Over 295 films - this includes shorts, fiction and documentary, animation, retrospectives, tributes, professional panels, outdoor interactive installations, the festival which takes place between the 13th to the 24th of October, furiously promotes not only world talent, but local French Canadian filmmakers. Among the notable titles, we have Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro volte, Olivier Assayas' Carlos and Alex de la Iglesia's The Last Circus and Wang Bing is doing a Master Class for Venice-winning The Ditch. His epic 9 hour film Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks will also be shown as part of a retrospective.
I spent all of last week divulging some of films that I expect to be in Cannes this year, and Screen Daily happened to do the same. There are a good number of films that are mentioned of both sites' lists, but I mention about twenty films that the trade makes no mention of, and of course they have got a long list as well of films that I either passed on as potential selections or I was totally oblivious as to their existence.
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.
I'd focus on Maren Ade's Everyone Else (Kent Jones wrote an essay in this month's Film Comment about this German film and comparable on-screen relationships citing Cassavetes and Bergman examples), Zhao Dayong's three hour documentary film (Ghost Town) about how China's Cultural Revolution didn't benefit everyone and (see pic) Samuel Maoz's circa 1982 film (Lebanon) which will screen at Venice, TIFF and at the Lincoln Center - not bad for a first time filmmaker!
So the inflatable doll magically coming to life tale was perhaps too “out there” for a main comp acceptance, but Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll came on over to Un Certain Regard section along with expect works from Romanian filmmakers Cristian Mungiu (Tales From The Golden Age) and Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective), France's Denis Dercourt (Demain Des L'aube), Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Nymph) and Cannes regular (The Host, Tokyo!) Bong Joon-Ho and his latest film, Mother.