YORGOS LANTHIMOS’ “ALPS” GOES TO KINO LORBER

By Jason Guerrasio

Kino Lorber has acquired U.S. rights to Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Alps, the follow-up to his Oscar-nominated cult hit Dogtooth.

According to indieWIRE, the film will be released in the spring of 2012. Kino also released Dogtooth in the States.

The fourth feature by Lathimos, Alps follows an unusual group who offers grieving family members the opportunity to have their troupe reenact and continue the lives of deceased loved ones.

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won Best Screenplay, and the Toronto International Film Festival. It will screen next at AFI Fest in L.A.

If we learned anything from Dogtooth, we’ll be expecting Lanthimos to give us an original (often comically bafalling) story. And if we’re luck more dancing scenes like this:

NYFF: WEST MEMPHIS 3 ON HAND FOR UNVEILING OF NEW “PARADISE LOST 3″ ENDING

By Jason Guerrasio

You probably know by now that the West Memphis 3 (Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin) were released from prison after giving an Alford plea — a guilty plea but not admitting to the act and asserting innocence — in August. At the time directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were locking up their third film on the WM3, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, when they heard the news of the surprise development and raced down to Arkansas. Unable to put the footage of the three being freed in the film before screening it at the Toronto International Film Festival, Berlinger and Sinofsky unveiled the new ending tonight at the New York Film Festival.

And adding to the excitement, Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin were on hand in their first public appearance since being freed.

For Berlinger and Sinofsky, screening at NYFF brings things full circle. As Berlinger noted before the screening, their first Paradise Lost movie screened at New Directors/New Films in 1996.

Like Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, part 3 looks at new findings by the defense team that their clients did not murder the three young boys found in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993 while backtracking to highlight the prosecution’s questionable tactics to convict the WM3 and look at the families effected by the murders/aftermath. All captured beautifully by DP Robert Richman (An Inconvenient Truth, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster).

Also similar to Revelations, in part 3 the most eye-opening footage is that of the victim’s families. The theatrics by John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the victims, is some of the most memorable moments from the first two films. At one point he was even considered a suspect and took a polygraph to prove his innocence. Well, in Purgatory questions are raised about another stepfather of a victim, Terry Hobbs, as new tests show his DNA on one of the ropes used to tie up the victims. Byers, who now believes the WM3 are innocent, shows no quarter to Hobbs as he  pulls out … Read the rest

TORONTO 2011: “WAVELENGTHS” PART II

By Livia Bloom

The adventurous Wavelengths experimental film programs at the Toronto International Film Festival, curated first by Susan Oxtoby and then, in recent years, by Andréa Picard, are a true festival highlight. 2011 was exemplary in this regard, its five experimental programs marked by a diverse range of aesthetics and artistic projects.

An eerie mood pervades the smart, surprising Sea Series #10 by John Price, one of the only films in the 2011 Wavelengths experimental program at the Toronto International Film Festival explicitly inspired by world events. An intertitle explains that the film was made “10,190 km from Fukushima” on May 21, 2011, two months after the deadly Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, and a week after a leak was reported at the nuclear power plant that lurks just outside Toronto. Located on the shores of Lake Ontario, Pickering is one of the largest nuclear plants in the world. For Price, the date held the added significance of having been designed by a religious group as the day of rapture.

To obtain lush, saturated color, Price develops his 35mm and 16mm footage himself; he also used water from Lake Ontario, the star of Sea Series #10, in that film’s chemical process. The first movement depicts distant sailboats doubling and shifting under a dancing, blue-tinted sun; later shots show tiny dead sardines lapping at the shore, and richly contrasting black-and-white footage of beachgoers at play in Pickering’s ominous shadow.

