Gianfranco Rosi's Notturno is exclusively showing in many countries starting March 5, 2021 in Mubi's Luminaries series.Nonfiction films tend to exhibit anxiety over their subjective engagement with the factual world. It’s a tension that makers often feel compelled to resolve, or assuage. Some lean into a journalistic tone or style, gathering witnesses and evidence, telling a cogent story and presenting it soberly, burying or at least deemphasizing subjective choices. Others signal or admit their own interventions by including themselves in the frame, or by embracing an unconventional, conspicuous formal approach, eager to wriggle free from outsized expectations of objectivity. Either way the work is, at least in part, defined by this dialectic. Accepting that subjectivity is not only a given but a necessity, the very source of an artist’s power and mandate, the tension shifts to what the artist chooses to emphasize—what he or she is drawn to,...
- 3/9/2021
- MUBI
Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary depicts a Middle East emerging from trauma, but it is self-conscious at times
Documentary film-maker Gianfranco Rosi has created a very characteristic cine-poem of sadness, about the Middle East as it emerges from Isis terror, but remaining scarred by the intervention of western powers who had promised so much. It’s an intensely considered curation of scenes: glimpses, perhaps, into a collective mind or soul. Rosi has assembled this from years of filming in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. It’s similar in its observational procedures to films such as Sacro Gra, his 2013 study of those who live on the periphery of Rome, near the “Gra” ring road, and also his masterly Fire at Sea from 2016, about the lives of desperate migrants who arrive in Lampedusa, Sicily, and the locals who are coming to terms with them.
The title means “night...
Documentary film-maker Gianfranco Rosi has created a very characteristic cine-poem of sadness, about the Middle East as it emerges from Isis terror, but remaining scarred by the intervention of western powers who had promised so much. It’s an intensely considered curation of scenes: glimpses, perhaps, into a collective mind or soul. Rosi has assembled this from years of filming in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. It’s similar in its observational procedures to films such as Sacro Gra, his 2013 study of those who live on the periphery of Rome, near the “Gra” ring road, and also his masterly Fire at Sea from 2016, about the lives of desperate migrants who arrive in Lampedusa, Sicily, and the locals who are coming to terms with them.
The title means “night...
- 3/4/2021
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Over the weekend, the 2017 Venice Film Festival handed out their awards, with Guillermo del Toro’s ravenously received The Shape of Water taking the top prize. While the Golden Lion isn’t quite an Academy Award barometer, it’s nothing to sneeze at either. This marks an important point in the road, as things are heating up. We’re not yet at the precursor season, but any feather in your hat right now is a boon for a contender. As such, del Toro has to consider himself in a very nice place. The next few months will still be about getting the proverbial ducks in a row. The real fun is still to come. Obviously, the Golden Lion went to del Toro’s highly praised movie, as The Shape of Water got the first big awards season boost. It took home the top prize, while other highlighted winners include Charlie Plummer...
- 9/11/2017
- by Joey Magidson
- Hollywoodnews.com
Before Oscar season late last year, the name Gianfranco Rosi meant little here in these United States. Outside of globally minded art film scenes, Rosi’s name prior to 2016 would garner mostly head scratches and quick glances at an iMDB page. However, following the release of his brilliant, Oscar nominated documentary Fire At Sea, Rosi is not just a darling of the documentary world, but a filmmaker with a growing audience anticipating what he’s offering up next.
But what about those films the masses have missed? A filmmaker with well over two decades of experience behind the camera, Rosi has seen the occasional retrospective pop up in large cities like New York City. For the most part however, his filmography is a relative blind spot for a large number of cinephiles. Thankfully, Kino Lorber has helped to change that.
The director of six films, four of Rosi’s pictures...
But what about those films the masses have missed? A filmmaker with well over two decades of experience behind the camera, Rosi has seen the occasional retrospective pop up in large cities like New York City. For the most part however, his filmography is a relative blind spot for a large number of cinephiles. Thankfully, Kino Lorber has helped to change that.
The director of six films, four of Rosi’s pictures...
- 4/26/2017
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back director Maura Axelrod at the Quad Cinema Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
On the morning before the reopening of the Quad Cinema in New York, where two impressive features - Terence Davies' A Quiet Passion and Katell Quillévéré's Heal The Living (Réparer Les Vivants) - are now screening, Maura Axelrod, the director of Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back, met with me at Foragers in Chelsea to give some insight on her relationship to Cattelan's work and how their friendship developed.
We touched on a number of his artworks, Him in Agnès Varda's film Ydessa, the Bears and etc., Michelangelo Frammartino's post-Alberi Pinocchio project, Disney and America, Gianfranco Rosi's Sacro Gra Cattelan moment, and wanting "the works to just appear as they do in the world" in her film.
Maurizio Cattelan's All: "And when I heard what he was doing at the Guggenheim,...
On the morning before the reopening of the Quad Cinema in New York, where two impressive features - Terence Davies' A Quiet Passion and Katell Quillévéré's Heal The Living (Réparer Les Vivants) - are now screening, Maura Axelrod, the director of Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back, met with me at Foragers in Chelsea to give some insight on her relationship to Cattelan's work and how their friendship developed.
We touched on a number of his artworks, Him in Agnès Varda's film Ydessa, the Bears and etc., Michelangelo Frammartino's post-Alberi Pinocchio project, Disney and America, Gianfranco Rosi's Sacro Gra Cattelan moment, and wanting "the works to just appear as they do in the world" in her film.
Maurizio Cattelan's All: "And when I heard what he was doing at the Guggenheim,...
- 4/17/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.
Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilovic)
Near the beginning of Evolution, there’s a shot that hangs underwater, showing a seemingly harmonious aquatic eco-system that’s glimpsed just long enough to create the sense of something that, while somewhat familiar, is distinctly outside the human world. This fleeting image though shows the promise of the film Evolution could’ve been. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Fire at Sea and...
Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilovic)
Near the beginning of Evolution, there’s a shot that hangs underwater, showing a seemingly harmonious aquatic eco-system that’s glimpsed just long enough to create the sense of something that, while somewhat familiar, is distinctly outside the human world. This fleeting image though shows the promise of the film Evolution could’ve been. – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
Fire at Sea and...
- 3/24/2017
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
The documentary form is designed to inspire discussion, but one thing that isn’t discussed in nonfiction filmmaking is its cinematography. Its directors are judged on their perspectives — how the topics are explored, not the forms used to express them.
Italian master Gianfranco Rosi has received his first Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, in part because “Fire At Sea” stems from the global news story of the European refugee crisis. However, he made it with the same impressionistic cinematic storytelling that has defined his career in films like “El Sicario, Room 164,” which follows a hitman for Mexican drug cartels, or “Sacro Gra,” which traces Italy’s Great Ring Road.
“Fire at Sea” is told largely from the point of view of Samuele, a 10-year-old boy who lives on Lampedusa, a sleepy island on the southernmost point of Europe. Just off the island, a near-daily life-and-death battle rages as rescue boats...
Italian master Gianfranco Rosi has received his first Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, in part because “Fire At Sea” stems from the global news story of the European refugee crisis. However, he made it with the same impressionistic cinematic storytelling that has defined his career in films like “El Sicario, Room 164,” which follows a hitman for Mexican drug cartels, or “Sacro Gra,” which traces Italy’s Great Ring Road.
“Fire at Sea” is told largely from the point of view of Samuele, a 10-year-old boy who lives on Lampedusa, a sleepy island on the southernmost point of Europe. Just off the island, a near-daily life-and-death battle rages as rescue boats...
- 1/26/2017
- by Chris O'Falt
- Indiewire
Gianfranco Rosi with Anne-Katrin Titze on Boatman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: "I remember when Jim Jarmusch saw this film many years ago, he thought this film was shot in the Fifties ..." Photo: Emilie Spiegel
Gianfranco Rosi and I met for the first time at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2014 for a conversation on Sacro Gra and last month we had a post-screening discussion on the opening weekend for his latest film, Italy's Oscar submission, Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare), at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, now playing side-by-side with Michael Moore's Hillary Clinton plaidoyer, Michael Moore In Trumpland, two days before the Presidential election.
Gopal in Boatman: "So the film is this hypothetical day on the Ganges. As I say, it took forever."
This past week after the screening of Boatman during the BAMcinématek Presents Gianfranco Rosi retrospective featuring the director's early films Below Sea Level and El Sicario,...
Gianfranco Rosi and I met for the first time at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2014 for a conversation on Sacro Gra and last month we had a post-screening discussion on the opening weekend for his latest film, Italy's Oscar submission, Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare), at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, now playing side-by-side with Michael Moore's Hillary Clinton plaidoyer, Michael Moore In Trumpland, two days before the Presidential election.
Gopal in Boatman: "So the film is this hypothetical day on the Ganges. As I say, it took forever."
This past week after the screening of Boatman during the BAMcinématek Presents Gianfranco Rosi retrospective featuring the director's early films Below Sea Level and El Sicario,...
- 11/6/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Gianfranco Rosi with Anne-Katrin Titze after the screening of Fire At Sea: "The only intuition I had at the beginning was to find a little boy as a point of view." Photo: Emilie Spiegel
In 2014, Gianfranco Rosi presented Sacro Gra, his nonjudgmental gaze that lands on bodies that matter at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. He returned this year for the New York Film Festival with his Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear winner, Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare), a masterpiece not only of documentary filmmaking but of timely and abiding storytelling.
Gianfranco Rosi on Samuele Pucillo: "He was eleven when I met him. He is like an old Woody Allen."
Rosi's early films Boatman, Below Sea Level and El Sicario, Room 164 will be screened at a BAMcinématek retrospective along with Italy's Foreign Language Film Oscar submission Fire at Sea, which will also screen at Doc NYC next month.
Director...
In 2014, Gianfranco Rosi presented Sacro Gra, his nonjudgmental gaze that lands on bodies that matter at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. He returned this year for the New York Film Festival with his Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear winner, Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare), a masterpiece not only of documentary filmmaking but of timely and abiding storytelling.
Gianfranco Rosi on Samuele Pucillo: "He was eleven when I met him. He is like an old Woody Allen."
Rosi's early films Boatman, Below Sea Level and El Sicario, Room 164 will be screened at a BAMcinématek retrospective along with Italy's Foreign Language Film Oscar submission Fire at Sea, which will also screen at Doc NYC next month.
Director...
- 10/24/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
This is a reprint of our review from the 2016 Berlin Film Festival.
It is easy to sink into the quiet waters of Gianfranco Rosi’s newest documentary, which brought him his second top honor from a major festival (“Sacro Gra” won Venice 2013) when it picked up the Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlinale this weekend. It’s a beautifully shot, meditative and poignant piece of work that clearly represents the fruits of a long period of intimate contact with its subjects, and a kind of fascinated love for the rhythms of traditional Italian islander life that goes beyond the anthropological and becomes almost spiritual in nature.
Continue reading ‘Fire At Sea’ Is A Deeply-Felt And Exquisitely Observed Documentary [Review] at The Playlist.
