Search results for: Amat Escalante

The Official Selection for the 66th Cannes Film Festival has been unveiled and noticeable absentees in the list of 19 Main Comp films and...

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.

In many ways the story-line of a pair of young migrant Mexican workers who commit a brutal crime reminded me of certain facets from Haneke's Funny Games. I expect the auteur filmmaker to bring much of the same provocation and similar visual treatment to his next work, Heli.

But given that figure, this small percentage illustrates a strong dose of diversity and range of genre, budget, but more importantly original strong stories and voices. Before I begin....one special mention goes out to REVOLUCIÓN by Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante, Fernando Eimbcke, Mariana Chenillo, Patricia Riggen, Diego Luna, Gael Garcia Bernal, Gerardo Naranjo, Rodrigo Garcia, and Rodrigo Plá.

Day 7's following screening was a film that I had wanted to see even before they announced the selections for the Un Certain Regard - while I'm a huge fan of his first feature Sangre (which also played in the section), unfortunately Amat Escalante's second film