Search results for: Hirokazu Kore-eda

Compared with last year, Fortissmo Films come packing with only a single title, but that doesn't mean their sales agent won't be spending pretty much the entire festival from their rented office balcony. They signed a fairly ambitious deal with Fox - first time I've heard of a major studio outputting their titles to a films sales company of this nature and they've got one receiving a world preem at the festival in Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy.

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.

Ask me what my top film of 2008 was. Simple. Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain (see here). Ask me what my number 2 film of the year is. Simple. Steve McQueen's Hunger (see here).

Traditionally among TIFF's first wave of announcements are titles that premiered at Cannes and Berlin and are solid enough to merit a North American preem in Toronto. Of the first 26 titles announced, nineteen of them were first shown on the Croisette.

With no run away, break out titles as in the previous years (Babel, Volver, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, NCFOM, Silent Light, The Class, Gomorrah, Synecdoche, New York, Waltz with Bashir) Cannes 2009 might not have been a bust, but it was disappointing to see so many mediocre films make it into the main comp.