It is easy to sink into the quiet waters of Gianfranco Rosi’s newest documentary, which brought him his second top honor from a major festival (“Sacro Gra” won Venice 2013) when it picked up the Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlinale this weekend. It’s a beautifully shot, meditative and poignant piece of work that clearly represents the fruits of a long period of intimate contact with its subjects, and a kind of fascinated love for the rhythms of traditional Italian islander life that goes beyond the anthropological and becomes almost spiritual in nature.
Continue reading ‘Fire At Sea’ Is A Deeply-Felt And Exquisitely Observed Documentary [Review] at The Playlist.
- 10/20/2016
- by Jessica Kiang
- The Playlist
With only a few months left to go in the year, if you’re around our home base, you can experience some of the best films of 2016 (and 2017) at New York Film Festival. However, if you happen not to be anywhere close, there’s still a handful of must-see films spooling out over the next four weeks, and we’ve collected our top 15 picks. Aside from some of our favorites this year, we should note that a restoration of the landmark drama The Battle of Algiers will begin a nationwide roll-out starting on October 7, so seek that out if it’s playing near you.
Check out our recommendations below and let us know what you are most looking forward to seeing.
15. Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi; Oct. 21)
Synopsis: Capturing life on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a frontline in the European migrant crisis.
Trailer
Why You Should See It: After...
Check out our recommendations below and let us know what you are most looking forward to seeing.
15. Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi; Oct. 21)
Synopsis: Capturing life on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a frontline in the European migrant crisis.
Trailer
Why You Should See It: After...
- 10/3/2016
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Italy on Monday announced its candidate for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race, selecting timely documentary Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare). The pic by Gianfranco Rosi is a study of the island of Lampedusa, which has become a metaphor for the flight of refugees to Europe. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in February and next screens at the New York fest. Rosi previously won the Venice Golden Lion in 2013 with another doc, Sacro Gra. Kino Lorber picked u…...
- 9/27/2016
- Deadline
Gianfranco Rosi’s Golden Bear-winning doc has been chosen as the country’s Best Foreign Language Film submission.
Fire At Sea, Italian director Gianfranco Rosi’s migrant documentary, has been selected by Italy to represent the country at this year’s Academy Awards.
The feature-length doc about life on Lampedusa - a small, windswept Mediterranean island of around 6,000 people, which in the last 20 years has seen 400,000 sea-borne migrants pass through - picked up the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival in February.
It was co-produced by Italy’s 21 Uno Film, Stemal Entertainment, Rai Cinema and Istituto Luce as well as Paris-based Les Films d’Ici and Franco-German Arte Cinema.
Director Rosi spent a year on the island capturing its inhabitants and the migrants transiting through from Africa, en route to mainland Europe.
The film received rave reviews following its competition screening in Berlin, and also topped the 2016 Berlinale Screen Jury Grid.
Rosi also won...
Fire At Sea, Italian director Gianfranco Rosi’s migrant documentary, has been selected by Italy to represent the country at this year’s Academy Awards.
The feature-length doc about life on Lampedusa - a small, windswept Mediterranean island of around 6,000 people, which in the last 20 years has seen 400,000 sea-borne migrants pass through - picked up the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival in February.
It was co-produced by Italy’s 21 Uno Film, Stemal Entertainment, Rai Cinema and Istituto Luce as well as Paris-based Les Films d’Ici and Franco-German Arte Cinema.
Director Rosi spent a year on the island capturing its inhabitants and the migrants transiting through from Africa, en route to mainland Europe.
The film received rave reviews following its competition screening in Berlin, and also topped the 2016 Berlinale Screen Jury Grid.
Rosi also won...
- 9/26/2016
- ScreenDaily
Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare) director Gianfranco Rosi Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Bertrand Tavernier's loving My Journey Through French Cinema dedicated to Jacques Becker and Claude Sautet; Pedro Almodóvar's Julieta, sparked by Alice Munro short stories, starring Emma Suárez with Michelle Jenner, Adriana Ugarte, and Daniel Grao; Pablo Larraín's Neruda with Luis Gnecco as Pablo Neruda, Gael García Bernal and Alfredo Castro; and Gianfranco Rosi's Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare) with Samuele (a winning, completely natural combination of Bruno Dumont's Li'l Quinquin, a Wes Anderson boy scout in Moonrise Kingdom, and the scientist in Rosi's Sacro Gra) are four more highlights of the 54th New York Film Festival.
Ava DuVernay’s The 13th; Mike Mills' 20th Century Women starring Annette Bening with Billy Crudup, Elle Fanning, Lucas Jade Zumann and Greta Gerwig; and James Gray's The Lost City Of Z with Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland...
Bertrand Tavernier's loving My Journey Through French Cinema dedicated to Jacques Becker and Claude Sautet; Pedro Almodóvar's Julieta, sparked by Alice Munro short stories, starring Emma Suárez with Michelle Jenner, Adriana Ugarte, and Daniel Grao; Pablo Larraín's Neruda with Luis Gnecco as Pablo Neruda, Gael García Bernal and Alfredo Castro; and Gianfranco Rosi's Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare) with Samuele (a winning, completely natural combination of Bruno Dumont's Li'l Quinquin, a Wes Anderson boy scout in Moonrise Kingdom, and the scientist in Rosi's Sacro Gra) are four more highlights of the 54th New York Film Festival.
Ava DuVernay’s The 13th; Mike Mills' 20th Century Women starring Annette Bening with Billy Crudup, Elle Fanning, Lucas Jade Zumann and Greta Gerwig; and James Gray's The Lost City Of Z with Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland...
- 9/23/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
The European migrant crisis began in 2015 when thousands fled their conflict-ridden homelands to seek asylum in the European Union. Facing life-threatening circumstances, these refugees traveled across treacherous seas for a better life, while Europe struggled to cope with the ongoing crisis. The new documentary “Fire at Sea” observes this humanitarian disaster as it impacts the small Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, and how the culture dealt with such an influx of people. An observation portrait, the film follows the lives of local fisherman and their families, as well as the rescue of many migrants. Watch an exclusive trailer for the film below.
Read More: Berlin Review: Golden Bear Winner ‘Fire at Sea’ Offers a Superb Snapshot of the Refugee Crisis
The film is directed by Gianfranco Rosi, an Italian documentarian whose films have been very successful on the festival circuit. His 2013 film “Sacro Gra,” which depicts life along the Grande Raccordo Anulare,...
Read More: Berlin Review: Golden Bear Winner ‘Fire at Sea’ Offers a Superb Snapshot of the Refugee Crisis
The film is directed by Gianfranco Rosi, an Italian documentarian whose films have been very successful on the festival circuit. His 2013 film “Sacro Gra,” which depicts life along the Grande Raccordo Anulare,...
- 9/16/2016
- by Vikram Murthi
- Indiewire
Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters and Life Itself director Steve James's latest, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, in the New York Film Festival Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Films by Steve James, Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens (on Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds), Errol Morris (on Elsa Dorfman), Bill Morrison, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Raoul Peck, Kasper Collin (on Lee Morgan), Sam Pollard, Aaron Brookner (on William Burroughs and Robert Wilson documentarian Howard Brookner), Olatz López Garmendia, Shimon Dotan, Mohamed Siam, Linda Saffire and Adam Schlesinger (on Wendy Whelan), Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker will shine in the New York Film Festival Spotlight on Documentary section.
Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th was announced earlier as the Opening Night Gala film, Gimme Danger's Jim Jarmusch appears in Brookner's Uncle Howard and Sacro Gra director Gianfranco Rosi has his latest Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) screening in the Main Slate program.
Chaired by Festival Director Kent Jones,...
Films by Steve James, Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens (on Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds), Errol Morris (on Elsa Dorfman), Bill Morrison, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Raoul Peck, Kasper Collin (on Lee Morgan), Sam Pollard, Aaron Brookner (on William Burroughs and Robert Wilson documentarian Howard Brookner), Olatz López Garmendia, Shimon Dotan, Mohamed Siam, Linda Saffire and Adam Schlesinger (on Wendy Whelan), Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker will shine in the New York Film Festival Spotlight on Documentary section.
Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th was announced earlier as the Opening Night Gala film, Gimme Danger's Jim Jarmusch appears in Brookner's Uncle Howard and Sacro Gra director Gianfranco Rosi has his latest Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) screening in the Main Slate program.
Chaired by Festival Director Kent Jones,...
- 8/25/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Screen reveals the burning questions ahead of this year’s festival…
Anticipation for the 73rd Venice Film Festival (Aug 31 - Sept10) has been building for weeks.
Now, ahead of the world’s oldest film showcase (and the autumn’s first major awards barometer), Screen highlights ten burning questions…
1. Awards race under orders…
This year’s awards race will get underway in earnest on the Lido. In the last three years the festival has kickstarted major Oscar runs for three movies: Gravity, Birdman and Spotlight, while last year’s crop also included popular awards titles The Danish Girl and Anomalisa.
This year’s line-up is starrier than ever with Venice’s competition alone featuring Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (more of which below), Tom Ford’s blue ribbon drama Nocturnal Animals, Jacqueline Kennedy biopic Jackie, starring Natalie Portman, Denis Villeneuve’s big-budget sci-fi Arrival and Michael Fassbender-Alicia Vikander romance The Light Between Oceans.
Which films, if...
Anticipation for the 73rd Venice Film Festival (Aug 31 - Sept10) has been building for weeks.
Now, ahead of the world’s oldest film showcase (and the autumn’s first major awards barometer), Screen highlights ten burning questions…
1. Awards race under orders…
This year’s awards race will get underway in earnest on the Lido. In the last three years the festival has kickstarted major Oscar runs for three movies: Gravity, Birdman and Spotlight, while last year’s crop also included popular awards titles The Danish Girl and Anomalisa.
This year’s line-up is starrier than ever with Venice’s competition alone featuring Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (more of which below), Tom Ford’s blue ribbon drama Nocturnal Animals, Jacqueline Kennedy biopic Jackie, starring Natalie Portman, Denis Villeneuve’s big-budget sci-fi Arrival and Michael Fassbender-Alicia Vikander romance The Light Between Oceans.
Which films, if...
- 8/25/2016
- by andreas.wiseman@screendaily.com (Andreas Wiseman)
- ScreenDaily
After winning Venice’s Golden Lion a few years back with his documentary Sacro Gra, director Gianfranco Rosi also took the top prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the Golden Bear, for his new feature Fire at Sea. The film follows a 12-year-old boy living on the Lampedusa island in the middle of the sea, which 400,000 migrants have landed in the past 20 years, having braved the perilous voyage across the Mediterranean from Africa, and 15,000 of them have died. Set for a release in the U.K. next month ahead of a bow this fall in the U.S., a new trailer has now landed.
We said in our review, “In a manner reminiscent of his previous documentary feature, 2013’s surprise (and unmerited) Golden Lion winner Sacro Gra, Rosi cycles through a variety of subjects on Lampedusa, capturing them in what could pass as spontaneous moments if the careful...
We said in our review, “In a manner reminiscent of his previous documentary feature, 2013’s surprise (and unmerited) Golden Lion winner Sacro Gra, Rosi cycles through a variety of subjects on Lampedusa, capturing them in what could pass as spontaneous moments if the careful...
