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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSIt Was Just an Accident.After being imprisoned multiple times over the past fifteen years in his home country of Iran, Jafar Panahi won the Palme d’Or for his latest film, It Was Just an Accident (2025) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Panahi is only the fourth director in history to win all three major festival awards: the Palme d'Or, the Venice Golden Lion, and the Berlin Golden Bear.Brian Eno, who famously composed the Windows 95 start-up chime, penned an open letter to Microsoft denouncing the company’s complicity in Israeli war crimes and pledging to donate the fee he received to the victims in Gaza.Swedish actor Hans Crispin has disclosed that he stole a...

Marcel Ophuls, the renowned, Oscar-winning documentarian whose controversial and epic “The Sorrow and the Pity” was a worldwide success, has died. He was 97.

His death was reported to the New York Times by his grandson, Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, who provided no details concerning the circumstances of the death.

Ophuls, the son of famed German and Hollywood film director Max Ophuls, often claimed that he was a prisoner of his success in the documentary field when what he really wanted was to make lighthearted musicals and romances. But his exhaustive “The Sorrow and the Pity,” about French complicity with their Nazi occupiers during WWII, elevated the film documentary in the public eye. His further explorations of the war in Northern Ireland (“A Sense of Loss”), the Nuremberg war crime trials (“The Memory of Justice”) and the notorious Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie (“Hotel Terminus”) added immeasurably to the documentary field. Ophuls mixed period footage and incisive,...

Famed documentarian Marcel Ophuls has died at age 97. One of the leading filmmakers to capture the political atrocities of the 20th century, Ophuls famously directed “The Sorrow and the Pity” and the Oscar-winning “Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie,” both depicting the rise of the Nazi regime.

Ophuls “died peacefully” on Saturday, May 24, as his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert confirmed to The Guardian on Monday, May 26. Ophuls was born to German filmmakers, director Max Ophuls, and his wife, actress Hildegard Wall. At age 11, the Ophuls family fled France after Germany was invaded by the Nazis; they later settled in Hollywood. Ophuls served in the U.S. army theatrical unit in Japan for WWII in 1946.

Ophuls later returned to France and worked as an assistant to his father and other filmmakers such as Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak. He also famously was an Ad on John Huston’s “Moulin Rouge...

Marcel Ophuls, the German-French documentarian renowned for his unflinching examinations of wartime complicity and collective memory, died on May 24 at his home in southwest France at the age of 97. Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, to director Max Ophüls and actress Hildegard Wall, he fled Nazi Germany with his family and ultimately became a U.S. citizen after serving in the American Army in postwar Japan. Ophuls settled permanently in France in 1950, where he cultivated a career that would repeatedly probe national myths and legal reckonings through film.

His landmark 1969 documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity, shattered the comforting narrative of widespread French resistance under Nazi occupation by presenting long, unvarnished interviews with collaborators, resistors and bystanders alike. Banned from French television for over a decade, the four-and-a-half-hour film eventually aired in 1981 and became a touchstone for historical cinema, recast in popular culture by citations in films such as Annie Hall.

Marcel Ophuls, the director of the seminal 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity that explored the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II, died May 24 of natural causes at his home in in the South of France over the weekend. He was 97.

His death was confirmed to Deadline by his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert.

“He had been feeling unwell about three days before,” Seyfert said. “My father spent the last day with him, and they watched Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, then he retired to bed. The next day, they were going to watch his favorite Lubitsch, Heaven Can Wait. Unfortunately, it didn’t come to that.” Seyfert said his grandfather passed away in his sleep.

Born on November 1, 1927, in Frankfurt, Germany – his father was film director Max Ophüls and his mother was actress Hildegard Wall, Ophuls was 11 when he and his...

The Sorrow and the Pity punched a hole through France’s self-excusing myths and saw something nastier, shabbier, more political and more human

• Marcel Ophuls dies aged 97

The last great voice of wartime European cinema has gone with the death of documentary film-maker Marcel Ophuls, son of director Max Ophuls; he was born in Germany, fled to France with the rise of Hitler, fled again to the US with the Nazi invasion and then returned to France after the war. He therefore had an almost ideal background for a nuanced, detached perspective on the impossibly (and enduringly) painful subject of French collaboration with the Nazis during the second world war.

This was the basis of his four-and-a-half hour masterpiece The Sorrow and the Pity from 1969, commissioned by French TV (which refused to screen it); however, it gained an Oscar nomination and its international reputation grew from there. The film was in two parts,...

Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning, German-born French filmmaker whose powerfully eloquent documentaries confronted difficult political, moral and philosophical issues, has died. He was 97.

Ophuls “died peacefully” at his home in the south of France, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter.

Ophuls earned his Academy Award — as well as prizes from the Cannes and Berlin film festivals— for Hotel Terminus (1988), a 4-hour, 27-minute documentary that examined the life of the notorious Klaus Barbie, convicted in Bolivia of his Nazi war crimes in 1987.

Ophuls’ best known work, however, came almost two decades earlier with The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), which explored the reality of the Nazi occupation in the small industrial French city of Clermont-Ferrand.

Ophuls spent more than two years compiling the more than 60 hours of footage that was eventually boiled down to that 4-hour, 11-minute film, which delineated France’s compliance with Nazi Germany. (Some in the country supported...

Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow And The Pity: "“All my discoveries must occur during the shooting in order for the viewer to share my own sense of surprise.” Photo: Kino Lorber

The film director who demolished one of France’s myths that the nation had always resisted the Germans and the Occupation in his documentary The Sorrow And The Pity, has died peacefully at the age of 97 at his home in the south of France.

According to his grandson Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert Marcel Ophuls died over the weekend of natural causes. He was the son of filmmaker Max Ophüls and the German actress Hilde Wall and was born on 1 November 1927 in Frankfurt.

Along with such directors as Billy Wider and Fritz Lang, the Ophüls family (Marcel later dropped the umlaut), who were Jews, escaped persecution by the Nazis by moving first to France in 1938 before fleeing across the Pyrenées to Spain...

The German-French documentarian, who fled the Nazis twice as a child, spent his career exploring wartime atrocities and conflicts around the world

Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning French film-maker whose documentary The Sorrow and the Pity uncovered the truth of the Vichy government’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during the second world war, has died aged 97.

Ophuls “died peacefully” on Saturday, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert confirmed on Monday.

Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity is a veritable chorus of disparate voices and striking faces, exquisitely juxtaposed in a way that challenges the once widely accepted notion of a strong, resistant France in the face of evil. This prismatic examination of the citizens of the small central French city of Clermont-Ferrand and their German occupiers features testimonies of integrity and betrayal, courage and indifference, capturing the full spectrum of the human condition within a fascinating microcosm of opposing forces.

Interviews with everyone from British secret agents and French resistance fighters to neutral citizens and Nazi officers provide an exhaustive, often contradictory, and always enlightening account of the years of the Nazi occupation of France and its aftermath that speaks to the factions and perspectives at play both during and after the war. Ophüls, though, is less interested in providing an overview of this historical period than he...

Above: French grande for Love in the Afternoon (aka Chloé in the Afternoon) which was the opening night film of the 10th New York Film Festival. Designer tbd.In the catalogue for the 10th New York Film Festival in 1972, festival director Richard Roud looked back on the first decade of the NYFF, musing on the changes in cinema of the previous 10 years: “a greater freedom of subject matter,” “an accompanying new freedom of form,” the obsolescence of “the tightly plotted film,” the rise of personal filmmaking and the inroads of political cinema and documentary techniques into narrative film. He also muses on international movements: the snuffing out of the Czech Renaissance (there were no Czech films in the 1972 festival), the rise of New Hollywood and American independent cinema, and the ebbing of the movement that had in many ways defined the festival to that point, the French New Wave:Some of...

Above: Poster by Frank Stella for the 9th New York Film Festival.Compared to the 32 films in the main slate of this year’s New York Film Festival, not to mention the seemingly hundreds of others playing in sidebars, the 1971 edition of the NYFF, half a century ago, was a lean affair. With only 18 films, down from 78 just four years earlier, the ninth edition of the NYFF was, according to its director Richard Roud, a “belt-tightening festival, a year of consolidation.” In fact, the financially strapped festival almost didn’t take place that year. A New York Times article published midway through the event mentions that “outside the 984-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater, there is only one poster announcing the festival [one assumes it was the beautiful Frank Stella poster above] that is quietly and modestly taking place inside.” A far cry from the glorious phalanx of digital billboards currently beaming outside Alice Tully Hall and the Elinor Bunin Center.The...

While it celebrated its 70thanniversary last year, the Cannes Film Festival kicks off this year under the specter of 50 years since 1968’s event, which was derailed amid social unrest in France. There’s plenty of unrest going on today too, but along with the social protests comes disruption in the film industry in general, and also specifically in Cannes. Non-conformist Thierry Frémaux, who is the final word on what gets in, has been making headlines since he took over in 2001. As the 71st Cannes Film Festival gets underway, he reflects on the past and looks to the future.

It’s been 50 years since 1968, and things are changing in the industry; what parallels do you see with 2018?

1968 was the culmination point of a joyful and creative decade; that’s not really the sentiment today. However, the Official Selection 2018, with numerous new countries and many young female and male directors, is reminiscent...

This devastating romantic melodrama is Max Ophüls’ best American picture — perhaps because it seems so European? It’s probably Joan Fontaine’s finest hour as well, and Louis Jourdan comes across as a great actor in a part perfect for his screen personality. The theme could be called, ‘No regrets,’ but also, ‘Everything is to be regretted.’

