director Saar Klein got his start in Hollywood as an editor, where he’s been working with top directors for the past two decades. He has two Academy Award nominations under his belt, for Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. His feature debut After the Fall joins the strong lineup of this year’s recession-era dramas. Wes Bentley plays a mediocre insurance appraisal agent who loses his job after being too generous with payouts. He turns to a life of crime in order to make payments on his house and keep his family above water. Becoming a petty […]
by Ariston Anderson on Dec 12, 2014 -
“All Films are about the Tugging of the Heart”: 5 Questions for Jeremy Irons
After attending the inaugural edition in 2001, English actor Jeremy Irons returned to the Marrakech International Film Festival on Saturday night to receive a career tribute award. The Academy Award-winning star greeted fans at the fest’s opening film The Theory of Everything and accepted his award before the screening The Imitation Game the following night. The festival opened with two films about geniuses, and Irons himself plays a mathematician in the upcoming The Man Who Knew Infinity, across from Dev Patel as the famed Ramanujan. Irons has come a long way since his entry into the Hollywood elite with 1981’s […]
by Ariston Anderson on Dec 9, 2014 -
Marrakech International Film Festival 2013
In his role as Jury President of the Marrakech International Film Festival, Martin Scorsese described the method that he and his fellow jurors would apply when watching films: “We will not be like critics,” he said. “We love films too much.” The stars were out in full force at the Marrakech International Film Festival. The names accompanying The Wolf of Wall Street director on judging duty would have graced Cannes. The list included actresses Marion Cotillard, Patricia Clarkson and Golshifteh Farahani and directors Paolo Sorrentino, Fatih Akin, Park Chan-Wook, Amat Escalante, Narjiss Nejjar and Anurag Kashyap. The prize for best film went […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Dec 11, 2013 -
Three Questions for Jonathan Demme
Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme has made Hollywood spectacles (The Silence of the Lambs, The Manchurian Candidate), eccentric indies (Rachel Getting Married, Something Wild), timeless rock docs (Stop Making Sense, Neil Young Journeys) and other unclassifiable delights. At the 12th annual Festival International du Film de Marrakech, Demme’s filmmaking legacy was honored with both a formal tribute, and an invite to give a “masterclass” to an enraptured Moroccan audience. Filmmaker sat down with Demme to discuss his iconoclastic career. Filmmaker: For decades, you’ve been slinking between narratives and documentaries. What interests you more? Demme: I’ve always followed my enthusiasm. If […]
by Aaron Hillis on Jan 9, 2013 -
Emir Kusturica on City Building and a New Renaissance
Fresh off an Ecuadorian tour with his No Smoking Orchestra, the twice-awarded Palme d’Or director Emir Kusturica flew to Morocco for the closest thing he can get to downtime. As President of the Jury of the 11th annual Marrakech International Film Festival, Kusturica got to enjoy one of his favorite pastimes, absorbing a dozen or so independent films from around the world in a week. His second time at the festival, the auteur was honored with the Golden Star award in 2009 for his outstanding career. While he spent most of the festival behind the scenes, apart from presenting a […]
by Ariston Anderson on Dec 21, 2011 -
Ten Lessons on Filmmaking From Terry Gilliam
“Billy Wilder once said that there are only two things aging directors can’t avoid…awards and haemorroids [sic]. I’ll stick with just the awards for the moment, please.” So says a recent Facebook post from the brain behind some of the greatest films of the last century, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to Brazil to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Yes, Terry Gilliam has joined Facebook, as an experiment to promote his latest venture, the short film The Wholly Family, about Italian Pulcinella figurines coming to life inside a small boy’s imagination. (I highly recommend following his status updates). […]
by Ariston Anderson on Dec 19, 2011 -
AN OBSERVATION IN MARRAKECH: ON “BLACK GOLD”
Sign of the times: A big-budget internationalist action throwback of sorts, one with some of the goofiest, most downright absurd conceits you’ll find all year, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s both intentionally and unintentionally funny Or Noir (Black Gold) will probably never see the light of day in the States. Relegating it to marginal art-house material because of its odd place on the contemporary film mantle, in which it has been deemed simply too silly and conventional for the American art house crowd and too high minded and not award season-worthy enough for the big leagues, Warners is only handling the U.K., Europe and a […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 6, 2011