For James Benning, the formalist behind 2004′s 13 Lakes (thirteen static ten-minute shots of lakes) and 10 Skies (ten static ten-minute shots of the sky), the 99-minute Twenty Cigarettes (2011) is virtually an action movie. Each of the film’s shots (twenty, to mimic the number of smokes in a pack) lasts for the length of a single cigarette as consumed by one of the filmmaker’s friends. The director sees the film as, among other things, a record of the diversity of those who surround him these days and indeed, the ten men (including Thom Andersen, whose Get Out of the Car (2010) made a splash in Wavelengths 2010) and ten women (including Suzan Pitt… Read the rest

TORONTO: WHIT STILLMAN DISCUSSES “DAMSELS IN DISTRESS”

By Scott Macaulay

Via The Guardian, here’s a talk with Whit Stillman and clips from his new film, Damsels in Distress.

… Read the rest

TIFF: “I AM A GOOD PERSON/I AM A BAD PERSON”

By Allan Tong

Ingrid Veninger’s latest film has to be the fastest movie ever made for TIFF. The Toronto filmmaker was on her way to unspool her 2010 feature, Modra,  at film fests across Europe when she seized the opportunity to shoot an entirely new film.

That meant 19 days of scripting, casting and rehearsals in Toronto in March this year, 13 days shooting in north England, Paris and Berlin, then wrapping with five weeks of post in T.O. to make the TIFF deadline. That also meant Veninger presenting Modra in one cinema and then becoming “Ruby White,” who was premiering a fictitious film at the same festival at the same time. I don’t even think John Cassavetes took personal filmmaking this far.

The constraints Veninger placed on herself and her skeleton crew and cast probably made i am a good person/i am a bad person a better film. In fact, it is a strong, lively drama, full of laughs, twists and honest character study. The film centers on Veninger’s alter ego, White, a bohemian filmmaker struggling with a lousy marriage, and her daughter Sara (real-life daughter Hallie Switzer), who wrestles with a secret pregnancy.  Ruby invites Sara to be her assistant on the festival tour, but really she wants them to bond. In an amusing role-reversal, Ruby stays up all night partying while Sara goes to bed. After the first festival in Bradford, Sara demands head-space and splits to Paris to stay with a cousin while Ruby ventures to Berlin alone and lonely.  Each woman does soul searching, with Sara asking herself if she’s a good person or a bad one.

“The intent was to make her [Hallie] happy,” Veninger explains after the second Toronto screening, “because she wasn’t keen on going back on a festival tour.” The Modra publicity tour began last September and was supplemented by a Canadian theatrical release in February. “She was burnt-out,” says Veninger, “but the flights were booked. So I proposed we bring her boyfriend.” Braden Sauder doubles as Sara’s boyfriend on screen and as the film’s sound recordist, given his work as a sound engineer and … Read the rest

TORONTO PHOTOS AND NOTES, #2

For several people I talked to, my favorite film at Cannes became their favorite film at Toronto. Oslo, August 31 is Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his inspiring hit film, Reprise. That movie, a tale of youth and best friends and literature and longing and rock and roll, was smart, sophisticated and with an emotional arc like a great mix tape. It was also somewhat dazzling in its montage, using split-screen, freeze frames and a European post-punk soundtrack to make its story of young Norwegian literati one that felt like young adulthood everywhere. After several years working on a larger-scale American picture that Trier hopes will go next year, the director decided to quickly make another feature. Oslo August 31 is a melancholic and deeply empathetic portrait of a recovering heroin addict on his first weekend away from his half-way house and amidst regular society. Based on a 1931 novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (also adapted by Louis Malle in The Fire Within) film stars physician and sometime-actor Anders Danielson Lie — he also appeared in Reprise — who delivers a heartbreakingly stoic performance. As befitting this more somber subject matter, Trier’s editorial pyrotechnics are dialed down this time. Nonetheless, the film’s opening minutes are a beautiful, elegiac city symphony for the film’s eponymous locale. I interviewed Trier and we talked about how movies with sad subjects, like this one, don’t have to make you blue. Like a melancholy song, they can move you and leave you with a feeling that heightens your sensitivity to everyday life. Watch for this interview here soon.

