This year's Palme d'or winner (Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) is a glowing example of exact purpose that the Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival Rotterdam serves: supporting national cinemas and filmmakers through various stages of production.
You can call this year's Masters section the "re-showing of old filmmaker favorites from Cannes". Plenty of the names selected here Godard, Lee Chang-dong, Ken Loach, Manoel de Oliveira and Palme D'or winning Apichatpong Weerasethakul were expected to show up, added to the Cannes titles we have a trio from Venice in: Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins, Jerzy Skolimowski's Essential Killing and Catherine Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty. The one world premiere is from Amos Gitai (Roses à Crédit).
Strand Releasing, the official North American distributor for all things Apichatpong Weerasethakul will indeed be releasing his latest, Cannes-winning film. The trades report that Marcus Hu's longstanding co. will distribute Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives in Spring of next year, but you can bet that the local premiere will occur at the Weerasethakul-friendly film festival in Toronto this September.
The German sales co. known for providing the fest circuit and art-house plexes with subtitled stuff from around the globe will set fire to the Director's Fortnight section this year. If I'm counting right, the Match Factory supply the section with a trio of titles (five total in the fest) including the much discussed on this site Cam Archer's sophomore feature, and they nabbed a Main Comp spot for one of the most celebrated directors of the decade in Apichatpong Weerasethakul latest – a sort of “ghost” story.
Prior to embarking on the writing journey for La Otra Orilla, a project supported by the CNC folks, Peruvian filmmaker Francesca Canepa premiered her...