The Chicago International Film Festival is America’s longest running competitive film festival, and organizers are promising something for everyone this year.
Michael Kutza, Founder and Director, Chicago International Film Festival. (Photo credit: Emily Oscarson)
“Young people films like ‘Trolls’ in 3D for kids, up to musicals like ‘La La Land,’ which is a big, Oscar potential, and we have a whole section on musicals. But really the festival is based on discovering new directors and honoring some of the old ones who’ve been here over the years,” says Michael Kutza, Founder and Artistic Director.
Kutza founded the CIFF in 1964 and has been bringing independent and foreign films to the masses for years.
“We do a mix of independent and Hollywood. We close with a big Hollywood film to tempt you to come see some of our foreign films. It’s a tough town, but we want to get you to see the world, and so we tempt you with Hollywood,” he says.
Kutza says not only does the festival educate fans about films they would never have seen otherwise, but the 15-day festival offers hundreds of feature films. It’s an opportunity to see many features before they are released.
“You want the best films, you want the winner of the Cannes Film Festival, Venice, Sundance, then you start with that. We go all over the world to find what’s best and bring it to film fans here in Chicago,” he says.
There will also be documentaries, films by first-time filmmakers, short-subject films, educational films, big name directors and actors along with films submitted for the Academy Awards.
There’s even a new section this year, an International Musical section.
Programming Director Mimi Plauche, Chicago International Film Festival (Photo from http://www.tiff.ro.com)
“We found everything from an Israeli-Palestinian hip-hop musical. Three different Polish musicals were made this year, and we have two of them. It’s really kind of fun looking for and finding a whole new genre of films from around the world,” says Mimi Plauche, programming director.
This year’s main competition jury president is actress Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Charlie Chaplin. She will join Kutza for a conversation about her career and the 23 days her famous father spent at Chicago’s Essanay Studios in 1915.
Actress Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Charlie Chaplin, will serve as the main competition jury president for the 52nd Chicago Film Festival. (Photo courtesy of Chicago International Film Festival)
“I was just in Cuba and spent ten days on a jury with Geraldine. I asked her if she’d ever been to Chicago and she said no. I told her to come and take part and we can honor you and you talk about your life and your dad’s films,” Kutza says.
Directors Peter Bogdonovich, left, and Steve McQueen will be honored at the 52nd Chicago International Film Festival. (Photo credit: http://www.chicago.cbslocal.com)
This year, directors Peter Bogdonovich and Steve McQueen will be honored. The film fest opens on Thursday and runs through Oct. 27. For more information, click here.
While it doesn’t have the glitz of Venice, the breadth of Toronto, or the Cannesiness of Cannes, the New York Film Festival is still a heavy-hitting stop in the fall-prestige cycle. In addition to a few major fall releases that have already screened in the United States — including Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, and Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight — the slate includes the U.S. premieres of some big-time movies, as well as two major worldwide debuts. Here are the highlights.
13th
Ava DuVernay’s new documentary is named for the 13th Amendment, which contains the clause that seems to presage mass incarceration in the United States: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” If there’s anyone who can take on a topic as weighty and complex as the prison system in modern America, it’s DuVernay, whose clear-eyed and humanizing approach seems like the ideal fit for a subject this inhumane.
20th Century Women
If you responded to Mills’s heartfelt and funny Beginners, which won Christopher Plummer a well-deserved Oscar, you’re likely to spark to this one, where Annette Bening stars as a witty, fretful single mother who enlists lodger Greta Gerwig and neighbor Elle Fanning to help raise her 15-year-old son. And if you respond to throwback attire, you’re definitely going to spark to every single jumpsuit, vintage tee, and denim jacket worn in this 1979-set film.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Besides being an Ang Lee film that’s likely going to be part of the Best Picture race, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is also sure to generate conversation for its technical ambition. Lee shot the movie, which adapts Ben Fountain’s novel about an Iraq War hero who returns home, at 120 frames per second versus the standard 24, with the intent of creating one of the most realistic and hypervisceral depictions of war ever to be shown on a movie screen. Regardless of how Billy Lynn turns out — and hopes are high — the 4K 3-D showing at NYFF should be a notable experience in and of itself.
Elle
A comedy about — wait for it — a woman brazenly overcoming her own rape, director Paul Verhoeven’s first film in French was one of the most talked-about films at Cannes. It’s also one of two acclaimed movies coming out this fall featuring the French actress Isabelle Huppert, whose Things to Come, directed by up-and-comer Mia Hansen-Løve, is also showing at NYFF. While Huppert’s two-pronged Oscar push could be a major awards-season narrative, Elle is worth seeing in its own right: Verhoeven is many things, but he’s never boring.
Jackie
Natalie Portman gives a brave, ballsy performance as Jackie Kennedy in this Pablo Larrain–directed biopic, which shrugs off the stodginess so often endemic to this genre in pursuit of something even bigger than real. Portman’s Jackie is no shrinking violet, though the men around her would love it if she played the dutiful, porcelain-faced wife even after the tragic assassination of her husband. How she, in turn, manipulates the image-crafters around her in one last bid for agency gives Jackie its startling kick.
Paterson
In an industry defined by big, loud, expensive superhero movies, Jim Jarmusch exists as the ultimate outlier. His movies are quiet, cool, and indie to the core, and new one Paterson sounds no different: Adam Driver plays a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, whose name is also Paterson, and who writes poems, and who hangs out with his wife and dog, and … that’s pretty much it. But that’s enough, and after raves out of Cannes, this should be the kind of film that gives a certain kind of moviegoer hope.