Letter from an Unknown Woman

Blu-ray

Olive Signature

1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 87 min. / Street Date December 5, 2017 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring: Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians, Marcel Journet, Art Smith, Carol Yorke, Howard Freeman, John Good, Leo B. Pessin, Erskine Sanford, Otto Waldis, Sonja Bryden.

Cinematography: Franz Planer

Film Editor: Ted J. Kent

Original Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof

Written by Howard Koch from a story by Stefan Zweig

Produced by John Houseman

Directed by Max Ophüls

A young woman’s romantic nature goes beyond all limits, probing the nature of True Love.

When a Potiche Ascends the Stairs: Brizé’s Winning, Textured de Maupassant Adaptation

Although cinematic adaptations of French writer Guy de Maupassant still occur with some regularity, few contemporary Gallic auteurs have successfully tackled the naturalist who was a protégé of Flaubert and a contemporary of Zola. Frequent adaptations of his famed short story “Boule de Suif” and Bel-Ami are resurrected regularly, and his stories have inspired auteurs like Robert Wise, Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Ophüls, and Jean Renoir. However, de Maupassant’s seminal first novel, Une Vie (1883), has been adapted several times outside of France, while previously its most definitive mounting was the 1958 End of Desire headlined by Maria Schell.

For his seventh feature, Stephane Brizé persuasively reflects the subjugation of women’s agency with the fragmented A Woman’s Life, and is perhaps the most auspicious transformation of the author since the handsome productions of the 1950s with this astute period piece featuring an exquisite ensemble of character actors.

After returning from convent school, Jeanne (Judith Chemla) takes joy in assisting her father (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) in the garden and perambulating with her mother (Yolande Moreau), a woman who spends most of her free time scrolling through the contents of letters she received throughout her life. With only the young family maid Rosalie (Nina Meurisse) as a friend and confidante, Jeanne soon finds herself courted by the handsome Viscount Julien de Lamare (Swann Arlaud). Swept into what she’s made to believe is romance, the marriage soon sours when Rosalie is found to be with child after having been raped by Julien. Thus begins Jeanne’s initiation into a world more harrowing than she had anticipated as her ideals and dignity are slowly stripped away.

Judith Chemla, who has starred as a supporting player in a number of period productions for noted auteurs (Tavernier, Techine) comes to the fore as the passive, frustrated center of Brizé’s film. Oblivious to the tendencies and behaviors of those around her, A Woman’s Life gently ushers her from a frivolous young woman of privilege to an increasingly fraught wife forced to contend with a debauched husband.

Brizé’s film has all the potential of a tawdry soap opera, and yet is distilled into fragmented reflections of her escapist tendencies. As we rush through defining moments of her life, time slows as Jeanne disappears into the bright, sunshiny memories which brought her to such a brooding standstill. Chemla is tasked with revealing Jeanne’s persona through inscrutable moments, an object acted upon despite meager efforts to gain control of her life. When escape presents itself upon learning of her own pregnancy at the same time as her husband’s philandering with Rosalie, her own mother confirms her fate by forcing Jeanne to forgive rather than return home.

Yolande Moreau gives a subversively droll performance as a cold maternal figure who has several major secrets of her own. As her counterpart, Jean-Pierre Darroussin nearly disappears within the period garb as Jeanne’s mild mannered father, while a mousy Swann Arlaud is sufficiently unpalatable as her cheating husband. Clotilde Hesme surfaces in a brief subplot which yields shockingly violent results, while rising young actor Finnegan Oldfield (Nocturama; Les Cowboys) shows up in the third act as Jeanne’s selfish teenage son, the specter haunting her golden years and sending her into protracted anguish.

Much like Brizé’s last lauded feature, 2015’s The Measure of a Man, the narrative revolves around distilled, refracted moments informing its protagonist’s mind frame, a person once again trapped by economic necessity in an unfavorable role which whittles away at their resolve.

Collaborating once more with scribe Florence Vignon (who scripted his superb 2009 film Mademoiselle Chambon), they achieve a striking portrait of a woman of certain means as equally weighted down by her expectations and limited control. Brizé also taps Dp Antoine Heberle (who worked on Chambon and A Few Hours of Spring, as well as Ozon’s Under the Sand) who transforms the film into a constant visual juxtaposition of stark, contrasting palettes, ranging from the brooding grays of Jeanne’s present to the golden, sparkling vivaciousness of happy times she can never return to. With stunning finality, a drastic situation boils down to bittersweet reality— “Life is never as good or as bad as you think it is.”

★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆

The post A Woman’s Life | Review appeared first on Ioncinema.com.

Chris Gethard doesn’t want you to worry about him, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t nervous.

“Permanence is not my usual M.O. and it’s pretty terrifying,” Gethard said, sitting in the Hollywood offices of Funny or Die last month. He smiled, but even he’ll admit that behind that grin, there’s the reserved bit of trepidation that comes before releasing a bit of yourself out into the world.

On Saturday, his comedy special “Chris Gethard: Career Suicide” will debut on HBO. In it, over the course of an hour and a half, Gethard details his decades-long relationship with depression, recounting his first experiences with a sinking sensation he couldn’t quite identify, all the way through impulsive suicide attempts, pieced-together blackout spells and the process of finding healthier, constructive ways to deal with all of those conflicting feelings and ideas.

Read More: ‘Chris Gethard: Career Suicide...

HBO has finally answered the question that has been on the minds of “Veep” fans since the very beginning: What if Tony Hale and Julia-Louis Dreyfus swapped roles? Okay, it’s probably never come up, but it is still fun to imagine, what if?

Of course, it’d be difficult to imagine anybody in the role of Selina Meyer other than Louis-Dreyfus. After all, she’s received critical acclaim, a number of awards as the focal point of a successful six-season run on “Veep.”

The same could be said for Tony Hale whose portrayal as Selina’s incredibly loyal personal aide, Gary Walsh, has led to two Emmys. But as the video below shows, the two show a surprising ability to inhabit each others’ roles as they reenact a classic scene from Season 4 of the show.

Read More: ‘Veep’ Review: A Big List of the Ways Women in Politics Get F***ed,...

Forty years after its initial release, a newly restored version of Marcel Ophüls’ seminal wartime documentary “The Memory of Justice” is set screen on HBO 2 on Monday, April 24, Holocaust Remembrance Day. The documentary was restored by The Academy Film Archive and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation.

Read More: Nyff: A Conversation with Academy Award-Winning Director Marcel Ophüls

In the film, Ophüls he explores the devastation and the destruction of war, specifically World War II and the Vietnam War. The film is a 4.5 hour epic that truly exposes the impact war has on the collective and on the individual.

Ophüls was inspired by “Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy,” written by Telford Taylor during the Vietnam War and reflecting on issues raised during his work as Chief Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials.

Read More: Milestone Celebrates Trio of Prizes and Deal for Ophuls’ “Troubles”

The film consists...

Ahead of the Academy Awards, we’re reviewing each short category. See the Documentary section below and the other shorts sections here.

Body Team 12 – Liberia – 13 minutes

For Americans the Ebola scare was a handful of cases and nurses who weren’t as careful as they should have been. To the world it was thousands upon thousands of dead bodies—loved ones that family members can’t normally mourn because every second the deceased’s blood lays in the streets is an extra second risking greater contamination. It’s easy to forget the scope of epidemics like this when ground zero isn’t in our own backyard. We blame countries for being inferior, rejoice in our capabilities to put a lid on things, and go about our daily business as though nothing is wrong. This isn’t the case for citizens of Liberia where outbreak numbers exploded exponentially. It was a plague destroying their country.

The Australian International Documentary Conference (Aidc) has announced its 2016 screening program..

Cult documentary Catfish will be screened with a live audio commentary by Zac Stuart-Pontier, the film's editor, and Marc Smerling, its producer.

The duo most recently worked together on HBO's The Jinx..

Also screening is The Hunting Ground, Kirby Dick's indictment of rape culture on American campuses, and The Memory of Justice, Marcel Ophüls' exploration of justice in the twentieth century, from the Nuremberg Trials to Algeria and Vietnam..

Aidc will also showcase Op-Docs, The New York Times' short documentary department, screening the banner's best docs, introduced by Op-Docs Commissioning Editor Lindsay Crouse..

The conference will also host an exclusive screening of Sherpa, followed by a Q&A with the film's director, writer and co-producer Jennifer Peedom and producers Bridget Ikin and John Smithson..

Also screening exclusively for delegates will be Black As, a new series following...

Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary feature takes his earlier The Act of Killing one step further. An Indonesian optometrist dares to interview death squad leaders that half a century before murdered a million people as part of an anti-communist genocide. The eye doctor's own brother was one of the victims. What we see sheds light on a long-suppressed outrage, smothered by a reign of terror and international indifference. The Look of Silence Blu-ray + Digital HD Drafthouse / Cinedigm Films 2014 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date January 12, 2016 / 29.93 Starring Adi Rukun Cinematography Lars Skree Film Editor Nils Pagh Andersen Original Music Seri Banang, Mana Tahan Produced by Sygne Byrge Sorensen Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

We in America truly live a sheltered First-World life, where a level of basic security is still considered the norm. But terrible events that occur beyond the reach of the news media, or that are simply inconvenient,...

While we thought it could sneak into the end of the 2015 calendar, it looks like Paramount is holding off a release of Martin Scorsese‘s priest drama Silence until after its rumored Cannes premiere. As we wait for the first trailer, today brings a few updates on the adaptation of Shûsaku Endô‘s novel, which follows Andrew Garfield as Father Rodrigues, a 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit who travels to Japan with a fellow priest amid rumors that Rodrigues’ mentor has abandoned the Church.