- 5/25/2016
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Guillaume Nicloux and Isabelle Huppert at the Valley of Love premiere Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
John Waters, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, Angélique Kidjo, Emmanuel Finkiel (Je Ne Suis Pas Un salaud), Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Mustang co-writer Alice Winocour (Disorder), Nicolas Pariser and his star Melvil Poupaud (Le Grand Jeu) and Bang Gang (Une Histoire D'Amour Moderne) director Eva Husson joined Guillaume Nicloux and Isabelle Huppert on the red carpet.
The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, Alfred Hitchcock casting James Bond Sean Connery for Marnie, Gianfranco Rosi's Sacro Gra and The End with Gérard Depardieu, came up in my conversation with the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema opening night film director, Guillaume Nicloux.
Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu in Valley Of Love
A long divorced couple, played by Depardieu and Huppert, meet up in Death Valley after their son committed suicide months earlier. They each received a letter promising them that if...
John Waters, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, Angélique Kidjo, Emmanuel Finkiel (Je Ne Suis Pas Un salaud), Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Mustang co-writer Alice Winocour (Disorder), Nicolas Pariser and his star Melvil Poupaud (Le Grand Jeu) and Bang Gang (Une Histoire D'Amour Moderne) director Eva Husson joined Guillaume Nicloux and Isabelle Huppert on the red carpet.
The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, Alfred Hitchcock casting James Bond Sean Connery for Marnie, Gianfranco Rosi's Sacro Gra and The End with Gérard Depardieu, came up in my conversation with the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema opening night film director, Guillaume Nicloux.
Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu in Valley Of Love
A long divorced couple, played by Depardieu and Huppert, meet up in Death Valley after their son committed suicide months earlier. They each received a letter promising them that if...
- 3/19/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
This 66th edition of the Berlinale did not focus so much on films as it did on issues, especially the issue of mass migration including Germany’s one million immigrants being welcomed by Angela Merkel. The sentiment of the Berlinale was expressed by Festival Director Dieter Kosslick in his introductory comment, “We are 90 million Germans. What are one million Syrians? We spent billions and billions to educate our kids, to teach them what happened in the Holocaust.” Nevertheless, the controversy throughout Germany and Europe continues to grow, as it does in the U.S. about what to do about the massive wave of migration, as if there were any other place the people, dispossessed and disposed of by their governments and the governments of the west to go.
Dealing with the plight of African and Syrian refugees, “Fire at Sea”/ “Fuocoammare” by Giovanni Rosi won the Golden Bear led by the jury president Meryl Streep. All North American rights have subsequently been acquired from its international sales agent, Doc & Film by Kino Lorber who plans an autumn release. “Gianfranco Rosi captured the hearts and minds of the Berlinale this year with what will become one of the essential films of our times,” said CEO Richard Lorber. The Italian distributor 01 Distribution profited from its Saturday night Golden Bear win as the Italian box office’s Sunday profits spiked +166%. Tuesday’s take was 40% up on Monday’s box office. By Wednesday the film had taken $169.5k (€154k) and the following weekend 01 almost doubled screens to 76. Imovision took Brazil, Caramel took Spain, Curzon took U.K. Rosi previously won the 2013 Venice Golden Lion for his documentary “Sacro Gra”.
“Fire at Sea” captures today’s Zeitgeist. Though it may not be a film of the highest merit when judged over time, it is the film with the highest contemporary-social-issue-political focus.
Its story is told from a superior point of view; what misery we see of the immigrants’ plight makes us sad and depressed – though not as much as the actual footage we see daily on the news. The only uplift we receive is to witness the acts of the good physician Pietro Bartolo. He not only cares for the island’s 4,000 inhabitants as they go about their daily business of fishing, keeping house, and going to school without much interaction with the invasion of refugees, but he also cares for the 400,000 immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, treating them or identifying them as already dead. As he said at his press conference, “This has become a dramatic problem, an epochal problem. I don’t think that a barbed-wire fence can stop these people. I don’t think there’s a person on earth who wants to leave his country if he isn’t forced to.”
A noble effort, the film in many ways misses the boat. Not to say that any other film was better (I did not see them all), but to make a point about the Berlinale itself as a festival, I note here the majority of other films in the Competition all had socially relevant foci and that is the point of the Berlinale. It is to its credit that it takes a stand and to its detriment that perhaps the films chosen do not attain cinematic stature internationally. The recent years’ Golden Bear winners were (in my opinion) certainly worthy with a couple of exceptions. “Caesar Must Die” a doc about Italian prisoners engaging in the production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and “Black Coal, Thin Ice” a Chinese hard-boiled detective saga were both quickly forgotten.
Memorable winners worth noting were in 2011 with Iran’s “ Jodaeiye Nader az Simin/ “A Separation”, Romania’s 2013 “ Poziţia Copilului”/ “Child‘s Pose” and again from Iran in 2015, Jafar Panahi’s “ Taxi”.
Looking at the other films in Competition this year, Mohamed Ben Attia’s “Hedi”(Isa: The Match Factory, sold to date to Austria’s Polyfilm, Germany’s Pandora, Norway’s Mer Film, Switzerland ’s Cineworx, Taiwan’s Maison Motion) deals with a quiet man’s personal struggle for freedom from the constraints of his Tunisian society; Ivo M. Ferreira’s “Letters from War” (Isa: The Match Factory) deals with the final years of the Angolan War of Independence against Portugal in 1961-74; Danis Tanovic deals with the more recent Bosnian War as a Frenchman sits in his hotel room while a World War I Commemoration takes place in Sarajevo in “Death in Sarajevo” (Isa: The Match Factory); protests against the Nazi regime are the subject of “Alone in Berlin” (Isa: Cornerstone, the new sales company of Alison Thompson and Mark Gooder, sold to Altitude for U.K., Pathe for France. X Film, the producer keeps German rights) by Vincent Perez; in Rafi Pitts’ “Soy Nero”( Isa: The Match Factory, sold to date to Neue Visionen for Germany, Sophie Dulac Distribution for France, Ama Films for Greece, Bomba Films for Poland, Filmarti for Turkey,MegaCom for Serbia and Montenegro, Moving Turtle for Lebanon, trigon-film for Switzerland) about a 19-year-old Mexican boy dreaming of immigrating north to the U.S. who takes the route of joining the U.S. Army to fight in the Middle East in order to get his “green card”. The Philippine Revolution against Spanish Colonization is treated in a 482 minute epic “ A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery” (Isa: Films Boutique) by Lav Diaz. In “United States of Love” (Isa: Films New Europe sold to Imovision for Brazil and Angel for Denmark), four women share the urge to change their lives in 1990, immediately after the fall of Communism. All of these films are dealing with issues of gaining freedom today. “Being 17”(Isa: Elle Driver sold Belgium to Lumière, Brazil to F ênix, France to Wild Bunch, Serbia to McF Megacom, Switzerland to Frenetic) by Andre Techine also deals with adolescents growing up gay in a working-class neighborhood in France, another current human rights issue.
These film choices remind us that the Berlinale itself was founded in 1950 during the Cold War as West Berlin’s way of confronting East Berlin’s imprisonment of its people by flaunting its own freedom, a truly Berlin way of life which still today animates its spirit of freedom. This casts a certain character upon the films chosen by the Berlinale selection committee to this day.
A political tone of the festival was also echoed by the pronouncement “We are all Africans really” spoken by Meryl Streep when she was questioned about why the Berlin Film Festival had appointed an all-white jury (not that she was responsible for choosing the jury).
Meryl Streep’s rather blithe comment, to quote Lindiwe Dovey in The Guardian , “plunged the actress into a debate about the lack of diversity in Hollywood. At best, Streep’s comment was an attempt to show solidarity. But what she unwittingly also underlined was the absence of Africans and African filmmaking in mainstream cinema. If we really are all Africans, and if we are going to take black filmmaking more seriously, why are we not watching African films?” Again, Streep is not responsible for the Berlinale’s selection either.
Only five African films are being shown at this year's festival and they are not all sub-Saharan African, that is to say “black”, but are also North African -- that is to say of the Mena region or Arab. These are two very different aspects of the giant continent called Africa. We are seeing many films from the Mena, that is Arab and North African regions this year.
In an attempt to find answers to this question of why we are not seeing more “black” films, we attended the Berlinale World Cinema Fund’s “Africa Day”. This one-off, and therefore insufficient, day was dedicated to discussing the memory, present and future of African films. Insufficient for finding answers and for creating any call for action, the day was, nonetheless, important and for that we all should thank the German Federal Cultural Foundation for providing the funds which guarantee the existence of the World Cinema Fund until at least 2018 and to the German Foreign Office, which substantially raised its level of support allowing the Wcf additional discretion in its actions.
The presentation by Nigerian film critic Didi Anni Cheeka was a fascinating exposé of what has happened to the “archives” of Nigerian cinema. The 60s to the 80s’ post-colonial cinema is not discussed today at all and Cheeka has searched for those filmmakers, called “The Seven Ups” who worked along with such filmmakers as Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. The Ministry of Information in Nigeria gave him permission to organize the films of the 60s which were lost during the Civil War in a collective amnesia. In the process, he discovered a room closed, locked and forgotten in the 1960s at the end of the independent movements throughout Africa, a room containing movie machines and more than 2,000 cans of films laying around like dusty dead bodies. This and other sad cases have revealed that in fact, there are no archives of African cinema at all.
But even the later Nollywood producers do not have copies of their films. Memories of what Africa looked like are lost along with the artistic efforts of its cineastes. Silence has been instilled by the governments of today as well.
Cinema as culture does not really exist in Africa. To create awareness takes education, leisure, city life and a cultural and cinema community nourishing one another. More than production funds, awareness needs the support of people with ideas.
Cheeka also stated, "We have the strange situation that new cineplexes are coming up every day, but they only show Hollywood movies. It's a common problem all over Africa: High quality movies from the continent hardly find an audience or even a place to be shown. Without a market in sight, few high-quality movies are shot. Only so-called ‘Nollywood movies’, mostly produced in Nigeria in just a few days or weeks, are thriving. Nigeria's movie industry earns around Us $250 million from Nollywood movies. This is the first time an economy has been established around the notion of film. In 1999 the first Nollywood delegaton came to Sithengi, the South African Film Market and they took over. Last year in Nigeria, many layers of Nollywood were apparent; the usual low budget exploitation or dramatic movie was giving space to other kinds of film. This opens the possibility of further discussion of film economy in all Africa, from Algeria to South Africa.
Pedro Pimento, Director of the Durban International Film Festival, gave the keynote address analyzing the lack of African film and the lack of distribution for what few African films there are. This was the high point of the day as he was heard loud and clear, at least by me, as he was articulate and to the point.
Pedro Pimenta is a filmmaker and producer from Mozambique. He produced the 1997 film "Fools", the first feature film shot by a black South African, Ramadan Suleman, and the same year "Africa Dreaming" a chronicle of Africa in six acts, with the common theme the love. Pimenta is also "foreign corresponding member" of the "Association of Real Cinema" the international meeting of documentary films held at the Pompidou Center in Paris created in 1978 which invites the public and professionals to discover film auteurs. The producer-director is also the founder and director of the documentary film festival "Dockanema" in Maputo, Mozambique. The first edition was held in September 2006 with support from the Mozambican Ebano Multimedia, in association with Amocine (Mozambican Association of Filmmakers).
