Search results for: Pia Marais

You'd think a festival with 300 + film title offerings would pretty much covers all bases, but I think there'll be more broken hearts than usual as a result of the unbalanced production year that was 2009. Like a vintage year for wine, Toronto International Film Festival co-directors Piers Handling and Cameron Bailey should see in 2010, a significantly higher number of World and North American premieres (loads from Cannes and Venice) than previous years for the 35th edition.

New logo. New website. New artistic director. Olivier Pere exited to become the head honcho at Locarno, so the Director's Fortnight, also known as La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, will be Frederic Boyer's baby this year. The mandate will remain the same, but will the tastes differ? Pere's legacy includes some of my favorites over the past decade such as Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest...

I spent all of last week divulging some of films that I expect to be in Cannes this year, and Screen Daily happened to do the same. There are a good number of films that are mentioned of both sites' lists, but I mention about twenty films that the trade makes no mention of, and of course they have got a long list as well of films that I either passed on as potential selections or I was totally oblivious as to their existence.

In many ways, Cannes' parallel sidebars (Director's Fortnight, Critic's Week and I'm including Un Certain Regard here) are the hardest sections to forecast - the high volume of films from all corner of the globe and the actual number of available slots makes it perhaps more difficult to predict than the actual Main Competition predictions..

Wedged between Sundance and Berlin is the extremely important Rotterdam film festival. Rotterdam functions as Europe's first major film fest of the year, but it seconds as a premiere destination for filmmakers such as Andrei Zvyagintsev (The Return), Amat Escalante (Sangre) and Juraj Lehotsky (Blind Loves) who make the kind of films that need a "helping hand". This list is of obvious interest because we'll be talking about this projects-turned-into-films down the road - we only need to look at Venice/TIFF for recent examples such as Samuel Maoz's Lebanon and Shirin Neshat's Women without Men to see the quality of films that got their start here.