Noticias

Locarno, Switzerland — Two affecting doc-fiction hybrids from Barcelona – “Dream of Another Summer” and “Downriver, a Tiger”– triumphed Sunday at Locarno’s First Look pix-in-post strand, focused on Spain.

In other awards announced by Locarno Pro, the festival’s dynamic industry arm, Liliana Cavani’s 1970 “The Year of the Cannibals” won Locarno Pro’s Historical Restoration Contest.

Laureates at European co-production initiative Alliance 4 Development took in, notably, “Bourgeois Paranoia” by Lukas Nathrath, a former Locarno First Look winner.

Composed of a series of extended fixed-frame shots of the streets of Beirut and parts of am apartment, Irene Bartolomé’s “Dream” builds, often elliptically, as a portrait of a woman returning to Beirut after Lebanon’s 2020 financial crash and a massive chemical explosion in the city’s port.

She’s on an emotional slide; Beirut and Lebanon are – sometimes literally – near to collapse. Doc feature specialist Colibri Studio produces.

“This film could...

Experimental feature Dream of Another Summer has picked up Locarno Pro’s Antaviana Films First Look Award, the biggest prize handed out by the festival’s industry section. The award comes with post-production services up to €50,000.

The feature is helmed by Barcelona-born, Beirut-based filmmaker Irene Bartolomé. Producers on the project are Pere Marzo (Colibrí Studio), Bartolomé (I.B. Films), and Elie Kamal (The Attic Productions).

Discussing their choice, the Locarno Pro jury — comprised of Beatrice Fiorentino, Kerem Ayan, and Mercedes Martínez-Abarca — said the film is “a poetic and rigorous project that elaborates on collective trauma by rewriting the topography of a city wounded many times by history.”

The jury added: “In its dual public and private dimensions, it restores the complexity of a territory marked by the past and the drive for modernity.”

Elsewhere,...

’The Night Porter’ director and ’In The Mood For Love’ actor to receive awards at this year’s festival.

The Venice Film Festival will present Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement to Liliana Cavani, the Italian director of The Night Porter and Ripley’s Game; and to Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai, whose credits include In The Mood For Love and Marvel film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Cavani’s Philippe Pétain: Processo a Vichy won the Lion of San Marco for best documentary at Venice in 1965. Her films Francis of Assisi (1966), Galileo (1968), The Year of the Cannibals,...

Liliana Cavani, one of the key directors of the New Italian Cinema movement and recognized internationally for The Night Porter, and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, the acclaimed Hong Kong actor known for his numerous collaborations with Wong Kar-wai, are set to receive Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

“I am very happy and grateful to the Biennale di Venezia for this wonderful surprise”, said Cavani, who first made a name for herself in Venice in 1965 with with Philippe Pétain: Processo a Vichy, followed by Francis of Assisi (1966), Galileo (1968), I cannibali (The Year of the Cannibals, 1970), Il gioco di Ripley (Ripley’s Game, 2002) and Clarisse (2012).

“I am overwhelmed and honoured with the news from the Biennale di Venezia. I hope to celebrate this award with all the filmmakers I have worked with. This award is a tribute to all of them as well,” said Leung Chiu-wai, who...

Can radical theater make a good movie? Elio Petri continues his string of biting social comment movies with a black comedy about rich people, thieves, and the notion of ownership — it’s a caustic position paper but also a funny satire, with quirky yet believable characters. Ugo Tognazzi is terrific as scheming capitalist, as much a prisoner of his wealth as a poor clerk is of his poverty.

Property is No Longer a Theft

Blu-ray + DVD

Arrow Video USA

1973 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 126 min. / Street Date March 28, 2017 / La proprietà non è più un furto / Available from Arrow Video / 39.95

Starring: Ugo Tognazzi, Flavio Bucci, Daria Nicolodi, Mario Scaccia, Orazio Orlando, Julien Guiomar, Cecilia Polizzi, Jacques Herlin, Ada Pometti, Salvo Randone.

Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller

Film Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni

Original Music: Ennio Morricone

Production design / Costume design: Gianni Polidori

Written by Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro

Produced by Claudio Mancini

Directed by Elio Petri

Essere o Avere?...

In the wake of the devastating loss of one of our greatest actors, countless remembrances of Philip Seymour Hoffman have flooded the internet. Here is a small sampling:

Above: illustrations of Hoffman via Daniel Clowes. For The Grid, Adam Nayman writes on the actor's best performances:

"It’s been said that the best actors are the ones who make it look easy. But Philip Seymour Hoffman was the opposite of self-effacing—he was incandescent. His acting had the sort of glow that could illuminate dim movies and burn holes through the middle of vivid ones."

Above: from Nelson Carvajal, a reel of some of Hoffman's greatest on-screen moments. For The New Yorker, Richard Brody pays tribute:

"Genius, whether at its most constructive or destructive, its most sublime or its most repugnant, is unnatural; Hoffman lived for great art, and it’s impossible to escape the idea that he died for it.

Raro Video resurrects an excitingly obscure title this month with Liliana Cavani’s 1967 film, The Year of the Cannibals, a counter culture art house film modernizing Sophocles’ play Antigone to explore modern political unrest, here in the streets of Milan. Cavani, perhaps best known for her notorious 1974 film The Night Porter, posing star Charlotte Rampling in one of her most iconic roles, has crafted a stunningly photographed and arresting film in this early work that’s ripe for rediscovery. Shown in art houses and retrospectives after receiving favorable reaction upon domestic release and major film festival play (Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes), the title never secured distribution in the Us, though this is mostly due to Cavani’s refusal to change the bleak finale when a major studio approached her to buy the film.

Set in a dystopic Milan, corpses litter the bustling streets after the government has squashed a vicious rebellion.

I always felt an icky attraction-repulsion, more slanted towards repulsion, for Liliana Cavani's most celebrated film, The Night Porter. But thinking about it now, I have to give her credit for boldly delving into the psychology of the persecutor-victim relationship in a way that no previous filmmaker quite had.

If that movie still makes me uncomfortable, I was nevertheless instantly psyched to see I cannibali (The Cannibals, 1970), a sci-fi hippy version of Antigone starring Britt Ekland. Maybe I'm shallow.

(Hippy science fiction movies go all the way from the super-respectable and respect-worthy 2001 at one extreme, past Silent Running somewhere in the middle, all the way to Jim McBride's 1971 post-atomic Adam and Eve story Glen and Randa. It's a sub-genre that can get a bit embarrassing, what with Bruce Dern lecturing us about "the simple beauty of a leaf" and all, but having been entered the world in 1967 maybe...