International Film News
Sound of Noise at Cannes
Sound of Noise to appear at Cannes’ Critics Week
29/04/2010
The Cannes Film Festival’s Semaine Internationale de la Critique, better known as Critics’ Week, will this year include amongst its seven titles Johannes Stjärne Nilsson and Ola Simonsson’s Sound of Noise. The film involved the participation of acclaimed Swedish special effects and post-production house, Filmgate.
The film is about a gang of eccentric drummers who carry out a musical assault on the city, playing on anything but common instruments. The police officer put in charge of the strange case soon turns the investigation into a personal vendetta.
Critics’ Week, which began in 1962, has a reputation for promoting the careers of exciting new talent. The film will also be in the running for the Camera d’Or, which no Swedish film has yet won.
Cannes Announces Competition Line-Up
16/04/2010
Though it might lack the heavyweight presence of the world’s top auteurs, who dominated last year’s competition, the line-up for the 2010 Palme d’Or is nevertheless an impressive roster of talent.
Presided over by Tim Burton and featuring Kate Beckinsdale, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Alberto Barbera, Emmanuel Carrere, Benicio Del Toro, Victor Erice and Shekar Kapur, the jury have the pick of Rachid Bouchareb’s follow-up to his acclaimed Days of Glory, Outside the Law, Takeshi Kitano’s return to more familiar thriller territory with Outrage, Doug Liman’s Fair Game, the only US film in competition and Abbas Kiarostami’s The Certified Copy, which stars the festival’s poster girl, Juliette Binoche. Also in Competition is actor Matthieu Amalric, with Tournée and Another Year, directed by Britain’s Mike Leigh.
Absent is Terence Malick’s film, which he is reportedly still working on. If it is completed in time, it will likely join Woody Allen and Oliver Stone’s latest films, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger and Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, which are both playing out of competition.
In Un Certain Regard, jury president Claire Denis will be looking over films by Xiaoshuai Wang, Cristi Puiu, Lodge Kerrigan, Manoel Dd Oliveira and Hong Sangsoo, while Cinefoundation and Short film president Atom Egoyan will be joined by Emmanuelle Devos, Dinara Droukarova, Carlos Diegues and Mac Recha.
Main Competition
Tournée (Matthieu Amalric)
Des Hommes et des dieux (Xavier Beauvois)
Hors la loi (Rachid Bouchareb)
Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu)
A Screaming Man (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)
The Housemaid (Im Sangsoo)
The Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
Outrage (Takeshi Kitano)
Poetry (Lee Chang Dong)
Another Year (Mike Leigh)
Fair Game (Doug Liman)
You. My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa)
La Nostra Vita (Daniele Luchetti)
Burnt By The Sun 2 (NNikita Mikhalov)
La Princesse de Montpensier (Bertrand Tavernier)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Un Certain Regard
Blue Valentine (dir. Derek Cianfrance)
Angelica (Manoel De Oliveira)
Heartbeats (Xavier Dolan)
Loza Los Labios (Ivan Fund)
Simon Werner A Disparu (Fabrice Gobert)
Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)
The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler)
Return to the Dogs (Lodge Kerrigan)
Adrienn Pál (Ágnes Kocsis)
Udaan (Vikramaditya Motwane)
Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean)
Chatroom (Hideo Nakata)
Aurora (Cristi Puiu)
Ha Ha Ha (Hong Sangsoo)
Life Above All (Oliver Schmitz)
Octubre (Daniel Vega and Diego Vega)
R U There (David Verbeek)
Chongqing Blues (Xiaoshuai Wang)
Lou Reed
Lou Reed To Attend Nyon
11/04/2010
Among the many highlights at this year’s Visions du Réel festival, which runs from 15-21 April 2010, the late announcement of a screening of the first film by legendary musician Lou Reed is something of a coup. The former frontman of the Velvet Underground and one of the iconoclasts of New York culture for the last 40 years, Reed’s debut is an intimate account of his elderly aunt, who is 100 this year.
Red Shirley tells the story of a woman who escaped the Nazis in 1938, fleeing to Canada and then New York, where she became a dressmaker, and a force to be reckoned with in the movement for workers’ rights, hence the title of the film.
The screening is one of many that will be covered by the IFG, which is present at the festival and will offer daily reports on screenings and events.
For more information on the festival and its programme, go to: www.visionsdureel.ch.
London Book Fair to Launch in April
11/04/2010
The 2010 London Book Fair will take place on 19-21 April 2010, at London’s Earl’s Court. One of the essential events in the literary diary, it brings together publishers, agents, authors and key individuals in the industry, to broker deals and create a platform to discuss the future of the publishing sphere in a rapidly changing world.
The latest LBF newsletter features all the details for entry to the fair, as well as their regular articles and podcasts. Included is an interview with acclaimed children’s author Eoin Colfer, who has seen success with his Artemis Fowl series, soon to be made into a film and in his new role as the successor to Douglas Adams in continuing the Hitchhiker series. Elsewhere in the issue, industry pundit Liz Thompson talks with Richard Charkin, Bloomsbury’s Executive Director, about their Public Online Library, a radical move to cope with a lack of funding in the public sector for libraries throughout the UK. As Thompson points out, ‘Bloomsbury offered to Britain’s public libraries themed digital bookshelves – a Children’s History Shelf, a Teen Fiction Shelf and a Reading Group Shelf – for an annual subscription of £100 per 100,000 of population served. Now, as it approaches its first birthday, Public Library Online has been subscribed by library authorities from across the UK, among them Edinburgh, Falkirk, Bournemouth, Poole, Lambeth and Essex, the latter the country’s largest library authority and a leader in technological innovation. Some three million people can already access the Library’s virtual shelves, a number set to expand as authorities convert trials into subscriptions.’
What has been one of the most dominant areas of discussion in the publishing world over the last few years, digital publishing is looked at in terms of future generations in ‘The Deal Online’. Danuta Kean reports on how children’s publishing is at the forefront of this publishing revolution, aware that the future generations of readers will approach literature in a very different way, one that the industry needs to prepare for now: ‘With the threat of texting toddlers a push button away, it is no wonder children’s publishers are looking seriously at how they make books relevant to a generation for whom digital is second nature. "We’re competing in an ever-converging marketplace, where we have to face up to the threat of on-demand TV, games, music and other social media," Paul Rhodes, head of digital at Walker Children’s Books points out. "If we’re not at least visible in those areas, that share of voice is gone, and will be difficult to claw back."‘
To register for the London Book Fair, click here.
