Search results for: Gus Van Sant

Here's the press release for the Venice Days selections folks: lots of names we know!

M. Blash's Lying made it to Cannes, but it failed to make much of a splash anywhere else. Benefitting from a name cast in thesps Chloe Sevigny and Jena Malone, it took me a couple of tries to work through the denseness of the quasi-drama. Bobby Bukowski's muted colors and the applied improvisational technique were perhaps the film's most difficult hurdle to overcome.

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.

Canada's most avant-garde film festival have released their entire slate for their 38th edition. Apart from Lee Daniel's pegged for Oscar - Precious, Lone Scherfig's An Education, Lars von Trier's Antichrist and Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces (Los abrasos rotos), this year's edition is filled to the gills with obscure titles and names that even a hardcore connoisseur of world cinema such as myself is unfamiliar with.

Fish Tank, Everyone Else, Dogtooth, Police Adjective, A Prophet and White Ribbon are just a half a dozen titles among the 48 films that have a shot at being nominated among several categories for 22nd The European Film Awards.