Ahead of the film’s release, earlier this year Approaching Silence was published (pick it up here), a novel which features a collection of essays looking back at the real-life background of Endô’s work. Perhaps most intriguing to our audience, it also features an afterword from Scorsese in which he describes bringing to life what “can’t be seen or described or named.” He references the “astonishing...

Several days prior to the "The Memory of Justice" (1976) screening of the newly restored film at the New York Film Festival, on September 27, Professor Regina Longo, Cinema Studies faculty at Purchase College, Suny, moderated a discussion with Oscar-winning director Marcel Ophüls.

From the New York Film Festival: "The third of Marcel Ophüls’ monumental inquiries into the questions of individual and collective guilt following the calamities of war and genocide, 'The Memory of Justice' examines three of the defining tragedies of the Western world in the second half of the 20th century, from the Nuremberg trials through the French-Algerian war to the disaster of Vietnam, building from a vast range of interviews, from Telford Taylor (Counsel for the Prosecution at Nuremberg, later a harsh critic of our escalating involvement in Vietnam) to Nazi architect Albert Speer to Daniel Ellsberg and Joan Baez."

Conversation Highlights

On "The Memory of Justice"

Making the film -- it was not sense of mission. I didn’t think I had to teach other people what the Holocaust was about or what other aspects of World War II were about. It was my job to make an audio visual form of storytelling of contemporary events. I don’t want to change the world. I think that’s much too big a job.

On Interviewing

I don’t script in advance at all. I don’t know what people will tell me in advance and they usually know in advance why you want to see them. it’s often the things that surprise me, that tend to surprise the public. I think the films I’ve tried to do, only come to life when the interviews become conversations.

React to what the person has told you as quickly as possible and get away from the prepared questions. If you don’t respond to their thoughts, what he or she has just told you, you never get a conversation, you get only an interview.

I try to get away from the idea of talking to a person (the subject) before the interview otherwise you have to explain too much. Well, you talk to the person on the phone beforehand when you set up an interview, but I don’t talk about the subject matter. You need to communicate minimal information. It’s the details of the answers, even if they go into a tangent. To me, it’s the spontaneity. Anything that interferes with spontaneity is bad.

I’m rather a passive interviewer. I don’t interfere very much.

Role of Editing

The role of editing is really doing all the work that is necessary like when you do a narrative film. The structuring work is done in the editing room on the basis of the rushes. There are some ideas beforehand.

All films should be narratives whether fiction or not. Storytelling is awfully important. A story with a beginning, middle and end.

On Objectivity

I’ve become more and more convinced that objectivity (in documentaries) doesn’t exist. This includes journalists, even in local news, reporters who report about a fire, some of them go to the fire chief for their information, others will tend to try to get a story with the victims. The choices you make, as an observer of events, are based on your own life and your own interests.

The question is, who narrates and from what point of view.

“Why must there be exceptions?” Marcel Ophüls asks one of his subjects in "The Memory of Justice."

The many ways in which Ophüls’ subjects justify their actions in this film allow viewers to draw their own conclusions. The film examines the collective versus individual responsibility, a theme further underscored when Ophüls, an exile from Nazi Germany interviews his wife, a German woman, who recounts her membership in the Hitler Youth.

The New York Film Festival runs from September 25 – October 11. http://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2015/

Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, Susan Kouguell teaches screenwriting at Purchase College Suny, and presents international seminars on screenwriting and film. Author of Savvy Characters Sell Screenplays! and The Savvy Screenwriter, she is chairperson of Su-City Pictures East, LLC, a consulting company founded in 1990 where she works with writers, filmmakers, and executives worldwide. www.su-city-pictures.com, http://su-city-pictures.com/wpblog...

Since its beginning in 1963, the New York Film Festival has grown into one of the more anticipated stops for film fans on the festival circuit, with the 2014 incarnation of the festival alone seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice and David Fincher’s Gone Girl make their world premiere at the event. As the festival’s importance has grown, the lineup presented has also piqued the interest of film fans. With the 2015 event set to run from September 25th to October 11th, a second wave of the lineup has now been announced to go with the previous Main Slate announcement.

The festival had previously announced that Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk would be the opening night film, making its World Premiere at the event, and the Don Cheadle film Miles Ahead would be the closing night feature, also making its World Premiere. The following films, with their official synopses, will also be playing at the event.

Organisers unleashed their latest volley of programming, an embarrassment of riches featuring new non-fiction work about education activist Malala Yousafzai, Russia’s Bolshoi Theatre, the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the iconic tango pairing of María Nieves and Juan Carlos Copes.

Midnight Madness brings a Turkish glimpse of hell, new work from the directors of Almost Human and The Loved Ones, a cyborg Pov story and Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, which premiered in Cannes and backer Broad Green Pictures recently made available for Us distribution after electing not to self-release.

Vanguard entries include Gaspar Noé’s Love, Alex de la Iglesia’s My Big Night and Ryoo Seung-wan’s South Korean cop thriller Veteran.

The Masters Of Cinema programme features Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister, while the Tiff Cinematheque selection of restored classics includes Luchino Viconti’s Rocco And His Brothers and Marcel Ophüls...

Rialto Pictures resurrects five classic titles from French auteur Claude Sautet in brand new Dcp versions for a mini-retrospective one week run in Los Angeles (July 24th – 30th) at the newly revamped Laemmle Royal Theater.

It’s a considerable spotlight on a neglected voice from one of 1970s French cinema most prominent figures. Sautet, who trained as a painter, sculptor, and music teacher before becoming a student of film, worked his way up to director in 1956 with his debut, Hello Smile! He continued with several film noir gangster films, like 1960’s Classe Tous Risques, a title that would gain wider consideration years later (and is now part of the Criterion collection). However, Sautet was most prominent as a screenwriter in the 1960s, passed over during the Nouvelle Vague as he adapted Jean Rodin’s novel Eyes Without a Face for Georges Franju, Backfire for Jean Becker, and Banana Peel for Marcel Ophuls.

This week on Off The Shelf, Ryan is joined by Brian Saur to take a look at the new DVD and Blu-ray releases for the week of June 16th, 2015, and chat about some follow-up and home video news.

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Episode Links & Notes Follow-up Unopened movies Christopher Lee News Thunderbean: Willie Whopper Blu-ray Pre-order Criterion September Line-up Scream Factory to release Army Of Darkness, Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood Arrow Video: Zardoz, The Mutilator, Requiescant, The Firemen’s Ball, Closely Watched Trains, Hard To Be A God, Society Masters Of Cinema / Eureka: The Skull Warner Bros. Hammer Horror Blu-ray Box Set Warner Bros Special Effects Boxset (Them!, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Son of Kong, Mighty Joe Young) Sony to release The Last Dragon on Blu-ray Scorpion: Burn Witch Burn Kino Cartoon Classics Announced Kl Studio Classics F/X 2 and The Challenge Universal to put out...

On the day after the day after the Oscars, we've still got a bit of cleaning up to do. The Skandies countdown is complete. Landing at #1 in the informal poll of critics is Under the Skin—and Jonathan Glazer is 2014's best director, too. We've also got a fresh list from James Hansen. #1: Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language. David Bordwell takes a close look at the structure, technique and intentions behind Birdman. Niles Schwartz suggests that Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is an "incoherent text." Plus Serge Bozon on Luc Mullet, Alexander Stille on Paolo Virzì’s Human Capital, Wim Wenders, Joanna Hogg, Darren Aronofsky and Claudia Llosa, Marcel Ophüls and Joshua Oppenheimer in conversation and more. » - David Hudson...

On the day after the day after the Oscars, we've still got a bit of cleaning up to do. The Skandies countdown is complete. Landing at #1 in the informal poll of critics is Under the Skin—and Jonathan Glazer is 2014's best director, too. We've also got a fresh list from James Hansen. #1: Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language. David Bordwell takes a close look at the structure, technique and intentions behind Birdman. Niles Schwartz suggests that Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is an "incoherent text." Plus Serge Bozon on Luc Mullet, Alexander Stille on Paolo Virzì’s Human Capital, Wim Wenders, Joanna Hogg, Darren Aronofsky and Claudia Llosa, Marcel Ophüls and Joshua Oppenheimer in conversation and more. » - David Hudson...

Refresh for latest… Ahead of the Efm next week, Paris-based Films Distribution has picks up Italian box-office success An Italian Name (Il Nome Del Figlio) by Francesca Archibugi. The sales company will handle world rights on the film which is based on Pathé’s French hit What’s In A Name?. It tells the story of extrovert Paolo and the beautiful Simona who are expecting a child. At a dinner with friends, one question will lead to an argument that will shake the night: the name of Paolo and Simona’s soon-to-arrive son. In What’s In A Name? the moniker in question was Adolf. Here, it’s Benito. Sales commence in Berlin next week.

Fortissimo Films has acquired worldwide rights (ex-South Africa) to Mark Dornford-May’s Breathe Umphefulmo which will world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Based on Puccini’s opera, La Bohème, the film transports the story...

Exclusive: Interview with Berlinale festival director Dieter Kosslick.

The Berlinale’s greater emphasis on television this year should not be interpreted as the first step towards a German Mip, according to festival director Dieter Kosslick.

In an exclusive interview with ScreenDaily, Kosslick said: ¨We don’t want to make a Mip TV or Mipcom, that’s as sure as day follows night and anything more would overstretch us.¨

He pointed out that that the Berlinale had had successful screenings of quality TV in the past with such productions as Dominik Graf’s Im Namen des Verbrechens, Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.

