No surprises at the 35th Cesars, as A Prophet cleaned up in all major categories it was nominated in: Best Film, Best Director (Audiard), Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Stephane Fontaine), Best Editing (Juliette Welfling), Best Art Direction (Michel Barthelemy) and last but not least, one of my top 5 performance of the year, Niels Arestrup won for Best Supporting...
What do Central Station (1998), The Thin Red Line (1999) and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (2000) all have in common? They were awarded the top honor at the Berlin Film Festival and you can add Honey, the final leg in Semih Kaplanoglu's trilogy which commenced with Egg and last year's Milk, to that grouping.
Christopher Doyle's "Picture Start" (Doyle (Happy Together) reconsiders how images evolve before the director’s call to “action” and what happens to them after the “cut.” Doyle superimposes directives from traditional film leader on to the processed still film and filmmaking images he has created during his extensive career.
The current issue of Filmmaker Magazine has hit kiosks and the only reason why I'd be pointing this out is because it includes its annual "25 New Faces" feature (available here) which is basically: a sampling of the future voices, filmmakers, editors, actors and cinematographers who in the opinion of the magazine's editors represent the future of independent filmmaking and who, I admittedly know only two of the twenty-five.
Germany's Oliver Hirschbiegel and Denmark’s own Lone Scherfig and Nicolas Winding Refn are among those representing their latest works in the World Dramatic Competition. The selection committee had the crazy task of bringing down the total number 1,012 submissions down to 16.