International Film News
WALTZ WITH BASHIR CHOSEN FOR INTERNATIONAL FILM GUIDE COVER
14/01/2009
A film still from the Israeli film WALTZ WITH BASHIR has been chosen as the cover image of the 2009 edition of the International Film Guide, the definitive yearbook of world cinema. The film, an animated documentary that traces the memories and anxieties of former Israeli soldiers, has been a major winner this awards season and seems poised to be the first Israeli film to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The film was selected to grace the cover of the 2009 IFG because of its prominence and as a representative of a special focus on Israeli cinema that is featured in the 45th edition. The 2009 International Film Guide will have its international premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival next month.
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE CONTINUES AWARDS BLITZ
09/01/2009
The British film SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE continues to impress as a major contender (and the one to beat) for this year’s Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. The film just won the most awards at the Critics Choice Awards, sponsored by the largest film critics association in North America. The film won Best Picture, Best Director (Danny Boyle), Best Composer (A.R. Rahmann), Best New Actor (Dev Patel) and Best Ensemble Cast honors at the awards ceremony held in Los Angeles on Thursday evening. The film, which is distributed by Fox Searchlight in North America, has become the “word-of-mouth” hit of the holiday season, with a wider release than usual for an arthouse film that is half in Hindi. With a possible awards sweep at Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE has emerged as the film to beat come Oscar night. This would be a major coup for the film’s UK producers and the Indian film industry (which supplied the crews and the cast). With the traumatic events in Mumbai last month and the new international perspective of the incoming Obama presidency, the film meets all the criteria for going all the way….big box office, critical darling, social issue themes and damned good entertainment.
WALTZ WITH BASHIR NAMED BEST PICTURE BY U.S. CRITICS
09/01/2009
The Israeli animated documentary WALTZ WITH BASHIR is another major awards season frontrunner. The film was named last week as the Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics, the oldest critics organization in the U.S. For a film in a non-English language and with dark themes of war and psychic pain, its win over more mainstream fare is indeed impressive. The film, directed by Ari Folman and executed by masterful Israeli animators, is a chronicle of the search for meaning and memory by Israeli soldiers still haunted by their memories of the 1982 war with Lebanon. The current crisis in the Middle East has given the film even more zeitgeist urgency. The film, which won the Best Foreign Language Film prize at the Critics Choice Awards last evening, is Israel’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and is regarded as the category’s strongest contender. An image from the film graces the cover of the upcoming 2009 International Film Guide, the definitive yearbook of world cinema, which is being introduced at the Berlin Film Festival. The Guide will also feature, among other things, a country focus on Israeli cinema that has benefited from the strong response to WALTZ WITH BASHIR since its world premiere last May at the Cannes Film Festival.
THE HOLOCAUST FOR THE HOLIDAYS
09/01/2009
In a somewhat intriguing and unplanned collision, the Holiday season was marked with, among other things, a confluence of films with themes that relate to the Holocaust. With the current economic doldrums and the anemic Christmas shopping season inspiring downer headlines in the press, another challenging period has been explored on movie screens across North America. Four films in current release dig back into the century’s most tragic crime, with a mix of realism, poetry and attempt to understand the lessons of that period for our own age of anxiety. The first to be released was THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS, a Holocaust tale suitable (some would argue that point) for children, since it centers on the unlikely friendship between a young Jewish boy who is incarcerated in a concentration camp and the son of the camp’s commandant. The psyche of those who worked in the camps (as if their day jobs were somehow “normal”) is one of the themes of THE READER, director Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of the prize-winning autobiographical novel, about a concentration camp guard (played by an incandescent Kate Winslet) and her affair with a boy much her junior. In between erotic roundelays, the film explores the guilt of the generation of young Germans after the war who must confront the crimes of their family, their neighbors and, in this case, their lovers. Another Holocaust film currently on the big screen is GOOD, the adaptation of a British play about a mild-mannered man’s complicity in the crime of the century. Starring Viggo Mortensen, the film tells the true tale of a German literature professor whose theories on euthanasia are used by the Nazis as a basis for their program to eliminate first, the mentally and physically challenged, and eventually political enemies and whole races of “inferior sub-humans”. While most of the above films portray the Jewish victims of the Nazi terror as just that, powerless victims, the new film DEFIANCE tells a different tale….of Jewish resistance as embodied by the Bielski brothers, a band of partisans who created a community in the woods of Belarus while also creating havoc for local Nazis and fascists. The cast, led by Daniel Craig (Mr. James Bond himself) and Liev Schreiber, illuminates a lesser known side of the Holocaust story that stands in contrast to the universal assumption of Jewish passivity and weakness. Add to this the pyrotechnics of the Hollywood big-budget actioner VALKYRIE, with Tom Cruise playing a Luftwaffe colonel who conspires to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and the Holidays seem almost overrun with Nazis. That these films were released in time with Christmas and New Year’s seems both fiercely ill-timed and oddly appropriate.