“We have now been working for the past two years on this programme which is composed of two parts: a series of discussions on new trends at the Efm and two days of drama series integrated into the festival programme and shown at Haus der Berliner [link=tt...

The Berlinale will be presenting premieres of several television series this year, including the Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul, the latest from the Danish creators of Borgen and more. Also, "2015: A Space Discovery" is the title of the focus at this year's Berlinale Talents, a program of master classes, discussions and workshops. Among the participants in the various programs are Jury president Darren Aronofsky, Bong Joon-Ho, Andreas Dresen, Joanna Hogg, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Marcel Ophüls, Joshua Oppenheimer, Laura Poitras, Walter Salles, Sebastian Schipper, Wim Wenders and the Yes Men. » - David Hudson...

The Berlinale will be presenting premieres of several television series this year, including the Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul, the latest from the Danish creators of Borgen and more. Also, "2015: A Space Discovery" is the title of the focus at this year's Berlinale Talents, a program of master classes, discussions and workshops. Among the participants in the various programs are Jury president Darren Aronofsky, Bong Joon-Ho, Andreas Dresen, Joanna Hogg, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Marcel Ophüls, Joshua Oppenheimer, Laura Poitras, Walter Salles, Sebastian Schipper, Wim Wenders and the Yes Men. » - David Hudson...

★★★★★If The 400 Blows (1959) constituted the songs of innocence for Antoine Doinel, then Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed & Board (1970) make up his songs of experience. Made in relatively quick succession almost a decade after director François Truffaut's iconic debut, they found Jean-Pierre Leaud's hero mired in the negotiations of adulthood. The key to understanding Doinel's transitions is Antoine & Colette (1962), a modest short film made by Truffaut as a part of Pierre Roustang's omnibus project, Love at Twenty (with Shintaro Ishihara and Marcel Ophüls). A portrait of teenage Antoine's pursuit of beauty Colette, the semi-autobiographical work introduces us to the primary drives of his adult life.

This is a reprint of an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education , L’affaire Natan, about a little known story given new life, the Dreyfus affair of French cinema. “Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect. Entitled Nazis, French Port and Film Studies: Bernard Natan’s Strange Saga, by Thomas Doherty, chair of the American-studies program at Brandeis University whose most recent book is Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, 2013).

Nazis, French Porn, and Film Studies: Bernard Natan's Strange Saga

By Thomas Doherty

Mention Bernard Natan to even the most obsessive connoisseur of French cinema and you’re liable to get a blank stare. If recognized at all, the name might call up a vague association with sleaze and scandal. "Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect.

Natan, né Natan Tannenzapf, was a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Paris in 1905 and went on to become a titan of French film, a man whose brand name, for a time, rivaled that of Gaumont and Pathé, founding fathers of le cinéma français. At once media visionary and rapacious entrepreneur, he burned bright over the City of Lights until an arrest for fraud sent him crashing to earth. Following a sensational trial laced with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was sentenced to four years in the Prison de la Santé, in Paris, which is where the Nazis found him. Shipped to Auschwitz, Natan perished in 1943 and promptly vanished—or was he erased?—from historical memory.

Natan seeks to undo the second injustice. At a brisk 66 minutes, it unspools like a much shorter, cinema-centric version of Marcel Ophuls’s epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), the searing j’accuse that vaporized the glorious myth of consensual French resistance during the Nazi occupation. Francophilic cinephiles are sometimes afflicted with a similar case of selective amnesia, hailing the subversive frisson of Marcel Carné’sChildren of Paradise (1945) while forgetting the collaborationist filmmakers who adapted to the new regime without missing a beat. A different kind of film noir, Natan unravels the knots in three interlacing threads: the nature of history (whom do we remember and whom do we choose to forget?), the tenacity of French anti-Semitism (where the indigenous variant proves a congenial blend with the imported vintage from Germany), and (here’s where things get strange) the archival shadows of pornography flickering in film studies.

The outlines of Natan’s biography read like a Gallic version of an American rags-to-riches story featuring a colorful hustler who might have fit in well with the moguls who built an empire of their own in Hollywood. A self-made Frenchman, perhaps in nothing so much as his passion for the emerging art of the century, Natan arrived in Paris when the city was still reeling from the actualités of Auguste and Louis Lumière and the prestidigitation of Georges Méliès. Hitting the ground floor running, Natan took any gig available: lab worker and projectionist, tripod carrier and camera-cranker, and, in 1910, an outré credit—probably on a nudie film—that earned him a hefty fine and jail time for trafficking in obscene material. Still, he assimilated with a vengeance, marrying a French Catholic and enlisting in the French army during the Great War. His heroic service at the front was his passport to French citizenship; it also got the prewar bust for obscenity expunged from his record.

Mustered out, Natan assumed a prominent role in rebuilding an industry left prostrate by the Great War and plowed under by Hollywood imports. He acquired exclusive rights to film the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, built high-quality processing plants for developing and duping prints, and moved into the production of top-line features, most notably the patriotic blockbuster The Marvelous Life of Joan of Arc (1929), directed by Marco de Gastyne. Both a detail-oriented manager and a big-picture man, Natan kept a hand in all ends of the business, from the chemicals used in the labs to the interior design of the theaters.

Even before the onset of sound, in 1927, Charles Pathé had lamented that there was no more money to be made from motion pictures. Natan knew better. In 1929 he bought out Pathé—whose "crowing rooster" logo was as much an emblem of ur-Frenchness as the Eiffel Tower—and, under the name Pathé-Natan, set about consolidating his various holdings into a vertically integrated business, a streamlined system of production, distribution, and exhibition, just like the major Hollywood studios. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded—creating big-budget, must-see feature films, building a fleet of ornate theaters, and bringing technical innovations like sound and Technicolor to the French screen. Among the 70 or so feature attractions produced under his shingle are two enduring classics by the director Raymond Bernard: Wooden Crosses (1932), a grim, trench-level slog through the Great War, and Les Misérables (1934), a prestige literary adaptation that, as the documentarians Duane and Cairns cannily note, probably had a personal reverberation for Natan, with its theme of a powerful man haunted by a petty crime from his past.

So far, so business-as-usual, not unlike a TCM documentary on Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer. But then the story detours into a distinctly French quarter. In December 1938, at the height of his power, Natan was hobbled by two indictments, that he was a swindler and a Jew. He could mount a defense against only one. More-scandalous allegations were whispered—actually, in the right-wing press, shouted: that Natan’s long-ago brush with the law was no youthful indiscretion but part of a pattern of perversity. Despite his high profile and respected position, the coverage suggested, the slick foreigner was still peddling pornographic films to an underground market of like-minded lechers. The charges were straight from the playbook of the Nazi propagandists, echoing the double-barreled libels of Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer, where the Jew was depicted as an invasive virus sucking the life out of the body politic while defiling the purity of the native bloodline.

Unfolding from January to June 1939, trumpeted in lurid press headlines, the criminal case against Natan involved cooked books, stock manipulation, and dummy holding companies. In brief, he was accused of robbing his own company blind and cheating the stockholders. He confessed to manipulating funds—but only, he insisted, to keep his company afloat, not to bilk the stockholders. Unmoved, the court sentenced him to four years in prison. In 1940, under the Third Republic and still before the Nazi invasion, the sentence was extended to five years. The next year, a Vichy court deprived him of the French citizenship he had won during the Great War. When the Nazis requested custody of Natan (according to the French Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld, Natan was one of only two French Jews targeted by name, the other being Léon Blum, the former prime minister), the Vichy authorities readily complied. As the French film historian Georges Sadoul remarked, Natan’s prison cell served as the "antechamber to the oven of the crematorium."

The obvious French back story to l’affaire Natan is the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whom the French military railroaded into Devil’s Island on a trumped-up charge of treason in 1895. "You might call this the Dreyfus affair of cinema," says the director and actor Frédéric Tachou. But the criminal charges against Natan are a bit harder to disentangle. In 1940, the Hollywood trade paper Variety, which had no dog in the fight, reviewed what it called "the largest scandal ever recorded in the French cinema world" and came down hard on the man in the cross hairs of the French justice system: Natan "built up a monster organization without sound financial foundation and it collapsed of its own dead weight, although it required more than 10 years to bring him to justice."

Nonetheless, a cadre of French film historians has been adamant that Natan was set up; that, despite his confession, he was no less a victim of anti-Semitic hysteria than Dreyfus. André Rossel-Kirschen, Natan’s nephew and the author of Pathé-Natan: the True History, published in France in 2004, attacked the legend of the "swindler Natan" as a smear by greedy business interests seeking to gain control of a company that was not a hollowed-out shell but a solid moneymaker—that, in fact, was always in the black. The French historian Gilles Willems, another diligent researcher in the archives of Pathé, also scorns "the tenacious legend" regarding "the Jewish swindler of Romanian descent, Bernard Natan, who acquired the great Pathé firm the better to pillage it."

For film scholars lacking a Cpa license, the labyrinthine bookkeeping trail is difficult to follow—a confirmation of the cynical Hollywood adage that the most creative people in the motion-picture business work in the studios' accounting departments. In a blog post on the making of the documentary, the filmmaker Cairns offers what seems a measured appraisal: that Natan "did more good than harm" in the annals of French cinema, and that whatever the nature of his financial malfeasance, he "was scapegoated and punished with a grotesque severity."