The IFP had a rooftop party at the Thompson Hotel with sponsors Calvin Klein and RBC. Celebrating women in film, the party honored a number of the fest’s female directors and stars, including Lynn Ramsay, Dee Rees, Selma Blair, Lynn Shelton and Susan Youssef. Spinning was The Ellen Show‘s DJ Tony — better known to Filmmaker readers as Tony Okungbowa, an actor and executive producer of Andrew Dosunmu’s Sundance and IFP Narrative Lab selection, Restless City.

Speaking of IFP parties and films, here’s … Read the rest

TORONTO 2011: “WAVELENGTHS” PART I

For fans of experimental film, 2011 has been a year of heavy losses. Yet even as we mourn the deaths of pioneer filmmakers including Jordan Belson, George Kuchar, George Landow (aka Owen Land), and Adolphas Mekas, the 2011 Wavelengths programs at the Toronto International Film Festival indicated that experimental film is alive and well… and living in Canada.

Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure is a site-specific live projection performance that was a highlight of this year’s festival. In the projection booth, Brooklyn-based artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder distilled a found 35mm commercial film print into rich, gorgeous beams of light that danced on the screen, the auditorium walls, and the faces of the rapt, dreamy spectators who filled the theatere at the Ontario Gallery of Art. (The movie that was the basis for the work was never identified to the audience, and the artists have never watched it in its entirety.) The introductory movement of the piece is a marvel: tiny lines of white light that were movie credits in a past life shimmer onscreen like sunlight filtering through deep water. Occasionally a half-glimpsed face from the original film surfaces deep within the piece like a mirage in the desert; other moments resemble flashlights dancing through fog.

The audio to the piece, created and mixed live in the theater by the Dallas-born contemporary composer Olivia Block, is at once organic and otherworldly. In addition to sounds produced digitally and musically, Block works with sounds she has collected from the world around her. Occasionally, these feel familiar: is that the sound of rushing water? Peeper frogs chirping on a summer night? The plaintive bleat of an alarm? The whir of an airplane about to take off? The pop of distant fireworks? Together, the visual and aural components of Aberration of Light are a symphony of lights and darks, quiets and louds, that are greater in concert then the sum of their parts.

Empire, as tiny and wondrous as Aberration of Light is long and wondrous, is the gem of a trailer for the 2010 Viennale made by Apitchatpong Weersethakul. Happily, it … Read the rest

TIFF 2011: THE YEAR OF THE DOC?

The buzz word at this year’s TIFF is “doc.” For the first time in its 35-year history, the Toronto International Film Festival opened with a documentary: Davis Guggenheim‘s From The Sky Down, which profiles the world’s most popular rock band, U2. Filmgoers and critics are also buzzing over Crazy Horse, by verite legend Frederick Wiseman;  Samsara (by Baraka‘s Ron Fricke); Tony Krawitz‘s The Tall Man,; and Girl Model by Ashley Sabin and David Redmon.

The doc vibe was in the air on Monday morning at a breakfast launch for Focus Foward. Sponsored by Cinelan and GE, Focus Forward invites big-name documentarians such as Morgan Spurlock (Comic-Con: Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope), Nick Broomfield (Sarah Palin: You Betcha) and Jessica Yu (Last Call at the Oasis) to make three-minute socially conscious docs that A-list festivals like Sundance, IDFA and Tribeca will screen. It was a rare bit of good news in an otherwise tough documentary business climate.

A lot of the talk that followed at Doc Conf, TIFF’s annual doc pow-wow of panels and keynotes, focused on raising money, finding distribution and getting eyeballs in front of screens. Idealism vs. cold, hard cash. A weak economy and broadcasters slimming their funding envelopes have forced documentarians on both sides of the border to launch crowdfunding campaigns on platforms like Kickstarter.com and find new ways of knocking on doors. Or rather, find new doors to knock on.

At the Focus Foward breakfast, Spurlock remained undeterred, but realistic: ”There will always be people who’ll give you money. You got to find them. When I made the Greatest Movie [Ever Told] I called 650 companies and we got 15 to say yes. It was ten months of just cold-calling, meetings, more cold-calling and meetings…. There’s a private financier for every idea, but you gotta find that guy who’ll say, “Oh my God! This is the greatest idea I ever heard! Where have you been all my life?”