According to Pimenta, "the documentary is an observation and testimony which brings the spectator something which otherwise would be merely read as news and quickly forgotten. Directed by great filmmakers, it can be a work of art; made by an amateur holding a small hand-held camera, it is a daily familiar record of an historic moment. The documentary brings us closer to the great achievements of the better side of humanity even as it brings us the violent scourge of today's world. It thus gives us the opportunity to replace prejudice by solidly based judgments and to take conscious positions."
Pedro Pimenta started his movie career with the National film Institute of Mozambique in 1977. Since then, he has produced and co-produced numerous short fiction, documentaries and feature movies in his country as well as in other African nations.
Between 1997 and 2003 Pedro was the chief Technical Adviser of the Unesco Zimbabwe Film and Video Training Project for Southern Africa in Harare. As part of his function, he conceived and managed various training programs. He is one of the founders of Avea (Audio Visual Entrepreneurs of Africa) which runs an annual training program for professional producers in Southern Africa. Until December 2005, Pedro was a member of the Prince Claus Fund Awards Committee of the Netherlands.
He presented practical and pragmatic steps for a concrete approach to invigorate African Cinema.
First of all, there is no case for Africa as a country. It is too diverse and too vast. Knowing the context(s) of film, there is a solution. However, there is a total lack of reliable data vis á vis Africa, just as there has been a lack of data for the case of women in film until the past couple of years. A structure as a way to access information must be built. Experience has been accumulated for what works and what does not work in changing contexts; there are constant paradigm shifts; there is “generational regeneration” in content every few years; but all facts are anecdotal and not data oriented.
And there is the traditional value chain of cinema going like this:
The money follows from production costs to recoupment through distribution and it should be put back into film education along with production. The weakest point in the chain is exhibition.
Currently there is good energy, but there is no system. There are two recognized international film festivals and Mogadishu might be a third festival but it will take four to five years. There were attempts to create Pan African film distribution utopias, but they failed. Neither the British nor the French ever involved themselves in distribution systems and the models died.
From the mid 80s to 2000 the Imf World Bank’s involvement in Africa was built on a model of all nations feeding off of Mother Africa like a litter of trucks feeding off the oil tank that was Africa.
Today, the need to control distribution is apparent and it can generate money, but governments have made it clear that culture today is a “negative priority”. International corporations serve as African nations’ only means of survival.
While commercial distribution models have failed, the number of film festivals has increased. Out of the 54 countries in Africa, only two have no film festival. From 1980 to 2000 there were only two countries with festivals. Plus there is the current digital revolution which points to new directions one can go.
If any form of distribution reaches a critical mass like that of Nollywood, the governments can think critically about its policies. Keep an eye on the cinemas opening in Ethiopia which are based on local demands for local films. Ethiopia is currently producing 200 films per year. Uganda has informal screening spaces located all over the capital city. Pathé looks like it might have a shot in Francophone Africa. These examples all go to show there is a small cultural economy through cinema.
Morocco and Mauritius have local incentives to encourage local production.
But overall, exhibition is the weakest link in the value chain shown above.
In 2016 we see Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Iroko TV/ Buni. We see TV, African Films and TV, Vidi, On Tap TV etc.
However, I am of the belief that VOD is not the answer for Africa and African cinema. A minority of so-called middle class Africans, who do not identify or show interest for African films will have access. The majority of Africans (the market) are left on the sideline (once again) and are not really considered in any strategy.
But with 1.4 billion people, 60% of whom live in urban settings and with a majority of young people, young consumers – one out of three being “middle class”, there is a demand for entertainment. But we need to find the reality and economy of Our Cinema.
There is a demand for a mirror of oneself. The origin of an audience is Our Grandmother. What does she say about our ideas? She was the storyteller who passed our values on to this new generation. How can our creative cinema advance if we do not head this real mirror.
Here are the transversal issues:
1. Training vs. Education. There are many training initiatives in Africa, but what of film education? To train an audience, to train storytellers rather than to train support for outside production companies shooting in Africa is imperative.
2. Relevance of data. Data is limited to say the least.
3. Role of the producer in Africa’s content and support strategies.
4. Role of film festivals. By default they are the exhibitor of African content throughout Europe and they are part of a larger year-round circuit supporting African films for African audiences.
5. European support models only create two to three projects a year. This includes Hubert Bals Fund of Netherlands, Cinema du Monde of France, World Cinema Fund of Germany and Acp of the European Market.
We need new ways and a new system of support from Europe that is matched by support from Africa. Any system based on support however is not adequate.
“Screen space” is not necessarily a theater. It can be universities, museums; it might be similar to the recent attempts in Cuba of “salon cinemas” which were separate rooms in restaurants and hair salons.
Another model might be Argentina’s building of 45 digital cinemas throughout Latin America for Latin American content or the recent creation of Retina Latina, a free online service of Latin American films for Latin America.
The Market exists. There is a lot of money in Africa. The problem is that the money's offices are in London.
Pimento’s response when I sent him Meryl Streep’s comment as it was reported in The Guardian follows.
“Interesting but what bothers me really is the fact that we never really critically talk about quality (or not) of African films and also the belief that things will happen out of some divine intervention and not by triggering purposeful market dynamics .
I find also that using Ms. Streep’s comment as a way to reach some visibility does not necessarily reflect any intellectual honesty… it’s just a quick expedient for a sector of dogmatic- bordering-on-racism African filmmakers who claim the rest of the world needs to provide solutions to their problems/ frustrations/ obstacles .....
There are many less visible examples of positive African people and initiatives driven by the notion that our destiny is in our hands really and not in the hands of any international cooperation/ aid/ humanitarian system."...
Dealing with the plight of African and Syrian refugees, “Fire at Sea”/ “Fuocoammare” by Giovanni Rosi won the Golden Bear led by the jury president Meryl Streep. All North American rights have subsequently been acquired from its international sales agent, Doc & Film by Kino Lorber who plans an autumn release. “Gianfranco Rosi captured the hearts and minds of the Berlinale this year with what will become one of the essential films of our times,” said CEO Richard Lorber. The Italian distributor 01 Distribution profited from its Saturday night Golden Bear win as the Italian box office’s Sunday profits spiked +166%. Tuesday’s take was 40% up on Monday’s box office. By Wednesday the film had taken $169.5k (€154k) and the following weekend 01 almost doubled screens to 76. Imovision took Brazil, Caramel took Spain, Curzon took U.K. Rosi previously won the 2013 Venice Golden Lion for his documentary “Sacro Gra”.
“Fire at Sea” captures today’s Zeitgeist. Though it may not be a film of the highest merit when judged over time, it is the film with the highest contemporary-social-issue-political focus.
Its story is told from a superior point of view; what misery we see of the immigrants’ plight makes us sad and depressed – though not as much as the actual footage we see daily on the news. The only uplift we receive is to witness the acts of the good physician Pietro Bartolo. He not only cares for the island’s 4,000 inhabitants as they go about their daily business of fishing, keeping house, and going to school without much interaction with the invasion of refugees, but he also cares for the 400,000 immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, treating them or identifying them as already dead. As he said at his press conference, “This has become a dramatic problem, an epochal problem. I don’t think that a barbed-wire fence can stop these people. I don’t think there’s a person on earth who wants to leave his country if he isn’t forced to.”
A noble effort, the film in many ways misses the boat. Not to say that any other film was better (I did not see them all), but to make a point about the Berlinale itself as a festival, I note here the majority of other films in the Competition all had socially relevant foci and that is the point of the Berlinale. It is to its credit that it takes a stand and to its detriment that perhaps the films chosen do not attain cinematic stature internationally. The recent years’ Golden Bear winners were (in my opinion) certainly worthy with a couple of exceptions. “Caesar Must Die” a doc about Italian prisoners engaging in the production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and “Black Coal, Thin Ice” a Chinese hard-boiled detective saga were both quickly forgotten.
Memorable winners worth noting were in 2011 with Iran’s “ Jodaeiye Nader az Simin/ “A Separation”, Romania’s 2013 “ Poziţia Copilului”/ “Child‘s Pose” and again from Iran in 2015, Jafar Panahi’s “ Taxi”.
Looking at the other films in Competition this year, Mohamed Ben Attia’s “Hedi”(Isa: The Match Factory, sold to date to Austria’s Polyfilm, Germany’s Pandora, Norway’s Mer Film, Switzerland ’s Cineworx, Taiwan’s Maison Motion) deals with a quiet man’s personal struggle for freedom from the constraints of his Tunisian society; Ivo M. Ferreira’s “Letters from War” (Isa: The Match Factory) deals with the final years of the Angolan War of Independence against Portugal in 1961-74; Danis Tanovic deals with the more recent Bosnian War as a Frenchman sits in his hotel room while a World War I Commemoration takes place in Sarajevo in “Death in Sarajevo” (Isa: The Match Factory); protests against the Nazi regime are the subject of “Alone in Berlin” (Isa: Cornerstone, the new sales company of Alison Thompson and Mark Gooder, sold to Altitude for U.K., Pathe for France. X Film, the producer keeps German rights) by Vincent Perez; in Rafi Pitts’ “Soy Nero”( Isa: The Match Factory, sold to date to Neue Visionen for Germany, Sophie Dulac Distribution for France, Ama Films for Greece, Bomba Films for Poland, Filmarti for Turkey,MegaCom for Serbia and Montenegro, Moving Turtle for Lebanon, trigon-film for Switzerland) about a 19-year-old Mexican boy dreaming of immigrating north to the U.S. who takes the route of joining the U.S. Army to fight in the Middle East in order to get his “green card”. The Philippine Revolution against Spanish Colonization is treated in a 482 minute epic “ A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery” (Isa: Films Boutique) by Lav Diaz. In “United States of Love” (Isa: Films New Europe sold to Imovision for Brazil and Angel for Denmark), four women share the urge to change their lives in 1990, immediately after the fall of Communism. All of these films are dealing with issues of gaining freedom today. “Being 17”(Isa: Elle Driver sold Belgium to Lumière, Brazil to F ênix, France to Wild Bunch, Serbia to McF Megacom, Switzerland to Frenetic) by Andre Techine also deals with adolescents growing up gay in a working-class neighborhood in France, another current human rights issue.
These film choices remind us that the Berlinale itself was founded in 1950 during the Cold War as West Berlin’s way of confronting East Berlin’s imprisonment of its people by flaunting its own freedom, a truly Berlin way of life which still today animates its spirit of freedom. This casts a certain character upon the films chosen by the Berlinale selection committee to this day.
A political tone of the festival was also echoed by the pronouncement “We are all Africans really” spoken by Meryl Streep when she was questioned about why the Berlin Film Festival had appointed an all-white jury (not that she was responsible for choosing the jury).
Meryl Streep’s rather blithe comment, to quote Lindiwe Dovey in The Guardian , “plunged the actress into a debate about the lack of diversity in Hollywood. At best, Streep’s comment was an attempt to show solidarity. But what she unwittingly also underlined was the absence of Africans and African filmmaking in mainstream cinema. If we really are all Africans, and if we are going to take black filmmaking more seriously, why are we not watching African films?” Again, Streep is not responsible for the Berlinale’s selection either.