Ironically, after getting little more than a footnote in most chronicles of the French cinema, Franco or Anglophone, it would be the more scandalous charge that rescued Natan from his cruel fade to black. In 1993, Joseph W. Slade, a professor of media and culture at Ohio University, published an article in the Journal of Film and Video with the come-hither title "Bernard Natan: France’s Legendary Pornographer." The piece was both salacious and, as it turned out, propitious. Slade was a pioneer in what has since morphed into a full-blown subfield of cinema studies—porn studies. Jump-started by the University of California at Berkeley film professor Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ published in 1989, and lent momentum by her edited collection, Porn Studies, in 2004, the close textual examination of pornography has turned from what was, not so long ago, an indictable offense into an au courant career path in the academy. Feminist critics especially have cultivated a nonprurient interest in porn, seeing in the raw footage an unfiltered lens into the male—and female—psyche, not to say physique.

Despite smirking from the mainstream press, few media scholars today would argue that a multibillion-dollar industry that has thrived since the dawn of cinema is not worthy of serious scrutiny and archival excavation. That consensus is confirmed by the steady inroads of a series of exceptionally well-attended panels at annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and, this spring, the debut of Porn Studies, an academic journal devoted to all things triple-x. If anything, the mainstreaming of porn in media studies has lagged behind its mainstreaming on the motion-picture screen, cable, and the web.

Slade’s article certainly resurrected Natan—not as a forgotten giant of the French film industry, but rather as a priapic smut merchant. Slade charged that even as Natan was consolidating his aboveboard cinematic empire, he "unquestionably turned out some of the most historically significant hard-core footage made during the silent era." More than that, Slade contended that Natan was a featured player in many of the films, exuberantly joining in with the sadomasochism, sodomy, and bestiality. "Natan’s dapper, slightly vulpine figure, capable of stalking or mincing as the role demanded, suited the storylines," he asserted. No prude himself, Slade frankly admired the sheer épater le bourgeois of Natan’s risky moonlighting, pointing out that "as a pornographer," Natan "parodied a bland, reactionary mainstream cinema."

The French, who love a good trans-Atlantic donnybrook over cinema more than a Gitane after dinner, took to the conference-journal-and-cyberspace barricades to defend Natan’s honor. None have been more tenacious than the archivist Brigitte Berg, director of Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris, who on the website Les indépendants du premier siècle, blasted Slade’s "poor knowledge of both the man Bernard Natan and the French cinema in general" and accused him of "slander," "fantasies," and (the mildest cut) "a rich imagination." (Unfortunately, Berg played no role in Natan, because of creative/scholarly/economic differences with the filmmakers.)

Natan resolves the fracas with a montage worth a thousand monographs: the first extended unreeling of Natan’s alleged on-screen acrobatics. Inarguably, the glimpses of proto-porno from the prewar, silent era possess redeeming archival value, from the posed nudes in nickelodeon-era stag films (pretty much the kind of mild erotica you might see on a visit to the Louvre) to the hard-core coupling, and tripling, of the 1920s and 1930s. The most shocking snippet (I have never seen anything like it and, if I had, I wouldn’t admit it) features a randy swain engaging in sexual congress with a mallard. (The French title—Le Canard—sounds far more genteel than the rhyming imperative that is its English billing.) "The ugliest film I have ever seen in my life," says the archivist Serge Bromberg. "We didn’t want to restore it."

But, of course, the best argument for restoration is that without being able to eyeball the primary source, the canard against Natan would persist. Freeze-framing and telescoping in on close-ups of the actor, the filmmakers compare the visage of the energetic star in the French porn with contemporaneous pictures of Natan, plainly showing that the men are not one and the same. The accusation always sounded unlikely—sort of as if David O. Selznick used his off time during Gone With the Wind (1939) to cavort in blue movies shot in 16mm down in the Valley. On camera, Slade now concedes that there may be reasonable doubt as to the identity of the performer and to Natan’s filmography in pornography. "I do not now believe that Natan performed in the films," he wrote me in an email, "but I do think it is likely that he was involved in their making." Although he finds Natan "somewhat maudlin," he is "delighted that Natan is at last getting the attention he deserves, attention long denied him because of the anti-Semitism that has for so long erased him from French film history."

It is odd, though, that a story that hits so many of the buttons of film scholarship—and that is this juicy—has been for so long so forgotten. "I don’t think he has been airbrushed out" of history, says the writer Bart Bull in Natan. "I think he has been deliberately destroyed." Yet it’s hard to gauge how much of the history in any field just slips down the rabbit hole of memory—like say, the story of the unheralded pioneers of American film, Harry and Roy Aitken, who produced The Birth of a Nation (1915)—and how much results from willful acts of historical erasure. However, one can see why historians of French cinema would rather remember the glory that was the cinéma français than they would the political, cultural, and business sadism, the bigotry and hypocrisy, not to mention the seediness intertwined with the triumphs in the story of Bernard Natan.

Appropriately, the most inspired sequence in Natan is also a work of restoration, though not of a pornographic film, at least not as usually defined. A newsreel clip shows Natan in the dock in 1941, at the trial that stripped him of his citizenship, a sequence that Ophuls also unspooled inThe Sorrow and the Pity. "This is not a comedy," sputters Natan, trying to hide from the cameras. "This is a tragedy." Produced by none other than Pathé Cinema, by then a tool of the Nazi occupation, the newsreel dubs in a panicky high-pitched voice for Natan, to make the outcast Jew sound like a squealing rat. Duane and Cairns correct the distortion, rewinding the clip with Natan’s real voice on the soundtrack. "You can hear his real voice in another clip used in the film where he’s telling architects what he wants in his cinemas," Duane told me in an email. "We pitch-shifted the sped-up voice in the trial newsreel until it was closer to the way he really sounded."

The gesture neatly demonstrates that if film can distort and delete history, it can also restore and repair it. "The man is dead," says the narrator at the beginning of Natan. "Even his memory has been destroyed."

No more.

In addition to its normal slate of invited and in-competition docs, as well as a tribute to the work of Steve James, this year the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival invited filmmaker Lucy Walker to curate a thematic program of her choosing. Walker built her sidebar around memorable characters, and how they both enrich and sometimes problematize documentary storytelling. It was a choice that resonated not only in the films she chose, such as the Robert Evans doc The Kid Stays in the Picture and Marcel Ophüls’s Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, and her own 2002 effort Devil’s Playground, but also in the new docs screening throughout the weekend. Many of my favorites from the fest were those that fit well with Walker’s program, as you can see below. From topical and historical stories that are most effective when focused on individual subjects to strictly character-driven narratives, the...

Kevin Macdonald, Marcel Ophuls, Fred Wiseman and Claude Lanzmann are among the top directors attending the 26th International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (Idfa) (Nov 20 - Dec 1).The festival opens this evening (Nov 20) with the world premiere of Talal Derki’s Return To Homs, a feature doc that centres on young revolutionaries in Western Syria. The film, being talked up by festival insiders as a potential Oscar contender, was co-financed by Idfa through the Idfa B

Kevin Macdonald, Marcel Ophuls, Fred Wiseman and Claude Lanzmann are among the top directors attending the 26th International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (Idfa) (Nov 20 - Dec 1).

The festival opens this evening (Nov 20) with the world premiere of Talal Derki’s Return To Homs, a feature doc that centres on young revolutionaries in Western Syria. The film, being talked up by festival insiders as a potential Oscar contender, was co-financed by Idfa through the Idfa Bertha Fund.

Before the film, Idfa’s Living...

Cinema, as Jean-Luc Godard wrote, is truth 24 times a second. Documentaries both prove and disprove the point; but the truth is their strongest weapon. Here, Guardian and Observer critics pick the 10 best

• Top 10 arthouse movies

• Top 10 family movies

• Top 10 war movies

• Top 10 teen movies

• Top 10 superhero movies

• Top 10 westerns

• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s

10. Man With a Movie Camera

To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium...

Selection includes competition titles, a focus on Southeast Asia and a ‘Top 10’ compiled by director Rithy Panh.

The selection for the 26th Idfa (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) has been unveiled and includes 288 titles – selected from more than 3,000 submissions – of which 100 will receive their world premiere during the festival (Nov 20 – Dec 1).

There will be a strand dedicated to documentaries from Southeast Asia titled Emerging Voices from Southeast Asia.

This year’s Idfa Top 10 is compiled by Cambodian director Rithy Panh, and a retrospective of his work will be screening at the festival.

Panh, whose doc The Missing Picture won the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes in May, has selected:

Alone

Wang Bing (Hong Kong/France, 2012)Don’t Look Back

D.A. Pennebaker (USA, 1967)Farrebique - The Four Seasons

Georges Rouquier (France, 1946)The Football Incident

Joris Ivens/Marceline Loridan-Ivens (France, 1976)I Am Cuba

Mikheil Kalatozishvili (Cuba/Russia, 1964)In Vanda’s Room

Pedro Costa (Portugal, 2000)A Man Vanishes...

Late as usual. People are attending Mipcom in Cannes and in November Afm in Santa Monica, and I’m only now getting around to writing about my own private Toronto. I chose films I would not be able to see soon in a theater near me and I chose films because my schedule permitted me to see them. Occasionally I chose films my friends were going to and that happened when my time was not demanding other things be done.

I wish I could have seen 100 other films too but for some reason or another I could not fit them in.

I moderated a wonderful panel (and we did blog on that!) on international film financing with Sffs’ Ted Hope, UTA’s Rena Ronson, Revolution’s Andrew Eaton, and Hollywood-based Cross Creek’s Brian Oliver, and Paul Miller, Head of Film Financing, from the Doha Film Institute, Qatar's first international organization dedicated to film financing, production, education and two film festivals.

