Strand Take ‘Leap’ of Faith on Cannes Camera D’or Winner and Jack Cardiff Doc

After IFC and SPC, it’s now up to Strand Releasing to fill up their coffers with films from last month’s Cannes festival. They just announced the pick up of the Cannes Classics selected Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, and less than 24 hours later comes one more pick up – this time in a Mexican film directed by a first time Australian filmmaker. Not to be confused with the comedy Leap Year, Año bisiesto was the lucky film that won the Camera D’or this year – which is given to a first time work and 2010 all three sections excluding the Main Comp for full of first time efforts.

Directed by Michael Rowe, Leap Year tells the story of a rather plump Laura, a young woman from the State of Oaxaca, now living in Mexico City, who goes through each and every day of the month of February while she creates links between melancholy and cruelty caused by a tragic event in her past. When she meets Arturo, a man who struggles between tenderness and sadism, she suddenly finds love. However, Laura has a set date, February 29th, as the day in which she will finally find one of three possibilities: freedom, atonement, or a criminal sentence. You can view a couple of clips after the jump.

The Jack Cardiff doc sounds pretty interesting — it oddly received a world premiere at Cannes — but get this, was shown on the beach. Here’s the synopsis: he photographed films for — John Huston, Sophia Loren, Alfred Hitchcock, Marilyn Monroe — and described by Michael Powell as “A genius, a daydreamer, a baby. He should have been a painter instead of being the best colour cameraman in the world.” Yet he has remained largely unknown to the general public until now. Cameraman celebrates the life and work of this unique figure in British and international cinema, a man whose career spans an incredible nine decades of cinema history. “Legend” is a word all too frequently used in Hollywood, yet Jack Cardiff’s story surely proves him worthy of that title. In 2001, fifty-four years after first winning an Academy Award for his stunning Technicolor work on Black Narcissus, Jack Cardiff became the first cinematographer to receive an honorary, Lifetime Achievement Oscar® for: “Exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences; and for outstanding services to the Academy.” Jack began in the film industry in 1918 as a child actor aged just four, but quickly switched to the other side of the camera, graduating to cinematography and for a period direction, gaining over a hundred film credits on productions as diverse as The Red Shoes and Rambo. In the process Jack Cardiff had a profound and lasting influence on cinema and its current leading practitioners.