Only five African films are being shown at this year's festival and they are not all sub-Saharan African, that is to say “black”, but are also North African -- that is to say of the Mena region or Arab. These are two very different aspects of the giant continent called Africa. We are seeing many films from the Mena, that is Arab and North African regions this year.
In an attempt to find answers to this question of why we are not seeing more “black” films, we attended the Berlinale World Cinema Fund’s “Africa Day”. This one-off, and therefore insufficient, day was dedicated to discussing the memory, present and future of African films. Insufficient for finding answers and for creating any call for action, the day was, nonetheless, important and for that we all should thank the German Federal Cultural Foundation for providing the funds which guarantee the existence of the World Cinema Fund until at least 2018 and to the German Foreign Office, which substantially raised its level of support allowing the Wcf additional discretion in its actions.
The presentation by Nigerian film critic Didi Anni Cheeka was a fascinating exposé of what has happened to the “archives” of Nigerian cinema. The 60s to the 80s’ post-colonial cinema is not discussed today at all and Cheeka has searched for those filmmakers, called “The Seven Ups” who worked along with such filmmakers as Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. The Ministry of Information in Nigeria gave him permission to organize the films of the 60s which were lost during the Civil War in a collective amnesia. In the process, he discovered a room closed, locked and forgotten in the 1960s at the end of the independent movements throughout Africa, a room containing movie machines and more than 2,000 cans of films laying around like dusty dead bodies. This and other sad cases have revealed that in fact, there are no archives of African cinema at all.
But even the later Nollywood producers do not have copies of their films. Memories of what Africa looked like are lost along with the artistic efforts of its cineastes. Silence has been instilled by the governments of today as well.
Cinema as culture does not really exist in Africa. To create awareness takes education, leisure, city life and a cultural and cinema community nourishing one another. More than production funds, awareness needs the support of people with ideas.
Cheeka also stated, "We have the strange situation that new cineplexes are coming up every day, but they only show Hollywood movies. It's a common problem all over Africa: High quality movies from the continent hardly find an audience or even a place to be shown. Without a market in sight, few high-quality movies are shot. Only so-called ‘Nollywood movies’, mostly produced in Nigeria in just a few days or weeks, are thriving. Nigeria's movie industry earns around Us $250 million from Nollywood movies. This is the first time an economy has been established around the notion of film. In 1999 the first Nollywood delegaton came to Sithengi, the South African Film Market and they took over. Last year in Nigeria, many layers of Nollywood were apparent; the usual low budget exploitation or dramatic movie was giving space to other kinds of film. This opens the possibility of further discussion of film economy in all Africa, from Algeria to South Africa.
Pedro Pimento, Director of the Durban International Film Festival, gave the keynote address analyzing the lack of African film and the lack of distribution for what few African films there are. This was the high point of the day as he was heard loud and clear, at least by me, as he was articulate and to the point.
Pedro Pimenta is a filmmaker and producer from Mozambique. He produced the 1997 film "Fools", the first feature film shot by a black South African, Ramadan Suleman, and the same year "Africa Dreaming" a chronicle of Africa in six acts, with the common theme the love. Pimenta is also "foreign corresponding member" of the "Association of Real Cinema" the international meeting of documentary films held at the Pompidou Center in Paris created in 1978 which invites the public and professionals to discover film auteurs. The producer-director is also the founder and director of the documentary film festival "Dockanema" in Maputo, Mozambique. The first edition was held in September 2006 with support from the Mozambican Ebano Multimedia, in association with Amocine (Mozambican Association of Filmmakers).
According to Pimenta, "the documentary is an observation and testimony which brings the spectator something which otherwise would be merely read as news and quickly forgotten. Directed by great filmmakers, it can be a work of art; made by an amateur holding a small hand-held camera, it is a daily familiar record of an historic moment. The documentary brings us closer to the great achievements of the better side of humanity even as it brings us the violent scourge of today's world. It thus gives us the opportunity to replace prejudice by solidly based judgments and to take conscious positions."
Pedro Pimenta started his movie career with the National film Institute of Mozambique in 1977. Since then, he has produced and co-produced numerous short fiction, documentaries and feature movies in his country as well as in other African nations.
Between 1997 and 2003 Pedro was the chief Technical Adviser of the Unesco Zimbabwe Film and Video Training Project for Southern Africa in Harare. As part of his function, he conceived and managed various training programs. He is one of the founders of Avea (Audio Visual Entrepreneurs of Africa) which runs an annual training program for professional producers in Southern Africa. Until December 2005, Pedro was a member of the Prince Claus Fund Awards Committee of the Netherlands.
He presented practical and pragmatic steps for a concrete approach to invigorate African Cinema.
First of all, there is no case for Africa as a country. It is too diverse and too vast. Knowing the context(s) of film, there is a solution. However, there is a total lack of reliable data vis á vis Africa, just as there has been a lack of data for the case of women in film until the past couple of years. A structure as a way to access information must be built. Experience has been accumulated for what works and what does not work in changing contexts; there are constant paradigm shifts; there is “generational regeneration” in content every few years; but all facts are anecdotal and not data oriented.
And there is the traditional value chain of cinema going like this:
The money follows from production costs to recoupment through distribution and it should be put back into film education along with production. The weakest point in the chain is exhibition.
Currently there is good energy, but there is no system. There are two recognized international film festivals and Mogadishu might be a third festival but it will take four to five years. There were attempts to create Pan African film distribution utopias, but they failed. Neither the British nor the French ever involved themselves in distribution systems and the models died.
From the mid 80s to 2000 the Imf World Bank’s involvement in Africa was built on a model of all nations feeding off of Mother Africa like a litter of trucks feeding off the oil tank that was Africa.
Today, the need to control distribution is apparent and it can generate money, but governments have made it clear that culture today is a “negative priority”. International corporations serve as African nations’ only means of survival.
While commercial distribution models have failed, the number of film festivals has increased. Out of the 54 countries in Africa, only two have no film festival. From 1980 to 2000 there were only two countries with festivals. Plus there is the current digital revolution which points to new directions one can go.
If any form of distribution reaches a critical mass like that of Nollywood, the governments can think critically about its policies. Keep an eye on the cinemas opening in Ethiopia which are based on local demands for local films. Ethiopia is currently producing 200 films per year. Uganda has informal screening spaces located all over the capital city. Pathé looks like it might have a shot in Francophone Africa. These examples all go to show there is a small cultural economy through cinema.
Morocco and Mauritius have local incentives to encourage local production.
But overall, exhibition is the weakest link in the value chain shown above.
In 2016 we see Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Iroko TV/ Buni. We see TV, African Films and TV, Vidi, On Tap TV etc.
However, I am of the belief that VOD is not the answer for Africa and African cinema. A minority of so-called middle class Africans, who do not identify or show interest for African films will have access. The majority of Africans (the market) are left on the sideline (once again) and are not really considered in any strategy.
But with 1.4 billion people, 60% of whom live in urban settings and with a majority of young people, young consumers – one out of three being “middle class”, there is a demand for entertainment. But we need to find the reality and economy of Our Cinema.
There is a demand for a mirror of oneself. The origin of an audience is Our Grandmother. What does she say about our ideas? She was the storyteller who passed our values on to this new generation. How can our creative cinema advance if we do not head this real mirror.
Here are the transversal issues:
1. Training vs. Education. There are many training initiatives in Africa, but what of film education? To train an audience, to train storytellers rather than to train support for outside production companies shooting in Africa is imperative.
2. Relevance of data. Data is limited to say the least.
3. Role of the producer in Africa’s content and support strategies.
4. Role of film festivals. By default they are the exhibitor of African content throughout Europe and they are part of a larger year-round circuit supporting African films for African audiences.
5. European support models only create two to three projects a year. This includes Hubert Bals Fund of Netherlands, Cinema du Monde of France, World Cinema Fund of Germany and Acp of the European Market.
We need new ways and a new system of support from Europe that is matched by support from Africa. Any system based on support however is not adequate.
“Screen space” is not necessarily a theater. It can be universities, museums; it might be similar to the recent attempts in Cuba of “salon cinemas” which were separate rooms in restaurants and hair salons.
Another model might be Argentina’s building of 45 digital cinemas throughout Latin America for Latin American content or the recent creation of Retina Latina, a free online service of Latin American films for Latin America.
The Market exists. There is a lot of money in Africa. The problem is that the money's offices are in London.
Pimento’s response when I sent him Meryl Streep’s comment as it was reported in The Guardian follows.
“Interesting but what bothers me really is the fact that we never really critically talk about quality (or not) of African films and also the belief that things will happen out of some divine intervention and not by triggering purposeful market dynamics .
I find also that using Ms. Streep’s comment as a way to reach some visibility does not necessarily reflect any intellectual honesty… it’s just a quick expedient for a sector of dogmatic- bordering-on-racism African filmmakers who claim the rest of the world needs to provide solutions to their problems/ frustrations/ obstacles .....
There are many less visible examples of positive African people and initiatives driven by the notion that our destiny is in our hands really and not in the hands of any international cooperation/ aid/ humanitarian system."...
- 3/16/2016
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Following a challenging local opening Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare) has been significantly boosted by its Golden Bear win.
Unlike Berlin jury president Meryl Streep, Italian audiences were not initially “swept away” by Gianfranco Rosi’s acclaimed documentary Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare) when it opened last weekend.
The film opened on February 18 across 47 screens but managed only $27.5k (€25k) in its first three days.
However, 01 Distribution’s charge about the migrant crisis and life on the Italian island of Lampedusa was mightlily boosted at the box office by its Golden Bear win in Berlin on Saturday night. Sunday profits spiked +166%. Tuesday’s take was 40% up on Monday’s box office.
By Wednesday the film had taken $169.5k (€154k) and this weekend 01 will almost double screens to 76.
“Fuocoammare was released with a limited, controlled investment, similar to other movies of its kind,” explains Luigi Lonigro, managing director at 01 Distribution. “The advertising budget wasn’t big, but it reflected...
Unlike Berlin jury president Meryl Streep, Italian audiences were not initially “swept away” by Gianfranco Rosi’s acclaimed documentary Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare) when it opened last weekend.
The film opened on February 18 across 47 screens but managed only $27.5k (€25k) in its first three days.
However, 01 Distribution’s charge about the migrant crisis and life on the Italian island of Lampedusa was mightlily boosted at the box office by its Golden Bear win in Berlin on Saturday night. Sunday profits spiked +166%. Tuesday’s take was 40% up on Monday’s box office.
By Wednesday the film had taken $169.5k (€154k) and this weekend 01 will almost double screens to 76.
“Fuocoammare was released with a limited, controlled investment, similar to other movies of its kind,” explains Luigi Lonigro, managing director at 01 Distribution. “The advertising budget wasn’t big, but it reflected...
- 2/26/2016
- ScreenDaily
The distributor has picked up all North American rights from Doc & Film International to Gianfranco Rosi’s Golden Bear winner that dazzled the Berlinale jury and critics alike.
Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare) chronicles the impact of refugees on the Italian Island of Lampedusa.
Berlinale jury president Meryl Streep said of the film last week: “It’s a daring hybrid of captured footage and deliberate storytelling that allows us to consider what documentary can do. It demands its place in front of our eyes and compels our engagement and action.”