I also spoke with Toronto Talent Lab filmmakers and then I filled my days with films – I did get an interview with Gloria’s director Sebastian Lelio and Berlin Best Actress winner Paulina Garcia and with Marcela Said, director of The Summer of Flying Fish but mostly I watched film after film after film – up to five a day, just like in the old days when I had to do it for my acquisitions jobs. This was pure pleasure. Friends would meet before the film, we would watch and disperse. And we would meet again at the cocktail hour or the dinner hour and then disperse again.

My partner Peter had lots of meetings with the Talent of Toronto from the Not Short on Shorts and the Talent Lab Mentoring Programs.

Parties like the Rotterdam-Screen International party gave us the chance to catch up with our Dutch friends whom we have not seen for the last two years. Ontario Media Development Corporation’s presenting the International Financing Forum luncheon gave us the chance to talk to lots of upcoming filmmakers and old friends again who were mentoring them. The panel Forty Years On: Women’s Film Festivals Today, moderated by Kay Armatage, former Tiff programmer, Professor Emeritus University of Toronto, and featuring Debra Zimmerman, Executive Director of Women Make Movies, NYC, Melissa Silverstein, Do-Fojnder an dArtistic Director of the Athena Film Festival in NYC and blogger of Women in Hollywood, So-In Hong, Director of Programming of the International Women’s Film Festival in Seoul had a rapport and didn’t hesitate to challenge each other. It felt like a party even though the subject was quite serious. The SXSW party was crowded as always, filled with everyone we could possibly know. It is always a great party we all want to attend.

One of the great dinners was that of The Creative Coalition Spotlight Awards Dinner honoring Alfre Woodard (12 Years a Slave), Hill Harper (1982, CSI: NY), Sharon Leal (1982), Matt Letscher (Scandal, The Carrie Diaries), Brenton Thwaites (Oculus, Maleficient), Tommy Oliver (1982, Kinyarwanda – I am a great fan of Tommy’s!), Tom Ortenberg (CEO, Open Road Films which has a coventure with Regal Theaters and AMC Theaters recently acquired by the richest man in China), and David Arquette (The Scream series). Our hostess, Robin Bronk is so welcoming and so dedicated to furthering the cause of universal education as a human right, education in the arts as a must. I admire her presence and her good work.

Here is a list of the great (and not so great, but never bad) films I got to see. I also list those I continue to hear about even now. I do not list all the films which were picked up during the festival and later. For that, you can go to SydneysBuzz.com and buy the Fall Rights Roundup 2013 and see all films whose rights were acquired (and announced) and by whom with links to all companies and Cinando for further research. For buyers it will, by deduction, show what is still available for Afm and for programmers, it will show who is in charge of the film for specific territories. The second edition will be issued two weeks after Afm.

One of the first films I saw and still retaining its place as one of my favorites was the documentary Finding Vivian Maier which begins with the discovery of photographs by an unknown woman named Vivian Maier by filmmaker John Maloof. As the mystery of this woman is uncovered, the audience is treated to her stunning work and the story of who she was.

One of my favorite films was by one of my favorite directors, Lucas Moodyson. We Are The Best (Isa: Trust Nordisk) was a great surprise, the story of three teeny-bopper punk-influenced girls who loved getting into unusual situations. It was loving and fun, darling and funny. I would take my children to see it and would delight in seeing it again. It was the biggest surprise for me. I can see why Magnolia snapped it up for the U.S. I thank programmer Steve Gravenstock for giving me the ticket for this film which I would have missed otherwise.

I had missed Jodorowsky’s Dune in Cannes. I am a great fan of El Topo and was eager to see this film. I was surprised at the elegance and skill of Jodorowsky in explaining his vision. Afterward, Gary Springer, our favorite publicist, arranged a wonderful reception at a classic comic book store where we loaded up on some fascinating graphic novels and Gary showed us his depiction on an old issue of Mad Magazine discussing the making of Jaws which he was in. picture here.

A totally unique and unexpected film about the African Diaspora, Belle, written and directed by Amma Asante was not talked about much to my surprise, perhaps because Fox Searchlight acquired all rights worldwide from Bankside before the festival. It is a stunningly beautiful British period piece of the 18th century about a mixed race aristocratic beauty.

My favorite film, on a par with The Patience Stone last year was Bobo (Isa: Wide) by Ines Oliveira starring Paula Garcia Aissato Indjai, produced by my friend Fernando Vendrell who gave me a ticket when I could not get one myself. This story of a woman who does nothing except go to work is forced to accept a claning woman and her young sister from Guinea-Bissau. Together they face down their demons. I love the cross-cultural understanding which results in their shared situations. I recently saw Mother of George and found the same warm connection across great cultural divides, though this one was of generations.

I wish I could have seen Pays Barbare/ Barbaric Land, the Italian/ French doc in Wavelengths about Mussolini’s attempted subjugation of Ethiopia (the only country in Africa never colonized). It sounds like great political poetry.

1982 which had previously won the prize of the jury I served on for Us Works in Progress held in July at the Champs Elysees Film Festival in Paris. It was deeply moving and disturbing film which depicts the shattering and the healing of a family. It also helps feed the pipeline begun with Lee Daniels producing Monster’s Ball who went on to direct to such films as Precious and The Butler. If the African American experience can continue to be expressed so eloquently by such filmmakers as Tommy Oliver, Rashaad Ernesto Green (Sundance 2012’s Gun Hill Road), Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere), then a film literate audience will foster greater growth of even more talent in the coming generation. While I didn’t see All Is By My Side by U.K.’s John Ridley which is about Jimi Hendrix nor (yet!) the most highly acclaimed film of the festival, 12 Years a Slave by U.K.’s Steve McQueen, but I would include them in this discussion of the African American Experience.

On the subject of Africa, where last Sundance God Loves Uganda shocked and upset me, this year Mission Congo (Cinephil) revealed much of the same cultural divide only these two films show the negative impact of the Christian right upon already besieged Africans. What is done in the name of a righteous G-d is cause for dialogue and oversight.

Israel and the Middle East

No major turmoil or denunciations this year (Thank G-d, Allah, or whoever She may be). Katriel Schory, head of the Israeli Film Fund told me that if I could only see one film, then it should be Bethlehem which is the country’s submission for Academy Award Consideration for the Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. It was a sad and clear eyed microcosmic view of the issues of trust and betrayals played out among every level of the society. People compared it to Omar by Hany Abu-Assad,the filmmaker of a favorite of mine, Paradise Now, but I did not see Omar.

Rags and Tatters at first seemed like a documentary, and does have doc footage, but it is a circular story that ends where it began but with much more understanding of the chaotic events in Cairo. Really worth watching.

Latino

Of the Latino films two Chilean films, Gloria (Chile) and The Summer of Flying Fish (Review), were accompanied by interviews which you can read on my previous blogs here and here. El Mudo from Peru by the Vega brothers was in the odd vien of their previous film, October. Not sure at the end just what the film was saying…

Toronto Film Fest Programmer Diana Sanchez’s official count of Latino films in the festival is 16. Of these, 5 are by women; 30% is a strong number. Venezuela and Chile are strong with year with two films each. Two other films might have been chosen except they went to San Sebastian for their world premieres. Especially hot this year was Mexico. 4 films are here but she might have chosen 10 if she could have. Costa Rica is making a showing with All About the Feathers and Central America is making more movies. There is lots of industry buzz coming from the good pictures from Brazil like A Wolf at the Door from Sao Paolo production

She is not counting Gravity by Alfonso Cuaron as as Latino film but as a U.S. film.

And Our White Society

The Dinner (Isa: Media Luna) by Menno Meyjes ♀ (Isa: Media Luna), a Dutch film deals with the personal and political as two families disintegrate when the affluent sons kill a homeless woman. Deeply disturbing social issues on the other side of the spectrum from those of 1982 and yet very much the same. How a society can foster such dissonance in class structure today which results in the disintegration of family and even a nation’s political life is, as I said, deeply disturbing. Based on the N.Y. Times best selling book which sold over 650,000 in The Netherlands, and is published in 22 countries, it stars four of Holland’s most renowned actors, Jacob Derwig, Thekla Reuten, Daan Schuurmans, and Kim van Kooten. This is a story that could be remade in America and still maintain its strength. The writer-director Menno Meyjes wrote the Academy Award nominee The Color Purple and collaborated with director Steven Speilberg on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In 2008 he directed Manolete with Penelope Cruz and Adrien Brody.

The Last of Robin Hood was a romp which thrilled us because Peter Belsito, my own dear husband, had a moment on screen (as the director of Errol Flynn’s last film Cuban Rebel Girls). He got the part because he had had an equally small role in the original Cuban Rebel Girls when it filmed in Cuba in 1959, four months after the Revolution. He happened to be there on vacation with his family including his 18 year old sister and his crazy aunt because Puerto Rico was full that year and Cuba had plenty of room. Directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland invited him to play in their film. The film actually had more meaning than merely a romp as it revealed what lays below the June-September love affair between Errol Flynn and 15 year old Beverly Aadland, the nature of fame (“a religion in this godless country” to quote Flynn himself) and ambition. Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandan and Dakota Fanning were all great in the repertoire piece.

Can a Song Save Your Life? garnered great praise as the film that followed the simple pure Once. I found it a bit flat though it kept my interest enough that I was not contemplating leaving. But it lacked the simplicity of Once.

Fading Gigolo proves that a Woody Allen Film is a Genre. John Turturro makes a Woody Allen middle-aged man fantasy of a wished for love affair with a Hasidic woman. Turturro is always lovable on screen, but his directing has something inauthentic about it…the only authentic thing was the twice-stated thought that somewhere in his heritage he was really Jewish. When I saw his previous film Passione, about Italians and passion, the opening song, being one of the first Cuban songs I ever heard, turned me off because again, it was inauthentic. It was Cuban, not Italian. I think he is not comfortable in his Italian guise.

