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French writer-director Jacques Audiard has proven himself a genre-spanning talent. He’s helmed such diverse features as 1994’s thriller See How They Fall, 2009’s Academy Award-nominated gangster film A Prophet, 2012’s devastating romance Rust and Bone, and 2015’s Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or-winning portrait of refugees escaping war, Dheepan. His work is united by the fierce pursuit of his singular visions. For his latest project, Emilia Pérez, Audiard set out to combine elements of musicals, film noir, and crime dramas, and he recruited a troupe of gifted performers and artisans all committed to realizing his ambitious tale of a woman on a quest to live as her truest self. The result is a provocative fever dream, a feat of cinematic fearlessness.

Karla Sofía Gascón (Rebelde) stars in the title role of the Spanish-language film as a menacing cartel leader looking for someone to discreetly assist her in seeking gender-affirming...

French writer-director Jacques Audiard has proven himself a genre-spanning talent. He’s helmed such diverse features as 1994’s thriller See How They Fall, 2009’s Academy Award-nominated gangster film A Prophet, 2012’s devastating romance Rust and Bone, and 2015’s Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or-winning portrait of refugees escaping war, Dheepan. His work is united by the fierce pursuit of his singular visions. For his latest project, Emilia Pérez, Audiard set out to combine elements of musicals, film noir, and crime dramas, and he recruited a troupe of gifted performers and artisans all committed to realizing his ambitious tale of a woman on a quest to live as her truest self. The result is a provocative fever dream, a feat of cinematic fearlessness.

Karla Sofía Gascón (Rebelde) stars in the title role of the Spanish-language film as a menacing cartel leader looking for someone to discreetly assist her in seeking gender-affirming...

Exclusive: Jacques Audiard is in the thick of awards season with his much-buzzed film Emilia Pérez, and now he is set for a retrospective from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival next month.

That Cannes Jury Prize-winning film starring Oscar hopeful Karla Sofia Gascón along with Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldaña will screen on January 10 at the Sbiff Riviera Theatre, followed by an in-person chat with Audiard.

The program running through January 17 at the new Sbiff Film Center also will include his films Paris, 13th District (2021), and The Sisters Brothers (2018); Dheepan (2015); Rust and Bone (2012); A Prophet (2009) and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005).

“Audiard is a master of cinema — combining genres in order to tell his complex yet compelling stories which always draw attention to important and urgent subjects like immigration and the disenfranchised,” festival executive director Roger Durling said. “As a filmmaker, he is generous, challenging and humane, and...

There are many different ways to measure a terrific film awards season.

Last year, “Barbenheimer” put two billion-dollar blockbusters at the center of the awards chatter. “Barbie” settled for an Oscar and a “box office achievement” Golden Globe, while “Oppenheimer” fulfilled its promise as the first (much-needed) awards season megahit and awards juggernaut in many years. Besides sweeping up multiple Oscars, Christopher Nolan’s opus also garnered both Oscar and Golden Globe best picture wins.

Twenty-five years ago, the Oscar race was a Weinstein-era slugfest for best picture, with the Harvey-handled “Shakespeare in Love” keeping Steven Spielberg’s WWII epic “Saving Private Ryan” out of the top Oscar perch, while both films took home Golden Globe best picture trophies. This year has been knocked by some critics and some awards season pundits as perhaps not one for the history books, with a less than stellar lineup of key contenders.

Exclusive: Hengameh Panahi re-expands historic art-house sales company Celluloid Dreams

Experienced sales executive Frédérique Rouault has joined Paris-based Celluloid Dreams as head of sales.

Rouault - who was previously VP international sales at TF1 Studio (formerly TF1 International) - is debuting in her new role at the Afm.

She describes the move as a “strongly personal one” based on her love of independent auteur cinema with international appeal.

“After my time at TF1 International where I learned so much I wanted to get back to my first love and the sorts of films I love and want to defend. It’s with great pride that I join a company which corresponds so closely to what I was looking for,” said Rouault.

A former alumnus of elite higher education institution Sciences Po and then France’s prestigious La Fémis film school, Rouault cut her teeth in the film business at Paulo Branco’s Alfama Films before heading to TF1.

Celluloid...

We’ll be better able to assess whether this Jacques Audiard’s seventh feature film was triumphant, faltered or flatlined when more results trickle in, but for the time being this looks to situate itself quality-wise underneath 2009’s Grand Prix winning A Prophet. It got his Cannes debut back in 1994 with Regarde Les Hommes Tomber in the Critics’ Week, saw 1996’s Un héros très discret land him Best Screenplay, and his last showing was for Rust & Bone in 2012. Starring relative unknowns in Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan and Claudine Vinasithamby, (supporting players also include Vincent Rottiers and Marc Zinga), Dheepan has all the earmarks from his other films: the immigrant story, criminal underpinnings, protagonist with odds against them, Paris, a visceral photography and on the tech side: a continued partnership with co-writer Thomas Bidegain. Make sure to click on the chart below for a larger version.