The Ecumenical Jury called Fire At Sea “a film that refuses to allow the status quo to go unquestioned.”
Rosi won the 2013 Venice Golden Lion for his documentary Sacro Gra.
Kino Lorber plans an autumn theatrical release. “Gianfranco Rosi captured the hearts and minds of the Berlinale this year with what will become one of the essential films of our times,” said CEO [link...
Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare) chronicles the impact of refugees on the Italian Island of Lampedusa.
Berlinale jury president Meryl Streep said of the film last week: “It’s a daring hybrid of captured footage and deliberate storytelling that allows us to consider what documentary can do. It demands its place in front of our eyes and compels our engagement and action.”
The Ecumenical Jury called Fire At Sea “a film that refuses to allow the status quo to go unquestioned.”
Rosi won the 2013 Venice Golden Lion for his documentary Sacro Gra.
Kino Lorber plans an autumn theatrical release. “Gianfranco Rosi captured the hearts and minds of the Berlinale this year with what will become one of the essential films of our times,” said CEO [link...
- 2/24/2016
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
It is easy to sink into the quiet waters of Gianfranco Rosi's newest documentary, which brought him his second top honor from a major festival ("Sacro Gra" won Venice 2013) when it picked up the Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlinale this weekend. It's a beautifully shot, meditative and poignant piece of work that clearly represents the fruits of a long period of intimate contact with its subjects, and a kind of fascinated love for the rhythms of traditional Italian islander life that goes beyond the anthropological and becomes almost spiritual in nature. It is creatively presented in a manner that stretches, but does not snap the elastic relation of documentary to reality. It is compassionate despite its austerity. It is a sort of star vehicle for its central character, the wonderful 12-year-old Samuele. What it is not, however, is a documentary about the European migrant crisis. Read More: 'Fire At...
- 2/22/2016
- by Jessica Kiang
- The Playlist
The Berlin International Film Festival continued to challenge expectations in its 66th edition, landing another auteur heavy competition line-up, albeit a slightly less sensational one than the landmark 2015 program. Although an attempt continues to be made to establish grand motifs between films in competition and the more experimental sidebars, topical issues seemed to be the name of the game across the board, particularly immigration. This culminated with this year’s Golden Bear winner, Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, a documentary which was the clear early favorite and remained so up until the awards ceremony. Rosi has now won two major film festivals with his documentary work (previously taking home the top prize at Venice 2013 for Sacro Gra), and further solidifies an argument for the Cannes Film Festival to follow suit and allow documentary titles to play in the main competition. Berlin notably had two documentaries in the main competition this year,...
- 2/22/2016
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
The Berlinale jury got it right. Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary about the migrant crisis in Europe engages deeply with a key topic of our time, but also displays a distinctive, humane cinematic style
Related: Berlin film festival awards top prize to refugee crisis documentary Fire at Sea
By giving its Golden Bear to the remarkable documentary Fire at Sea, the Berlinale has anointed its director, Gianfranco Rosi, as a new significant force in European cinema. Rosi’s previous film, Sacro Gra, a prose-poem of a film about the unlikely subject of Rome’s ring-road motorway, achieved another major prize, the Golden Lion from Venice; but that may have been considered a one-off freak for an Italian film festival looking to support homegrown talent. But two of the biggest European festival awards in a row looks less like a coincidence and more like a coronation.
Continue reading...
Related: Berlin film festival awards top prize to refugee crisis documentary Fire at Sea
By giving its Golden Bear to the remarkable documentary Fire at Sea, the Berlinale has anointed its director, Gianfranco Rosi, as a new significant force in European cinema. Rosi’s previous film, Sacro Gra, a prose-poem of a film about the unlikely subject of Rome’s ring-road motorway, achieved another major prize, the Golden Lion from Venice; but that may have been considered a one-off freak for an Italian film festival looking to support homegrown talent. But two of the biggest European festival awards in a row looks less like a coincidence and more like a coronation.
Continue reading...
- 2/22/2016
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
Update, 11:40 Am Pt: Italian director Gianfrano Rosi scooped the Golden Bear tonight for his documentary Fire At Sea. The film was heavily tipped to take the top award after wowing Berlin audiences and critics with its timely study of the island of Lampedusa, which has become a metaphor for the flight of refugees to Europe. Rosi adds the Bear to the Venice Golden Lion he scored in 2013 with another doc, Sacro Gra. Jury president Meryl Streep said her panel was “swept away”…...
- 2/20/2016
- Deadline
Italian Gianfranco Rosi’s powerful and apposite documentary Fire at Sea, made in the eye of the storm of the refugee crisis, has won the Golden Bear in Berlin. It is the second major film festival where Rosi has scooped the top prize, following his Golden Lion in Venice for "Sacro Gra," in 2013. For one documentary filmmaker to triumph in festival competitions dominated by fiction is accomplishment enough; for the same director to do so at different festivals in quick succession is extraordinary. Read More: Berlin Review: 'Fire at Sea' Offers a Superb Snaphot of the Refugee Crisis In an evening where every award went to a different film, Mia Hansen-Løve won the Silver Bear for best director, for "L'Avenir," her supremely well-judged account of a middle-aged philosophy professor, played by Isabelle Huppert, whose life is suddenly and unexpectedly turned upside down. Read More: Berlin Review: In Silver Bear Winner 'L'Avenir,...
- 2/20/2016
- by Demetrios Matheou
- Thompson on Hollywood
Gianfranco Rosi’s migrant documentary Fire At Sea (Fuocoammare) took home the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival, which handed out its competition awards on Saturday night.Click here for full list of winners
Italian-American Rosi - who won the Golden Lion in Venice for his documentary Sacro Gra in 2013 - spent months on the island of Lampedusa capturing the everyday lives of its 6,000-strong population.
Situated closer to Africa than Europe, the Italian island of Lampedusa is one of the first points of call for hundreds of thousands of African and Middle Eastern refugees and migrants hoping to make a new life in Europe.
The film was a critics favourite during the Berlinale, leading the Screen Jury Grid into the final weekend of the festival, however during an interview with Screen director Rosi admitted a fear that his film might divide viewers.
Fire At Sea proved a hot seller for Doc & Film...
Italian-American Rosi - who won the Golden Lion in Venice for his documentary Sacro Gra in 2013 - spent months on the island of Lampedusa capturing the everyday lives of its 6,000-strong population.
Situated closer to Africa than Europe, the Italian island of Lampedusa is one of the first points of call for hundreds of thousands of African and Middle Eastern refugees and migrants hoping to make a new life in Europe.
The film was a critics favourite during the Berlinale, leading the Screen Jury Grid into the final weekend of the festival, however during an interview with Screen director Rosi admitted a fear that his film might divide viewers.
Fire At Sea proved a hot seller for Doc & Film...
- 2/20/2016
- by andreas.wiseman@screendaily.com (Andreas Wiseman)
- ScreenDaily
Exclusive: UK’s Curzon Artificial Eye among buyers to have snapped up timely migrant crisis documentary.
Doc & Film International has secured a slew of deals on Gianfranco Rosi’s European migrant crisis feature-length documentary Fire At Sea, one of the most buzzed about competition titles at this year’s Berlinale.
The Golden Bear contender has sold to the UK (Curzon Artificial Eye), Germany and Austria (Weltkino Filmverleih), Sweden (Folkets Bio), Denmark (Camera Film), Poland (Aurora Films), Greece (StraDa Films), Portugal (Leopardo), Hungary (Vertigo), Norway (Arthaus) and Brazil (Imovision).
In previously announced deals, the film also pre-sold to France (Météore Films), Benelux (Cinéart) and Switzerland (Xenix).
Istituto Luce – one of four Italian partners on the film – will distribute in Italy.
“We’re really trying to get the right distributor for each territory. Of course, these deals are about business but there’s more to this film,” said Doc & Film founding CEO Daniela Elstner. “A lot of...
Doc & Film International has secured a slew of deals on Gianfranco Rosi’s European migrant crisis feature-length documentary Fire At Sea, one of the most buzzed about competition titles at this year’s Berlinale.
The Golden Bear contender has sold to the UK (Curzon Artificial Eye), Germany and Austria (Weltkino Filmverleih), Sweden (Folkets Bio), Denmark (Camera Film), Poland (Aurora Films), Greece (StraDa Films), Portugal (Leopardo), Hungary (Vertigo), Norway (Arthaus) and Brazil (Imovision).
In previously announced deals, the film also pre-sold to France (Météore Films), Benelux (Cinéart) and Switzerland (Xenix).
Istituto Luce – one of four Italian partners on the film – will distribute in Italy.
“We’re really trying to get the right distributor for each territory. Of course, these deals are about business but there’s more to this film,” said Doc & Film founding CEO Daniela Elstner. “A lot of...
- 2/16/2016
- ScreenDaily
Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. Tonight, previous Venice winner, Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare.
Gianfranco Rosi shocked the film world with his Golden Lion win at Venice for Sacro Gra a few years ago. At Berlinale, the true shock would be for his latest film, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), to leave the festival empty-handed. The Italian maestro’s seamless hybrid of documentary and fiction is a self-reflexive and compassionate meditation on Italy’s crisis of cultural identity in the face of an unprecedented wave of refugee migration.
Gianfranco Rosi shocked the film world with his Golden Lion win at Venice for Sacro Gra a few years ago. At Berlinale, the true shock would be for his latest film, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), to leave the festival empty-handed. The Italian maestro’s seamless hybrid of documentary and fiction is a self-reflexive and compassionate meditation on Italy’s crisis of cultural identity in the face of an unprecedented wave of refugee migration.
- 2/15/2016
- by Amir S.
- FilmExperience
For those who like their cinema directly linked to the pressing issues of the day, Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea” is likely the most important film competing for the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale. The Italian’s follow-up to “Sacro Gra,” which won the Golden Lion at the 2013 Venice Film Festival, documents life on and around Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island, with the same observational style, ethnographic approach and casually meandering rhythm as the earlier prizewinner. The mere mention of Lampedusa has dreadfully tragic connotations. Located 127 miles from Sicily but only 70 miles from Tunisia, the rocky isle has become primarily known as the entry point into Europe for masses of refugees making the extremely precarious intercontinental journey, in flight from war and genocide in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. As on-screen text reveals at the beginning of “Fire at Sea,” some 400,000 migrants have passed through Lampedusa in the last two decades.
- 2/15/2016
- by Michael Pattison
- Indiewire
The opening titles of Gianfranco Rosi’s new documentary Fire at Sea state that 400,000 migrants have landed on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa in the past 20 years, having braved the perilous voyage across the Mediterranean from Africa, and that 15,000 have died. Shortly thereafter, we see an elderly Italian woman preparing lunch in her kitchen. The television is playing somewhere offscreen. The lady chops her vegetables while paying only casual attention to the TV, which is broadcasting a news report on a recent shipwreck that cost the lives of the many migrants onboard. “Poor souls,” she says mechanically and without looking up. This short scene perfectly encapsulates the current frame of mind in Italy vis-à-vis the migrant crisis and the reason why films such as Fire at Sea are necessary. And while Rosi certainly manages to jolt the viewer out of complacency, his strategy towards this end is so ethically dubious as to border on repellent.