For the sake of disclosure, my co-director and I last year raised Kickstarter seed money for our own African amputee … Read the rest

TORONTO PHOTOS AND NOTES, #1

The IFP organized a screening series at TIFF this year for RBC, the Royal Bank of Canada, at the Thompson Hotel. The event turned into a four-night run of Ryan O’Nan’s festival selection, The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best, which knocked out the crowd each night. As I moderated the Q&A’s, I can attest: this film plays.

The movie was selected for the IFP’s Narrative Lab just this past summer, and it happily surprised all of us by finishing so quickly and making it to Toronto. The Brooklyn Brothers is a totally winning tale of a makeshift band on a haphazard cross-country tour. It speaks to both a DIY-youth generation as well as to boomers mulling their own life choices and vicariously living out through the movie their own “what if…?” scenarios. Above are pictured, from left to right, producer Kwesi Collisson, writer/director/star O’Nan, and producer Jason Berman. At the Q&A’s, I learned that the film has already picked up a soundtrack deal from Warner/Rhino Records, and that the movie’s fictional band is now a real one, with records to follow.

One of my favorite films in Toronto was David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s disturbing documentary, Girl Model. In following a thirteen-year-old Siberian girl traveling to Japan for modeling work, it turns into an eerie critique of a post-modern global image trade. I was haunted by the scenes of young Nadya in the middle of giant Japanese magazine stands hunting for her portrait amidst a sea of fashion magazines. Read my interview with Sabin and Redmon here. Above, they are pictured with Rachel Blais, another young model who appears in the film.

After living in various cities around the world, writer/director Alison Murray has moved to Argentina, where she is making movies… and teaching tango. Dance has featured in all of Murray’s films so far, and she is also a competition-level tango dancer. At TIFF she premiered her Caprichosos, which is a documentary about the murga — what she calls “tango’s bastard cousin.” Here is Murray at the IFP/Cinereach party. Read our interview with her … Read the rest

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR “UNION SQUARE” DIRECTOR NANCY SAVOCA

Nancy Savoca’s True Love was an early high-water mark in the modern independent film movement. In fact, its storyline, newcomer casting and loose style is now the template for much current indie drama. So, it’s great to report that over 20 years later Savoca is back with another intimate drama realized on a low budget and entirely outside the industry. With a stellar cast (Mira Sorvino, Tammy Blanchard and Patti Lupone), Savoca explores sister dynamics through the lens of a Canon 5D. The film, Union Square, premieres today at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Filmmaker: What were the origins of Union Square, and were the relationship dynamics of the film’s two lead sisters inspired by any in your own life?

Savoca: I was sitting in a coffee shop with (producer) Neda Armian and (screenwriter) Mary Tobler. We were venting our frustration that we couldn’t raise money for any of our projects and Neda said, “Let’s just shoot something. Anything! Shoot in my apartment. It’s yours!”

Little did she know that I’d take her up on it.

We had to finance this ourselves and needless to say, our resources were limited. My biggest fear was that, because of our low budget and short schedule, we’d be forced to shoot some boring, half-baked ‘two-people-in-a-room’ scenario. (Neda’s apartment is actually just one room).

So, I entered the project feeling a bit shaky but, luckily, Mary was fearless. Over the summer, she and I batted the script back and forth. It was great fun to get the emails with her latest draft- like opening a lovely gift every time!

I also enlisted the help of my favorite movie couples: Roberto Rossellini/Anna Magnani and John Cassavetes/Gena Rowlands. “The Human Voice” (part of the feature, Amore) and Woman Under the Influence, were an inspiration for telling an emotionally powerful story within a small canvas.

Like both films, I wanted to bring our audience in close with some difficult women. Maybe it’s a reaction to so-called “reality tv” which makes us see people as either crazy, stupid, uptight or bitchy. It plays on our … Read the rest