Personal Shopper
Personal Shopper director Olivier Assayas recently stated, in no uncertain terms, that Kristen Stewart is the best actress of her generation. If this comes as an unusual suggestion to you, then you haven’t been paying close-enough attention, because KStew has, truly, become a must-see performer — including in Assayas’s most recent movie, Clouds of Sils Maria, for which she won a César Award, something no American actress has ever done before. With a strange premise — Stewart’s character is a personal shopper and, also, a medium, meaning there are fancy clothes AND a ghost — and a famously divisive reception at Cannes, this gives the best actress of her generation one of the most anticipated films of the fall.
The Lost City of Z
James Gray’s last film The Immigrant was under-seen and under-heralded, as James Gray films tend to be. But his new one, The Lost City of Z, gives him an unusually sexy topic: The British explorer Percy Fawcett’s search for a city in the Amazon rain forest, based on the book of the same name by the virtuoso New Yorker writer David Grann. Hopefully, it can bring Gray the wide audience he deserves; at the very least, audiences in the know can savor a new film from one of the most thoughtful contemporary American directors.
The unmistakable face of Eric von Stroheim, a guest at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, shown here with Giovanni Ponti, the Special Commissioner of the Biennale. In 1958 the Venice Film Festival dedicated a major retrospective to the Austrian director.
KENJI MIZOGUCHI ON THE BEACH – PHOTO
Kenji Mizoguchi on the beach of the Lido in 1953: he was the winner of the Silver Lion that year for Ugetsu Monogatari, jointly with Moulin Rouge by John Huston, Thérèse Raquin by Marcel Carné, Sadko by Aleksandr Ptushko, I vitelloni by Federico Fellini and The Little Fugitive by Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin. The Jury chose not to award the Golden Lion.
GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA ON THE SEASHORE AT THE LIDO – PHOTO
Gina Lollobrigida on the seashore at the Lido in 1956: she was one of the most highly acclaimed stars that year. Oriana Fallaci described her triumphal arrival at the Palazzo del Cinema in L’Europeo magazine: “A roar rose up from the crowd. The metal barricades risked snapping like twigs, the 156 policemen trying to hold back all those bodies were on the verge of being overwhelmed by the crush. Gina alighted from a taxi accompanied by Milko Skofic and by a bodyguard. Milko looked bored. Gina was wearing a blue-green satin dress, glittering with sequins; she exhibited blood-red gloves and not a jewel around her neck. (…) The photographers rushed towards her. The bodyguard enclosed her in a circle of arms. You could no longer see her long breezy black curls, her immense wonderstruck eyes and her full lips. (…) All of this took place at ten in the evening on Tuesday August 28th, the day of the inauguration of the 17th Film Festival, also known as the Lollo’s Festival, for the heroine of our time”. Gina Lollobrigida had already participated in the Venice Film Festival in 1952 as the actress in two films: Altri tempi, a film in nine episodes by Alessandro Blasetti, and Les belles de nuit by René Clair.
ANGELO RIZZOLI AND FEDERICO FELLINI – PHOTO
Producer Angelo Rizzoli and a young Federico Fellini meet outside the Palazzo del Cinema: the year is 1958. A few months later, in March 1959, together they would begin production of La dolce vita.
ELSA MAXWELL AND OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND – PHOTO
Elsa Maxwell, the tireless mover of the Venetian smart set, dressed extravagantly as a Navy officer, hugs actress Olivia de Havilland in Venice, in 1955.
JOAN FONTAINE DISEMBARKS AT THE LIDO – PHOTO
1952: Joan Fontaine disembarks on the famous Darsena of the Excelsior Hotel. The actress came to the Venice Film Festival as the star of Ivanhoe by Richard Thorpe.
MARIA CALLAS IN VENICE – PHOTO
1957: Maria Callas is one of the stars that enliven the nights of the 18th Venice Film Festival with her husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini. That was the year that the opera singer met Aristotle Onassis for the first time in Venice, and two years later he would become her partner.
The Biennale Cinema 2016 will run Aug. 31 to Sept. 10
“Actress Moon So Ri has been named as one of the jurors for the 73rd annual Venice International Film Festival!
On July 24, her agency, C-JeS Entertainment, announced that the actor had been selected as one of the jurors for the Orizzonti section.
The festival is the oldest of its kind in the world and one of the most prestigious alongside the Cannes Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival. The Orizzonti section is a sub-section of the festival with its own awards categories.
She is the first Korean actor to be appointed as juror for the Venice Film Festival. In 2006 director Park Chan Wook was one of the jurors for the official competition, and in 2009 director Kim Jin Ah was one of the jurors for the Orizzonti section.
Moon So Ri has previously won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Emerging Actor or Actress at the 59th Venice International Film Festival for her 2002 film “Oasis.” Her films “Hill of Freedom” and “A Good Lawyer’s Wife” have also been shown at previous festivals.
A source from the festival said, “Moon So Ri is a brilliant actress who represents the Korean film industry. She has accomplished several milestones in Korean film and it is an honor to have her as juror following her 2002 award.”
Moon So Ri herself made a statement saying, “It’s always difficult to compare films and give them scores. But nothing compares to the experience of meeting filmmakers all around the world and watching films together. I have many good memories of the Venice International Film Festival and I hope to make even more this year.”
Moon So Ri has also been the juror for the Busan International Film Festival, Jeonju International Film Festival, Festival del film Locarno, and the Tokyo International Film Festival.
The 73rd International Film Festival will be held from August 31 to September 10. Meanwhile, Moon So Ri is currently filming the movie “Special Citizen.”
(Source: Post by notclaira on Soompi.com, July 24, 2016)