- 2/14/2016
- by Giovanni Marchini Camia
- The Film Stage
Italian director Gianfranco Rosi creates an unsentimental documentary about the carnage and despair as Lampedusans struggle to deal with desperate refugees
In 2013 Gianfranco Rosi won the Golden Lion at Venice with Sacro Gra, a lyrical documentary about – of all things – the buzz of activity around Rome’s ring-road, the Grande Raccordo Anulare. Now Rosi has put his quiet observational skills and judicious sense of shot selection to work on a far more hot-button topic: the Sicilian island of Lampedusa as it battles to contain the flood of migrants attempting the perilous crossing from north Africa in horrifically overcrowded boats.
Related: Sacro Gra review – a beguiling documentary prose-poem to Rome
Continue reading...
In 2013 Gianfranco Rosi won the Golden Lion at Venice with Sacro Gra, a lyrical documentary about – of all things – the buzz of activity around Rome’s ring-road, the Grande Raccordo Anulare. Now Rosi has put his quiet observational skills and judicious sense of shot selection to work on a far more hot-button topic: the Sicilian island of Lampedusa as it battles to contain the flood of migrants attempting the perilous crossing from north Africa in horrifically overcrowded boats.
Related: Sacro Gra review – a beguiling documentary prose-poem to Rome
Continue reading...
- 2/13/2016
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
As if new films from the Coens and Jeff Nichols weren’t enough, the 2016 Berlin Film Festival has further expanded their line-up, adding some of our most-anticipated films of the year. Mia Hansen-Løve, following up her incredible, sadly overlooked drama Eden, will premiere the Isabelle Huppert-led Things to Come, while Thomas Vinterberg, Lav Diaz, André Téchiné, and many more will stop by with their new features. Check out the new additions below, followed by some previously announced films, notably John Michael McDonagh‘s War on Everyone.
Competition
Cartas da guerra (Letters from War)
Portugal
By Ivo M. Ferreira (Na Escama do Dragão)
With Miguel Nunes, Margarida Vila-Nova
World premiere
Ejhdeha Vared Mishavad! (A Dragon Arrives!)
Iran
By Mani Haghighi (Modest Reception, Men at Work)
With Amir Jadidi, Homayoun Ghanizadeh, Ehsan Goudarzi, Kiana Tajammol
International premiere
Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) – documentary
Italy / France
By Gianfranco Rosi (Sacro Gra, El Sicario...
Competition
Cartas da guerra (Letters from War)
Portugal
By Ivo M. Ferreira (Na Escama do Dragão)
With Miguel Nunes, Margarida Vila-Nova
World premiere
Ejhdeha Vared Mishavad! (A Dragon Arrives!)
Iran
By Mani Haghighi (Modest Reception, Men at Work)
With Amir Jadidi, Homayoun Ghanizadeh, Ehsan Goudarzi, Kiana Tajammol
International premiere
Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) – documentary
Italy / France
By Gianfranco Rosi (Sacro Gra, El Sicario...
- 1/11/2016
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
New titles from Thomas Vinterberg, Mia Hansen-Løve, Danis Tanovic, Lav Diaz and Gianfranco Rosi among line-up.Scroll down for full list
Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 11-21) has added nine titles to its Competition line-up, bringing the current total to 14 (the full Competition programme will be announced soon, according to the fest).
The new additions include The Commune, marking the first time Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt, Far From The Madding Crowd) has been in Competition at Berlin since Submarino in 2010. The film centres on a Danish commune in the 1970s and will be released in Denmark this weekend (Jan 14).
French director Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden) has been selected with her drama Things to Come, starring Isabelle Huppert as a woman embarking on a new life after her husband leaves her for another woman. The film will world premiere at Berlin.
Another world premiere will be documentary Fire at Sea, capturing life on...
Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 11-21) has added nine titles to its Competition line-up, bringing the current total to 14 (the full Competition programme will be announced soon, according to the fest).
The new additions include The Commune, marking the first time Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt, Far From The Madding Crowd) has been in Competition at Berlin since Submarino in 2010. The film centres on a Danish commune in the 1970s and will be released in Denmark this weekend (Jan 14).
French director Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden) has been selected with her drama Things to Come, starring Isabelle Huppert as a woman embarking on a new life after her husband leaves her for another woman. The film will world premiere at Berlin.
Another world premiere will be documentary Fire at Sea, capturing life on...
- 1/11/2016
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
A who's who of this year's Oscar-contending foreign film crop will duke it out for best film honors along with Lars von Trier's latest at this year's European Film Awards. "Force Majeure" from Sweden, "Ida" from Poland, "Leviathan" from Russia and "Winter Sleep" from Turker were nominated in the top category with Lars von Trier's two-part "Nymphomaniac," with "Ida" leading the way overall with five nominations. Steven Knight's "Locke" showed up in the director and screenwriter fields, while that film's star, Tom Hardy, was nominated in the best actor category along with awards hopefuls like Brendan Gleeson ("Calvary") and Timothy Spall (shockingly, "Mr. Turner's" only nomination). Marion Cotillard ("Two Days, One Night"), Charlotte Gainsbourg ("Nymphomaniac") and Agata Kulesza ("Ida") were among the best actress nominees. Also announced were the craft prizes, included hardware for "Ida" (cinematographer), "Under the Skin" (composer) and "The Dark Valley" (costume and...
- 11/9/2014
- by Kristopher Tapley
- Hitfix
★★★★☆Encircling Rome like a tightening lariat that threatens to flood the environs of the Italian capital with ghosts of its past and future, the Grande Raccordo Anulare is the focus of Gianfranco Rosi's latest documentary. The surprise winner of the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, a honour that shocked and angered many but the decision seems enlightened by a stubbornness that will drive many to investigate . Sacro Gra (2013) gravitates towards a humanism not often seen within Western Capitals and celebrates a honest strangeness that lies outside of everyone's day to day sturm und drang... The Gra is a tollfree, ringshaped orbital motorway, 42 miles long.
- 11/5/2014
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they’re seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: What better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? This week […]
The post This Week In Trailers: Magical Universe, Björk: Biophilia Live, Layover, Sacro Gra appeared first on /Film.
The post This Week In Trailers: Magical Universe, Björk: Biophilia Live, Layover, Sacro Gra appeared first on /Film.
- 10/19/2014
- by Christopher Stipp
- Slash Film
Well, you gotta give Venice points for originality. Two years ago the Golden Lion went to the odd Korean film, Pieta. Last year it went to the Italian film Sacro Gra (which also won best film at the Seville Film Festival). This year, instead of handing out the awards to Birdman, including Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for the Silver Lion and Michael Keaton for Best Actor, as I would have, well, take a look for yourself.
Golden Lion: A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence, directed by Roy Andersson Silver Lion (not, as one might guess for second place for Best Film, this is for Best Director): Andrej Končalovskij for the film Belye Nochi Pochtalona Alekseya Tryapitsyna (A Postman’S White Nights) Grand Jury Prize: The Look Of Silence, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer Golden Osella
Best Screenplay
Rakhshan Banietemad and Farid Mostafavi for Ghesseha
...
Golden Lion: A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence, directed by Roy Andersson Silver Lion (not, as one might guess for second place for Best Film, this is for Best Director): Andrej Končalovskij for the film Belye Nochi Pochtalona Alekseya Tryapitsyna (A Postman’S White Nights) Grand Jury Prize: The Look Of Silence, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer Golden Osella
Best Screenplay
Rakhshan Banietemad and Farid Mostafavi for Ghesseha
...
- 9/6/2014
- by keithsim
- IMDb Blog - All the Latest
The shindig on the Lido that is the Venice Film Festival draws to a close tonight after 11 days of films, stars, sun – and a lot of uncharacteristic rain. The weather put a damper on the proceedings which were a little less glitzy than in the past couple of years, and some films fell flat. But, there were a handful of breakout movies that are likely to figure in awards season as it kicks into gear.
As it did last year, the festival got underway with a smash. In 2013, Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity began its stellar trajectory after opening the festival out of competition. This year, Cuaron’s pal Alejandro G Inarritu’s Birdman soared in its debut with raves pretty much across the board. I asked Inarritu afterwards if we could expect a movie from his and Cuaron’s amigo, Guillermo del Toro, to do opening honors next year. “Yes!
As it did last year, the festival got underway with a smash. In 2013, Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity began its stellar trajectory after opening the festival out of competition. This year, Cuaron’s pal Alejandro G Inarritu’s Birdman soared in its debut with raves pretty much across the board. I asked Inarritu afterwards if we could expect a movie from his and Cuaron’s amigo, Guillermo del Toro, to do opening honors next year. “Yes!
- 9/6/2014
- by Nancy Tartaglione
- Deadline
James Franco will receive a filmmaking award at the Venice Film Festival.
Franco be handed the Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker prize before a screening of his new film The Sound and the Fury on September 5, reports The Wrap.
The director of the Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera, said: "[He] is one of the most versatile and multi-talented auteurs on the current American scene, as an actor in cinema and theatre, director, screenwriter, producer, soap-opera star, video-artist and much more - indeed, a relentless 'manufacturer' of cultural imagery.
"The adaptation of the great classics of American literature, like his new film based on a novel by Faulkner which will be presented in Venice, is a major thread in his creative approach, characterised by boldness, lucidity, courage and self-confidence.
"These values transform his omnivorous verve into a concept of total art performance, founded on considerable curiosity and intelligence."
Franco was also recognised...
Franco be handed the Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker prize before a screening of his new film The Sound and the Fury on September 5, reports The Wrap.
The director of the Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera, said: "[He] is one of the most versatile and multi-talented auteurs on the current American scene, as an actor in cinema and theatre, director, screenwriter, producer, soap-opera star, video-artist and much more - indeed, a relentless 'manufacturer' of cultural imagery.
"The adaptation of the great classics of American literature, like his new film based on a novel by Faulkner which will be presented in Venice, is a major thread in his creative approach, characterised by boldness, lucidity, courage and self-confidence.
"These values transform his omnivorous verve into a concept of total art performance, founded on considerable curiosity and intelligence."
Franco was also recognised...
- 8/9/2014
- Digital Spy
The Sundance Film Festival has entered into a partnership with Poznan’s Transatlantyk Film Festival to present a selection of its titles at the forthcoming fourth edition running from August 8-14.
The new sidebar, Sundance at Transatlantyk, will screen such films as Fishing Without Nets, The Green Prince, Watchers Of The Sky, 52 Tuesdays, Difret and A Most Wanted Man, and invite the films’ creators to meet with the audience for Q&As after the screenings.
Transatlantyk was founded in 2011 by the Oscar-wining musician and composer Jan A.P. Kaczmarek as ¨a new artistic platform aimed at building a stronger relationship between society, art and the environment through music and movies¨ as well as inspiring discussion on social issues.
Another innovation is the introduction of the new section Cinema of the Third Age targetted at maturer audiences with screenings in early afternoon slots during the weekdays. Films selected for this first edition include Philomena, Gloria and [link...