Other films at Tiff I have seen previously:

Only Lovers Left Alive by Jim Jarmusch (Isa: HanWay, U.S. Spc). If you can see it as a dream of night, then the vampires dreaminess might appeal to you. I personally was ready to fall into my own stupor after watching this 123 minute movie of Vampires who have seen it all. Zzzzzz.

Don Jon is sexy and sweet. Scarlett Johansson is a superb comedienne, equal to Claudette Colbert in this film about two totally media mesmerized young lovers. ___ and his father are also great straight men. I loved this film, so funny and sweet and all about sex. Loved it!

Borgman Darkest humor, or is it humor? Creepy and definitely engrossing. Dutch filmmaker Alex van Warmerdam at his best. This is the Netherlands' Official Academy Awards Submission.

What I hear was good:

Aside from the ones that got snapped up for lots of money and are covered in all the trades already, there are films which I keep hearing about even now and will see:

Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon

12 Years a Slave (Isa: Summit, U.S. Fox Searchlight)

The Lunchbox (Isa: The Match Factory)

Prisoners (Isa: Summit/ Lionsgate, U.S.: Warner Bros)

Dallas Buyers Clubs (Isa: Voltage, U.S. Focus Features)

Life of Crime (Isa: Hyde Park, U.S.: )

A Touch of Sin (Isa: MK2, U.S. Kino Lorber)

Gravity (Isa: Warner Bros. U.S. Warner Bros.)

Enough Said (Isa: Fox Searchlight, U.S. Fox Searchlight)

La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty) (Isa: Pathe, U.S. Criterion) Italy’s submission for Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film

Violette (Isa: Doc & Film, U.S.: ?)

Omar (Isa: The Match Factory, U.S.: ?)

Le Passe (The Past) (Isa: Memento, U.S. Spc) Iran’s submission for Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

To the Wolf (Isa: Pascale Ramonda)

The Selfish Giant (Isa: Protagonist, U.S. IFC)

At Berkeley by Frederick Wiseman (Isa: Doc & Film, U.S. Zipporah)

The Unknown Known (Isa: Entertainment One, U.S. Radius-twc)

Ain’t Misbehavin (Un Voyager) by Marcel Ophuls (Isa: Wide House)

Faith Connections by Pan Nalin (Isa: Cite Films). This Indian French film, produced by Raphael Berduo among others is written about here.

Civil Rights (?)

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

12 Years a Slave (Isa: Summit, U.S. Fox Searchlight)

Belle (Isa: Bankside, all rights sold to Fox Searchlight)

Lgbt

Kill Your Darlings: The youthful finding of himself by Alan Ginsburg as he enters Colombia University and meets Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac and Alan Bourroughs revolves around a murder which actually happened. The period veracity and Daniel Radcliffe’s acting carry the film into a fascinating character study. (U.S. Spc)

Dallas Buyers Club (Isa: Voltage, U.S. Focus Features)

Tom a la ferme / Tom at the Farm by Xavier Dolan Isa: MK2, U.S.:)

L’Armee du salut/ Salvation Army by Abdellah Taia (Isa: - U.S.:-)

Eastern Boys (Isa: Films Distribution)

Pelo Malo/ Bad Hair (FiGa Films)

The Dog (Producer Rep: Submarine)

Ignasi M. (Isa: Latido)

Gerontophilia (Isa: MK2, U.S. Producer Rep: Filmoption)...

Titles include Alfonso Cuaron’s acclaimed Gravity and Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.

Thierry Ragobert’s Amazonia 3D and Heitor Dhalia’s Serra Pelada bookend the Rio Film Festival, set to run from Sept 26-Oct 10.

A rich line-up of films includes Alfonso Cuaron’s acclaimed Gravity, Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza and Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.

Paul Schrader will receive a lifetime achievement award. Tribute screenings will include Schrader’s latest, The Canyons, as well as Cat People, American Gigolo and Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters.

French director Claire Simon, due to present her recent feature Gare Du Nord, will also be the subject of a festival retrospective.

Festival top brass said that apart from the dozen traditional Rio Festival sections there will be three new arrivals: Tec Section exploring the impact of technology and the internet on privacy; Vanguard Expectation Section challenging conventional narrative; and Big Documentarians Panorama Section spotlighting recent work from...

Once again the European Film Promotion’s (Efp) Film Sales Support (Fss) initiative will come to Toronto to link sales companies from all over Europe to a great array of buyers from across the globe. Supported by the Media Programme of the European Union, Fss has now been aiding the European film industry fro the last 10 years.

"Toronto has and is an important informal market and an important festival for European films, the distributors see the films in a different mood, more quietly, the public screenings are working well. It is a key place to launch a film or to complete previous sales on films that were in Cannes, Venice, Locarno...” (Loïc Magneron, Wide)

“Tiff is a major pillar of the annual festival calendar. Aside from a proliferation of North American buyers, it also attracts top tier international distributors so a favorable reception at Tiff can significantly increase a film's commercial prospects”. (Andrew Orr, Independent)

Due to the limited amount of resources, only 52 out of the 60 films submitted to the Efp will receive financial support to be marketed during the Tiff, which runs from September 5 to 15. This year alone, 372 films total, over 150 from Europe, will screen at the festival many of which will see their world or international premiers there.

Supported films and companies at Tiff 2013

Alpha Violet (France), rep. Virginie Devesa The Summer of Flying Fish (El Verano de los Peces Voladores) by Marcela Said, France, Chile, 2013

Arri Worldsales (Germany), rep. Moritz Hemminger Exit Marrakech by Caroline Link, Germany, 2013 Home from Home (Die Andere Heimat) by Edgar Reitz, Germany, France, 2013

Athens Filmmakers' Co-Operative (Greece), rep. Venia Vergou Wild Duck by Yannis Sakaridis, Greece, 2013

Bac Films Distribution (France), rep. Clémentine Hugot The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (L'Entrange Couleur Ded Larmes De Ton Corps) by Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, 2013

Beta Cinema (Germany), rep. Tassilo Hallbauer Le Grand-Cahier by János Szász, Germany, Hungary, Austria, France, 2013

Blonde S. A. (Greece), rep. Fenia Cossovitsa Standing Aside, Watching (Na Kathese Kai Na Kitas) by Yorgos Servetas, Greece, 2013

Capricci Films (France), rep. Julien Rejl Story of My Death (Historia De La Meva Mort) by Albert Serra, Spain, France, 2013 The Battle of Tabato (A Batalha De Tabato) by João Viana, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, 2013

Celluloid Dreams (France), rep. Hengameh Panahi Those Happy Years (Anni Felici) by Daniele Luchetti, Italy, 2013

Cité Films (France), rep. Raphaël Berdugo Faith Connections (Faith Connections) by Pan Nalin, France, India, 2013

Doc & Film International (France), rep. Daniela Elstner, Alice Damiani Violette by Martin Provost, France, Belgium, 2013 South is Nothing (Il Sud E'Niente by Fabio Mollo, Italy, France, 2013

Dogwoof (United Kingdom), rep. Ana Vincente Inreallife by Beeban Kidron, UK, 2013

Ealing Metro International (United Kingdom), rep. Natalie Brenner, Will Machin Half of a Yellow Sun by Biyi Bandele, UK, 2013 The Stag by John Butler, Ireland, 2013

Embankment Films (United Kingdom), rep. Tim Haslam Le Week-End by Roger Michell, UK, 2013

Eyeworks Film & TV Drama (The Netherlands), rep. Maarten Swart The Dinner (Het Diner) by Menno Meyjes, The Netherlands, 2013

Fantasia Ltd (Greece), rep. Nicoletta Romeo The Daughter (I Kori) by Thanos Anastopoulos, Greece, Italy, 2013

Film Factory Entertainment (Spain), rep. Vicente Canales Cannibal (Canibal) by Manuel Martín Cuenca, Spain, 2013 Zip & Zap and the Marble Gang (Zipi & Zape y el Club de la Canica) by Oskar Santos, Spain, 2013

Films Boutique (Germany), rep. Jean-Christophe Simon Walesa. Man of Hope (Walesa) by Andrzej Wajda, Poland, 2013

Films Distribution (France), rep. Nicolas Brigaud-Robert, François Yon Eastern Boys by Robin Campillo, France, 2013 Under the Starry Sky (Des Etoiles) by Dyana Gaye, France, Senegal, 2013

Heretic (Greece), rep. Giorgos Karnavas The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas (I Aionia Epistrofi Tou Antoni Paraskeva) by Elina Psykou, Greece, 2013

Independent Film Sales (United Kingdom), rep. Karina Gechtman, Abigail Walsh The Sea by Stephen Brown, UK, Ireland, 2013 Starred Up by David Mackenzie, UK, 2013

Latido Films (Spain), rep. Miren Zamora Honeymoon (Libanky) by Jan Hrebejk, Czech Republic/Slovak Republic, 2013

LevelK (Denmark), rep. Tine Klint Sex, Drugs & Taxation (Spies Og Glistrup) by Christoffer Boe, Denmark, 2013

Linel Films (United Kingdom), rep. Aran Hughes To The Wolf (Sto Lyko) by Aran Hughes & Christina Koutsospyrou, Greece, UK, France, 2013

Minds Meet (Belgium), rep. Tomas Leyers I'm The Same I'm An Other by Caroline Strubbe, Belgium, The Netherlands, 2013