Mathieu Kassovitz was hailed as the heir to Truffaut after making La Haine in 1995. So why has he renounced French cinema after making his latest film, Rebellion?

Any doubts over Mathieu Kassovitz's feelings towards his national film industry were cleared up last year when he tweeted: "Bugger French cinema. Go fuck yourself with your shitty films." He's done with France. He's moved to Los Angeles. The tweet was in response to the César nominations, France's equivalent of the Oscars. In a field dominated by The Artist and Untouchable, Kassovitz's sober political thriller, Rebellion, received just one nomination, for best adapted screenplay.

"I wasn't hurt because they didn't want to give me a César, I was hurt because they didn't care about that kind of movie any more," says Kassovitz, who has previously won three Césars and never turned up to collect them. "It's a French story. It's craftsmanship. We...

The emergence of French filmmaker Jacques Audiard on the world scene has been one of the great cinematic pleasures of the last decade or so. Although he's been in the business for years (winning the Cesar for best debut for 1994's "See How They Fall"), it was 2005's excellent "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" that really brought him to the attention of world audiences. Four years later, "A Prophet" won him even more fans -- along with the Grand Prix at Cannes and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film -- and the praise has continued with the Marion Cotillard-starring "Rust and Bone," which premiered on the Croisette earlier in the year. The film marks something of a break from the crime genre feel of his three previous projects, and after speaking to the filmmaker and his co-writer Thomas Bidegain today ahead of the BFI London Film...

From Palme d’Or winner “Amour” to the latest offerings from some of the biggest names of world cinema such as Alain Resnais, Abbas Kiarostami, Bernando Bertoluci, Manoel de Oliveira , Brillante Mendoza, Ken Loach, Jacques Audiard, 14th Mumbai Film Festival has a lot to offer to the filmbuffs.

The festival offers an exciting lineup of more than two hundred films, spread over about a dozen screen and seven days! To help our readers decide we’ve picked up the most talked about films from festival circuit.

14th Mff runs from October 18th-25th, 2012 at the National Centre for Performing Arts (Ncpa), and Inox, Nariman Point, Liberty Cinemas, Marine Lines as the main festival venues and Cinemax, Andheri and Cinemax Sion as the satellite venues.

To get delegate pass for the festival, you can register here:

1) Beast of the Southern Wild

Dir.: Benh Zeitlin (USA/ 2012 /Col./ 92’)

Section: International Competition for...

After the pairing of The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet (I admittedly haven’t seen his earlier films, like Read My Lips or See How They Fall), it really does seem as though director Jacques Audiard can do no wrong. And now we finally have proof that the director may be three for three, with one hell of a trailer for his new film, Rust & Bone.

Read more on First trailer for Rust & Bone arrives...

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The benchmark for any decent film festival is the level of cinematic diversity it offers. A good mix of entertaining, provocative, intriguing and possibly even perverse selections from around the globe with a few classic retrospectives thrown in for good measure that inform, intrigue, delight, outrage and provoke thoughtful debate is all that one can hope for in a well compiled line-up. Thankfully Brisbane’s 20th anniversary international film festival, which commences on the 3rd November, appears to have delivered that desired ensemble.

While commencing with the Aussie premieres of Joe Cornish’s UK genre-bender Attack the Block and closing with Pedro Almodovar’s psychologically intense genre hybrid The Skin I Live In, and with a few entries bleeding over from this year’s Sydney Film Festival (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Tyrannosaur and Take Shelter amongst others), there’s more than enough fresh material in between to make the trip to another Aussie state worthwhile.

Still from The Artist

The 2011 edition of Mumbai Film Festival can boast of a strong French connection. Not only does it include a strong line-up of French films in a special section, but it will also celebrate the 50th anniversary of Cannes Critics Week by presenting a retrospective of 25 films.

The special section called ‘Rendez-vous with French Cinema’ will be co-organized with the French Embassy in India and Unifrance. For those who remember, this is the fourth edition of the event in Mumbai which has been merged with the Mumbai Film Festival this year. The past three editions were held separately as film festivals. This section will bring to Mumbai some of the critically acclaimed contemporary French films which include The Artist by Michel Hazanavicius, The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Robert Guédiguian and Declaration of War by ValérieDonzelli.

The Artist which will open the section competed at the Cannes Film...

After 15 years as a director, it's about time we recognised the talent of Jacques Audiard – even if he can be a little too entertaining at times

In Cannes last year, Jacques Audiard's Un Prophète did not win the Palme d'Or. Instead, that prize went to Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon – and some observers murmured that it was because the Audiard picture was too gripping, too entertaining, too much like an old-fashioned prison drama. It's a dilemma that might amuse Audiard, the fond son of a seasoned screenwriter who wrote some of the big French movies of the 1950s. But Un Prophète marks 15 years in Jacques Audiard's career as a director, and if he is not exactly established yet, or consistently in character, it's about time we saw fit to place him in the company of such distinguished French directors as Julien Duvivier, Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville.