Actualités

Ahead of the festival’s June 20th launch, Chief Executive Ken Hay and Artistic Director Chris Fujiwara today announced the 2012 Eiff’s full selection of shorts, feature films and documentaries from Screen 1 of Edinburgh’s Filmhouse.

Eager to comment on the state of contemporary cinema, while both acknowledging its colourful past and attempting to forecast its possible future, the organisers’ full line-up features one hundred and twenty-one works from fifty-two countries.

Boasting a total of seventy-six UK premières (eleven of which will also make their European début), the festival will also pay homage to a number of prolific directors from around the world, including the first complete retrospective of Japanese filmmaker Shinji Somai (Kazahana, Typhoon Club) outside of his native country; a spotlight on and masterclass workshop from Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing (The Ditch, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir); both films in steampunk legend Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo franchise; and a...

Cannes is now over which means it’s time to move to Britain as the Edinburgh Film Festival kicks off!

We’ve just been sent the full line-up for the 2012 Edinburgh Film Festival which is now in it’s 66th year. We have our people (Jamie, Steven and Emma) on the ground at the event right now ready to catch as many films as they possible can throughout the next wee or two as we get to see 121 new features and 19 world premieres.

I’ll let the full press release below do the talking but let us know what you’re looking forward to in the comments section below.

World Premieres:

Berberian Sound Studio Borrowed Time Day Of The Flowers Exit Elena Flying Blind Fred Future My Love Guinea Pigs Here, Then Leave It On The Track The Life And Times Of Paul The Psychic Octopus Life Just Is Mnl...

The full programme for the 66th edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (Eiff), which runs from 20 June to 1 July, has been officially announced and will feature nineteen World premieres and thirteen International premieres.

The Festival will showcase one hundred and twenty-one new features from fifty-two countries, including eleven European premieres and seventy-six UK premieres in addition to the World and International premieres. Highlights include the World premieres of Richard Ledes’ Fred; Nathan Silver’s Exit Elena and Benjamin Pascoe’s Leave It On The Track and European premieres of Lu Sheng’s Here, There and Yang Jung-ho’s Mirage in the maiden New Perspectives section; and the International premiere of Benicio Del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Medem, Elia Suleiman, Gaspar Noé, Juan Carlos Tabio and Laurent Cantet’s 7 Days In Havana and the European premiere of Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America in the Directors’ Showcase. In addition to the new features presented,...

Gregory La Cava and Irene Dunne

"An extraordinary movie is being screened at Anthology Film Archives [today] through Sunday," writes the New Yorker's Richard Brody: "Unfinished Business, a bitterly passionate romantic drama with a relentless comic tone, from 1941, starring Irene Dunne and Robert Montgomery and directed by Gregory La Cava. It's part of the ongoing series Stuck on the Second Tier: Underknown Auteurs, programmed by Miriam Bale, and you can't get it on home video." And it's "a minor masterwork of performance, direction, and screenwriting."

Unknown Auteurs is actually a set of series running at various locations in New York, with Anthology focusing on La Cava; the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of the Moving Image, for example, will have other editions soon, but for now, Michael Rawls has an overview of the La Cava selections in Cinespect and David Cairns wrote about Unfinished Business here in the Notebook yesterday.

Gregory Le Cava's Unfinished Business (1941) screens at Anthology Film Archives in New York on 27th - 29th January, along with the director's 1935 film She Married Her Boss in part of the on-going series, Stuck on the Second Tier: Underknown Auteurs.

The first distinguishing feature I noticed about Gregory La Cava's films, apart from his great ability with comedy, was the tension between humor and pain, which often seemed quite off-kilter, unpredictable, and liable to Whang you in the face. The happy ending of Stage Door (1937) is marred by our consciousness of the death of the most sympathetic and passionate character (some prints apparently include a quick shot of her grave at the end, not smoothing over the problem so much as highlighting it). When Lee Tracy prepares to beat up Lupe Velez at the end of The Half-Naked Truth (1932), and the soundtrack jauntily plays Mendelssohn's Wedding March, the modern sensibility rather shudders.