MK2 (France), rep. Victoire Thevenin Hotel (Hotell) by Lisa Langseth, Sweden, Denmark, 2012

Mpm Film (France), rep. Pierre Menahem For Those Who Can Tell No Tales by Jasmila Žbanić, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, 2013

Negativ s.r.o. (Czech Republic), rep. Zuzana Bielikova Miracle (Zazrak) by Juraj Lehotský, Czech Republic, Slovakia, 2013

Pathé Distribution (France), rep. Muriel Sauzay The Finishers by Nils Tavernier, France, 2013 Quai d'Orsay by Bertrand Tavernier, France, 2013

Pausilypon Films (Greece), rep. Menelaos Karamaghiolis J.A.C.E. - Just Another Confused Elephant by Menelaos Karamaghiolis, Greece, Portugal, Macedonia, Turkey, 2012

Picture Tree International (Germany), rep. Andreas Rothbauer Mary Queen of Scots by Thomas Imbach, Switzerland, 2013 Metalhead (Malmhaus) by Ragnar Bragason, Iceland, Norway, 2013

PPProductions (Greece), rep. Thanassis Karathanos Septmeber by Penny Panayotopoulou, Greece, Germany, 2013

Pyramide International (France), rep. Agathe Mauruc Giraffada by Rani Massalha, France, Germany, Italy, 2013

Rezo (France), rep. Laurent Danielou, Sebastien Chesneau The Station (Blutgletscher) by Marvin Kren, Austria, 2013 Abuse of Weakness (Abus De Faibless) by Catherine Breillat, France, Belgium, Germany, 2013

The Match Factory (Germany), rep. Michael Weber, Thania Dimitrakopoulou The Police Officer's Wife (Die Frau Des Polizisten) by Philip Gröning, Germany, 2013 Qissa (Quissa) by Anup Singh, Germany, India, The Netherlands, France, 2013

The Yellow Affair (Sweden), rep. Miira Paasilinna Heart of a Lion (Leijonasydan) by Dome Karukoski, Finland, 2013

TrustNordisk (Denmark), rep. Susan Wendt, Nicolai Korsgaard Pioneer (Pioner) by Erik Skjoldbjaerg, Norway, 2013 We Are The Best (Vi Ar Bast!) by Lukas Moodysson, Sweden, 2013

Wide (France), rep. Loic Magneron Bobo by Ines Oliveira, Portugal, 2013

Wide House (France), rep. Garreau Geoffrey Ain't Misbehavin, A Marcel Ophuls Journey (Un Voyageur) by Marcel Ophuls, France, 2013

Wild Bunch (France), rep. Vicent Maraval, Gary Farkas Going Away (Un Beau Dimanche) by Nicole Garcia, France, 2013 A Promise (Une Promesse) by Patrice Leconte, France, Belgium, 2013...

Ain’t Misbehavin’ – Marcel Ophüls

Section: Tiff Docs

Dates: Tuesday 10th, Thursday 12th, Sunday 15th

Buzz: The freewheeling memoir Ain’t Misbehavin’ (titled Un Voyageur in French) screened alongside Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune during Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. While the latter is perhaps the most buzzed about Tiff Doc, the first feature from Marcel Ophüls in nearly two decades should not be overlooked. The son of celebrated German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophüls (The Earrings of Madame de …) and friend of François Truffaut, the master documentarian, now eighty-five years old, has lived an extraordinary life. Marcel Ophüls won the Academy Award for Best Documentary and the Fipresci Award at Cannes for Hotel Terminus (1988), while his Oscar nominated, four-hour long The Sorrow and The Pity (1969), that explored French resistance and collaboration with Nazis was memorialized in Annie Hall. After the endless critical praise for his Holocaust-related material, it will be...

French sales outfit Wide Management has added a slew of titles in recent months.

Tiff contemporary world cinema premiere Ningen, about a Japanese CEO under pressure to save his company, is the second feature from Noor directors Cagla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti.

Portuguese drama Bobo, by Ines Oliveira, plays in the Tiff discovery programme. The feature follows two women who unite over their mutual desire to protect a child.

Vinko Bresan’s Karlovy Vary competition comedy The Priest’s Children has sold to a number of European territories while Jean-Louis Daniel’s Paris-set Shanghai Belle, also in-demand, tells the story of young models discovering a life of drugs, sex and prostitution.

Also on the slate are Snails in the Rain by Yariv Mozer, Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Rene Feret’s The Film to Come, and Us comedy Only in New York, in which a stand-up has a novel take on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Wide has also...

The 38th Toronto International Film Festival has released an incredible guest list of celebrated talent from around the globe. Filmmakers expected to present their world premieres in Toronto include: Catherine Breillat, Nicole Garcia, Pawel Pawlikowski, Bertrand Tavernier, Steve McQueen, Godfrey Reggio, Denis Villeneuve, Bill Condon, Jean-Marc Vallée, John Wells, Ralph Fiennes, Richard Ayoade, Atom Egoyan, Matthew Weiner, John Carney, Jason Reitman, Jason Bateman, Yorgos Servetas, Liza Johnson, Megan Griffiths, Fernando Eimbcke, Alexey Uchitel, Johnny Ma, Biyi Bandele, Rashid Masharawi, Paul Haggis, Ron Howard, Eli Roth, Álex de la Iglesia, Bruce McDonald, Jennifer Baichwal, John Ridley, and Justin Chadwick.

The Festival also welcomes thousands of producers and other industry professionals bringing films to us.

The following filmmakers and artists are expected to attend the Toronto International Film Festival:

Ahmad Abdalla, Hany Abu-Assad, Yuval Adler, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Alexandre Aja, Bruce Alcock, Gianni Amelio, Thanos Anastopoulos, Madeline Anderson, Nimród Antal, Louise Archambault,...

I took a look and last year I saw 24 movies and reviewed 23 of them at the Toronto Film Festival (read my recap here). So I took a quick look at the lineup announced so far for this year's festival to see what I may or may not be seeing and already my list of "must sees" is at 18 followed by three titles I really want to see. After that I have 18 films followed by six that are quite unlikely I'll fit along with three I saw and already reviewed at Cannes earlier this year. As is always the case with film festivals of this size, I simply have to weigh each film by measure of "importance" in the grand scheme of things, followed by those I'm most excited to see and after that is when I can begin poking around at some of the films that raise my curiosity, but...

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, one of many Special Presentations at this year's Tiff.

The Toronto International Film Festival has begun to announce its lineup for its 2013 edition, beginning with Gala and Special Presentations. To browse the festival's programming on their web site, visit here.

Gala Presentations

American Dreams in China (Peter Chan, China)

The Art of the Steal (Jonothan Sobol, Canada)

August: Osage County (John Wells, USA)

Cold Eyes (Cho Ui-seok & Kim Byung-seo, Korea)

The Fifth Estate (Bill Condon, USA)

The Grand Seduction (Don McKellar, Canada)

Kill Your Darlings (John Krokidas, USA)

Life of Crime (Daniel Schechter, USA)

The Love Punch (Joel Hopkins, France)

The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra, India/France/Germany)

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (Justin Chadwick, South Africa)

Parkland (Peter Landesman, USA)

The Railway Man (Jonathan Teplitzky, Australia/UK)

The Right Kind of Wrong (Jeremiah Chechik, Canada)

Rush (Ron Howard, UK/Germany)

Shuddh Desi Romance (Maneesh Sharma, India...

Not too long ago we saw a rather impressive list of films announced for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival 2013. With titles like Gravity, 12 Years a Slave and The Fifth Estate all set to appear, I simply cannot wait for September to arrive. With all the Oscar contenders flying around though, it’s easy to forget about some of the other films at the festival.

With that in mind, the Midnight Madness lineup has been announced today, showcasing some quality horror/thriller films that will serve as a break from the serious, weighty dramas that popular the majority of the festival lineup.

Amongst the highlights are the world premiere of Ei Roth’s The Green Inferno as well as the next film from Lucky McKee, All Cheerleaders Die.

Additionally, Tiff also revealed their documentary lineup today, which can be seen below along with the Midnight Madness films.

The Toronto International...

The latest Tiff 2013 line-up to be announced is what they have in store for documentaries. At the top of my must-see list are Errol Morris' Donald Rumsfeld documentary The Unknown Known and Frank Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune. Also, reading through the brief synopses, I'm going to try and make time for Beyond the Edge (a 3D doc about Everest climber Sir Edmund Hillary) and The Dog (the story that was used as the basis for Dog Day Afternoon). I'll also be avoiding At Berkeley, which sounds just awful. Hit the jump for the full documentary line-up. The 2013 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5 – 15th. A Story of Children and Film Mark Cousins, United Kingdom North American Premiere A Story of Children and Film is the world’s first movie about kids in global cinema. A passionate, poetic portrait of the adventures of childhood — its surrealism, loneliness, fun, destructiveness...

Yesterday we looked back at the exquisite documentaries that have graced us with their presence thus far in 2013, but now it is time to look to the Toronto International Film Festival which plays host to the biggest docu titles of the fall festival season. While Sundance tends to be the spring launching pad for politically charged films, Tiff tends to have a broader spectrum of non-fiction fare. This morning, Tiff Docs programmer Thom Powers and the rest of the team at the Lightbox dropped a press release with the list of non-fiction films joining this year’s already stacked lineup.

Unsurprisingly there are a few titles making their way over from Cannes in Frank Pavich’s hilarious and tragic Jodorowsky’s Dune, Claude Lanzmann’s continued Holocaust investigation with The Last of the Unjust and Mark Cousins’s film history follow up The Story of Children and Film. Expectedly, Errol Morris...