The new sidebar, Sundance at Transatlantyk, will screen such films as Fishing Without Nets, The Green Prince, Watchers Of The Sky, 52 Tuesdays, Difret and A Most Wanted Man, and invite the films’ creators to meet with the audience for Q&As after the screenings.
Transatlantyk was founded in 2011 by the Oscar-wining musician and composer Jan A.P. Kaczmarek as ¨a new artistic platform aimed at building a stronger relationship between society, art and the environment through music and movies¨ as well as inspiring discussion on social issues.
Another innovation is the introduction of the new section Cinema of the Third Age targetted at maturer audiences with screenings in early afternoon slots during the weekdays. Films selected for this first edition include Philomena, Gloria and [link...
- 7/31/2014
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
Last year’s Venice Golden Lion winner will head Locarno’s main jury; Syrian director Ossama Mohammed will lead the Filmmakers of the Present competition jury.
Locarno has confirmed the juries for its 67th edition.
Italian director Gianfranco Rosi, who won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2013 for his documentary Sacro Gra – is to head up the festival’s International Competition jury.
He will be joined by German filmmaker Thomas Arslan, Brazilian actress Alice Braga, Danish actress Connie Nielsen and Chinese director Diao Yinan, winner of the Golden Bear at the last Berlin Festival for Black Coal, Thin Ice.
Meanwhile, Syrian director Ossama Mohammed has been named as president of the jury for the Filmmakers of the Present Competition for first and second films.
Mohammed, whose Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait was one of most widely acclaimed films at Cannes this year, will be joined by Thierry Jobin, the Swiss Artistic Director of the Fribourg Festival, Canadian writer...
Locarno has confirmed the juries for its 67th edition.
Italian director Gianfranco Rosi, who won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2013 for his documentary Sacro Gra – is to head up the festival’s International Competition jury.
He will be joined by German filmmaker Thomas Arslan, Brazilian actress Alice Braga, Danish actress Connie Nielsen and Chinese director Diao Yinan, winner of the Golden Bear at the last Berlin Festival for Black Coal, Thin Ice.
Meanwhile, Syrian director Ossama Mohammed has been named as president of the jury for the Filmmakers of the Present Competition for first and second films.
Mohammed, whose Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait was one of most widely acclaimed films at Cannes this year, will be joined by Thierry Jobin, the Swiss Artistic Director of the Fribourg Festival, Canadian writer...
- 7/14/2014
- by sarah.cooper@screendaily.com (Sarah Cooper)
- ScreenDaily
Last year’s Venice Golden Lion winner will head up Locarno’s main jury; Syrian director Ossama Mohammed will lead the Filmmakers of the Present competition jury.
Locarno has confirmed the juries for its 67th edition.
Italian director Gianfranco Rosi, who won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2013 for his documentary Sacro Gra – is to head up the festival’s International Competition jury.
He will be joined by German filmmaker Thomas Arslan, Brazilian actress Alice Braga, Danish actress Connie Nielsen and Chinese director Diao Yinan, winner of the Golden Bear at the last Berlin Festival for Black Coal, Thin Ice.
Meanwhile, Syrian director Ossama Mohammed has been named as president of the jury for the Filmmakers of the Present Competition for first and second films.
Mohammed, whose Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait was one of most widely acclaimed films at Cannes this year, will be joined by Thierry Jobin, the Swiss Artistic Director of the Fribourg Festival, Canadian...
Locarno has confirmed the juries for its 67th edition.
Italian director Gianfranco Rosi, who won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2013 for his documentary Sacro Gra – is to head up the festival’s International Competition jury.
He will be joined by German filmmaker Thomas Arslan, Brazilian actress Alice Braga, Danish actress Connie Nielsen and Chinese director Diao Yinan, winner of the Golden Bear at the last Berlin Festival for Black Coal, Thin Ice.
Meanwhile, Syrian director Ossama Mohammed has been named as president of the jury for the Filmmakers of the Present Competition for first and second films.
Mohammed, whose Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait was one of most widely acclaimed films at Cannes this year, will be joined by Thierry Jobin, the Swiss Artistic Director of the Fribourg Festival, Canadian...
- 7/14/2014
- by sarah.cooper@screendaily.com (Sarah Cooper)
- ScreenDaily
Rome — Gianfranco Rosi, whose acclaimed Sacro Gra became the first documentary to ever win the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion award and the first Italian film to win it in 15 years, will head the main jury at the Locarno Film Festival, officials announced Monday. Rosi will head the five-person jury that will award the 67-year-old festival's main prizes, including best film. He will be joined by German filmmaker Thomas Arslan, Brazilian actress Alice Braga, actress Connie Nielsen of Denmark, and Chinese director Diao Yi'nan. Photos 25 Summer Movies for Grown-Ups The August 6-16
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- 7/14/2014
- by Eric J. Lyman
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Gianfranco Rosi waiting for the light: "The light is a character. Any story with a different kind of light would be a different story."
When I arrive at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York for my interview with Gianfranco Rosi, he introduces me to his old friend, jewelry designer John Hardy, who lives in Bali and whom he hasn't seen in a decade. Rosi suggests, in a Maurizio Cattelan inspired move, that I do the interview on Sacro Gra with his friend instead. "You'd find out all my secrets." Hardy leaves, and we find a spot underneath a poster of Erich von Stroheim in the Furman Gallery for a conversation about his Fred Astaire style of editing, light as protagonist and the transformation of place. Paolo Sorrentino told me of his film The Great Beauty "there is no destination. People are floating over life. Apparently, they are...
When I arrive at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York for my interview with Gianfranco Rosi, he introduces me to his old friend, jewelry designer John Hardy, who lives in Bali and whom he hasn't seen in a decade. Rosi suggests, in a Maurizio Cattelan inspired move, that I do the interview on Sacro Gra with his friend instead. "You'd find out all my secrets." Hardy leaves, and we find a spot underneath a poster of Erich von Stroheim in the Furman Gallery for a conversation about his Fred Astaire style of editing, light as protagonist and the transformation of place. Paolo Sorrentino told me of his film The Great Beauty "there is no destination. People are floating over life. Apparently, they are...
- 6/11/2014
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Festival to open with European premiere of The Auction House: A Tale of Two Brothers.
Open City Docs Fest holds its fourth edition in London next week from June 18-22.
Kicking off with the European premiere of Edward Owles’ The Auction House: A Tale of Two Brothers on June 17, the festival will also screen the likes of David Graham Scott’s Iboga Nights, Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro Gra, Marc Silver’s Who is Dayani Cristal? and Hilla Medalia & Shosh Shlam’s Web Junkie.
It will close with the UK premiere of Pavel Loparev & Askold Kurov’s Children 404, followed by an awards ceremony.
This year’s awards are for Best UK Film and Emerging International Filmmaker, as well as a Grand Jury prize awarded by Pawel Pawlikowski (chair), Jeanie Finlay, Dr. Grit Lemke, Diana Tabokov and Chris Wilson.
Events at the festival include a talk with award-winning filmmaker Penny Woolcock, a masterclass held by Avi Mograbi and a...
Open City Docs Fest holds its fourth edition in London next week from June 18-22.
Kicking off with the European premiere of Edward Owles’ The Auction House: A Tale of Two Brothers on June 17, the festival will also screen the likes of David Graham Scott’s Iboga Nights, Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro Gra, Marc Silver’s Who is Dayani Cristal? and Hilla Medalia & Shosh Shlam’s Web Junkie.
It will close with the UK premiere of Pavel Loparev & Askold Kurov’s Children 404, followed by an awards ceremony.
This year’s awards are for Best UK Film and Emerging International Filmmaker, as well as a Grand Jury prize awarded by Pawel Pawlikowski (chair), Jeanie Finlay, Dr. Grit Lemke, Diana Tabokov and Chris Wilson.
Events at the festival include a talk with award-winning filmmaker Penny Woolcock, a masterclass held by Avi Mograbi and a...
- 6/10/2014
- by ian.sandwell@screendaily.com (Ian Sandwell)
- ScreenDaily
Rome is a city well known for its old world charm, its complex and ancient past, and for its relics and buildings that span the history of civilization itself. However, unless you’re talking about its original roads, as in the ones built by the Roman Empire, not a lot is said of traffic in Rome. One interesting aspect of the modern Roman roadways though is the Gra, or the Grande Raccordo Anulare, which means “Great Ring Junction.” It’s a circular road that surrounds the city like a ring, and although Rome has its treasures and wonders, the Gra is certainly not one of them.
Indeed, there is something ordinary about the Gra, and that’s the angle that Sacro Gra, is trying to make. This is the first documentary to ever win the Venice International Film Festival’s Golden Lion Award, and although I found it quite interesting,...
Indeed, there is something ordinary about the Gra, and that’s the angle that Sacro Gra, is trying to make. This is the first documentary to ever win the Venice International Film Festival’s Golden Lion Award, and although I found it quite interesting,...
- 5/6/2014
- by Adam A. Donaldson
- We Got This Covered
Doc Alliance lines up triple day-and-date premiere with Venice winner.
Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro Gra, the first documentary to ever win the Golden Lion in Venice, has been chosen as the title to mark Doc Alliance Films’ first foray into triple day-and-date releases.
Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily at this week’s Visions du Réel in Nyon, Doc Alliance Films’ Andrea Pruchová revealed that this coming Monday (May 5), the 2013 Venice winner will simultaneously be shown in six Czech and Slovak cinemas from Prague to Bratislava, at the Doc Alliance online portal DAFilms.com, and on the Film Europe TV channel.
Rosi spent two years filming life along Rome’s main ring road highway, the Grande Raccordo Anulare, for his documentary which is handled internationally by Doc&Film International.
The gala premiere in Prague’s Cinema Světozor will be attended by Rosi in person, with other special events being organised in the other cinemas.
Meanwhile, those...
Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro Gra, the first documentary to ever win the Golden Lion in Venice, has been chosen as the title to mark Doc Alliance Films’ first foray into triple day-and-date releases.
Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily at this week’s Visions du Réel in Nyon, Doc Alliance Films’ Andrea Pruchová revealed that this coming Monday (May 5), the 2013 Venice winner will simultaneously be shown in six Czech and Slovak cinemas from Prague to Bratislava, at the Doc Alliance online portal DAFilms.com, and on the Film Europe TV channel.
Rosi spent two years filming life along Rome’s main ring road highway, the Grande Raccordo Anulare, for his documentary which is handled internationally by Doc&Film International.
The gala premiere in Prague’s Cinema Světozor will be attended by Rosi in person, with other special events being organised in the other cinemas.
Meanwhile, those...
- 5/2/2014
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
The 20th annual Spring Film Festival (Wiosna Filmow) kicks off in Warsaw this Sunday and runs through April 13th. It's definitely one of the most interesting cultural events that the capital of Poland has to offer during springtime, and a perfect occasion to catch up on some of the most celebrated Polish and international films of the last few years. Screenings will take place at the gorgeously designed art house cinema Kino Praha, the first movie theater built in Warsaw after World War II. All tickets cost only 7 Pln (that's less than 2 euro).Italian documentary Sacro Gra (winner of the Golden Lion at the 70th Venice Film Festival) will open the festival, and German drama Stations of the Cross (Silver Bear for best script at the 64th...
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- 4/4/2014
- Screen Anarchy
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