If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Gone with the Woman (Tatt av kvinnen) (Director: Peter Næss): Combine the director of Elling (review) with the star of The Bothersome Man (review) and you have something that I am very tempted to make room for. Trond Fausa Aurvaag stars as the nameless Him who falls, bewildered, into love for the first time only to have his heart broken. Then, just when he’s getting over her, she returns. This sounds like a typically dry Nordic comedy, and check out that poster.
Teaser Trailer
Official Site
***
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 s&acaron;pt&acaron;mîni şi 2 zile) (Director: Cristian Mungiu): Winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Mungiu’s film follows a pregnant young woman and her best friend in 1980s Romania as they try to obtain an illegal abortion. This could be grim, but the reviews have been positive.
Clip
Official Site
***
Chacun son Cinéma (To Each His Own Cinema) (Director: Various): This omnibus film was assembled in honour of Cannes 60th anniversary this year, and brings together 33 directors. Each contributes a three-minute short on the theme of what cinema meand to them. According to the Cannes press release, “Each director was totally free to make his own three-minute film on the theme of the movie theatre, a place sacred to the world’s film buffs.” Though this is already available on DVD in Europe, it seems somehow wrong not to see the film in the setting it honours, on a giant screen in a darkened room filled with film buffs like me.
I Travelled 9,000 km to Give It To You (Wong Kar-Wai)
Dans l’Obscurité (Darkness) (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes)
Movie Night (Zhang Yimou)
***
Tagged as:
TIFF
A Jihad for Love (Director: Parvez Sharma): The first documentary of its kind, it follows several gay and lesbian Muslims from 12 different countries as their faith and their sexuality collide. From the same producer (Sandi Simcha Dubowski) as Trembling Before G-d, a similar film about homosexuality among Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. I have an ongoing interest in the way organized religion deals with the gay and lesbian community, and was really hoping that For The Bible Tells Me So, a similar film from a Christian perspective, would make it to TIFF. But this promises to be a very interesting and provocative film in its own right.
Official Site
***
Operation Filmmaker (Director: Nina Davenport): Actor/director Liev Schreiber was watching MTV when he saw a segment on a young charismatic Iraqi film student named Muthana Mohmed who felt that his dream to become a filmmaker had been crushed, first by Saddam Hussein and then by the American bombs that destroyed his film school. Convinced he could help, Schreiber invites Mohmed to assist on the set of his film Everything is Illuminated (review). The charitable gesture soon goes awry, as frustrated expectations complicate the relationship between the young Iraqi and his American “benefactors.”
***
Dai-Nipponjin (Director: Hitoshi Matsumoto): Hitoshi Matsumoto both directs and stars in this comedy about a Tokyo man who periodically transforms into a giant and battles huge monsters who attack the city. If this wacky premise isn’t enough, the film also aims some satirical jabs at current Japanese society, while revelling in the cliches of the classic Japanese monster movies.
Official Site
***
Tagged as:
TIFF