Search results for: Asghar Farhadi

With a total of 50+1 films from around the world, the Contemporary World Cinema programme could very well be a film festival in its own right. Once again loaded in Cannes North American premieres from, the section also includes world preem titles: Xiaolu Guo's UFO in her Eyes, Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister (starring Emily Blunt see pic above), Nacho Vigalondo's Extraterrestrial and Christophe Van Rompaey's Lena. Among Cannes titles we can vouch for, which will play out in the section and happen to tell us that this world is not healthy state of affairs we have Andrey Zvyagintsev's brilliant Elena, Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala , and Markus Schleinzer' Michael.

With a flurry of titles (from herlmers Kawase, Lanners, Rebecca Daly in the multiple Cannes sections, the future (Venice, and TIFF prospects) look equally as fruitful for Memento Films Int. The French Sales Agent and Prod Co. have a stellar bunch in post production items such from So Yong Kim's and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's next films (see Headshot pic above), but pre-production items with an eye towards next year's Cannes with Laurent Cantet's and Cate Shortland's next features.

Korea’s Mother won the top honor at the 4th Asian Film Awards, picking up Best Picture, while Chinese and Hong Kong films sweeped the other major award categories. After the grand opening of HKIFF on Sunday night, the ceremony has been held on the following day, adding an extra kick to the film festival. Bong Joon-ho’s murder mystery predictably won in a category that has previously been dominated by Korean films.

If you asked me what films I'd like to see in the final 5 tally, I would love to see the Academy embrace non-mainstream items such as the Romanian pic from Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective) and Bong Joon-ho's Mother (South Korea)...

The October 1st deadline for all countries wanting into the Academy Award's foreign-language film category has come and gone, but you wouldn't know it since no official list of films submitted has been published.