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If you're tired of those same old raggedy Red Carpets every year the 56th edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival which opens on September 18 has anounced a major change in decor --the Red Carpet this year will be FUCHSIA... and not just one rug for the stars to cavort on on on their way to the galas, but two! A carpet 9O metres long (about one American football field) will lead up the main beachfront thoroughfare to the surrealistic Kursaal complex, otherwise known as 'The Cube', where ...
Following the morning press screening in the Big Hall both American actresses and director Chadwick held court at another heavily crowded press conference because, although she´s not really a big star yet, Scarlett Jo, for her looks alone, is already a major media magnet. Scarlett, with her bright yellow hair, heart-shaped face, perfect nose, almond eyes, full sensuous lips, and porcelain complexion, looked incredibly radiant as usual, clad in a modest flowery print dress, as she responded to u...
The final class production of the fest, "The Other Boleyn Girl", (Non competition) an opulent costume drama set at the court of the most famous of all British Kings, Henry VIII, (who reigned from 1509 – 1547) has echoes reminiscent of the Golden Age of Hollywood when the likes of eminently upper crust Englishmen such as George Sanders played sneering Nazi officers, and flamboyant Australians like Errol Flynn portrayed gunslingers in Dodge City --and never mind the displaced accents...
As for the film, “Filth and Wisdom” set entirely in London, largely in the Disco scene, I was told by Neil Young, director of the UK Bradford festival (and no relation to CSNY) that the prestigious British daily, the Guardian, had described it as “the worst film in the entire history of the Berlin festival”, but others disagreed and though it was only the worst film of this years festival. Mr. Young himself, an astute film assessor, said that “If you didn’t know it was made by Madonn...
There are Stars and there are Super-Stars, and then there is MADONNA... a kind of media Super Nova, who blows other stars away, sends photogs scurrying like cockroaches in heat, and attracts incredible throngs of gawkers even when she isn’t trying to outrage the Bourgeois and seems to be on her best behavior. The forty-nine year old Queen of Pop arrived in Berlin on Wednesday looking very trim in a smart, conservative black dress, six inch high heels, and her blonde tresses parted neatly in ...
Gavras was here again in 2002 with the hard-hitting and under-rated “Amen” which tells the story of papal collusion in the German mass murder of the Jews. The poster for that film, showing a cross and a Swastika intertwined, was even more controversial than the film itself. In short, Costa-Gavras is no stranger to this long-running festival. An interesting sidelight on the this Grecian born director’s name: He was actually born in Greece in 1933 under the name of Konstantinos Gavras,...
The star-studded eight member international panel under the baton of celebrated Greco-French director Constantine Costa-Gavras was reduced to a Sextet when ace Danish director, Susan Bier, and top drawer French actress, Sandrine Bonnaire, both announced their enforced withdrawal from jury duty due to inescapable commitments elsewhere. In Bier's case it was a sudden need to visit the location of the next movie she’s shooting, while Bonnaire submitted her regrets due to "personal family re...
Films by famous directors in the over-seventy five category include “Kabei – Our Mother” by Japanese old master Yamada Yoji (third time in Berlin with a competition film), and the Polish non-competition entry “Katyn” by 80 year old director Andrzej Wajda who has been a familiar figure in Berlin over the years and was warded a Life Work career Golden Bear here three years ago. The Katyn film dealing with the mass murder of Polish Prisoners of war in WWII by the Russians which was...
The big arrival yesterday, (Day 2) was Daniel Day-Lewis, here to plug his latest, the highly touted oil tycoon drama, “There Will Be Blood”. Today, Sunday, day number three, the conference hall was festooned with the appearance in the flesh of smouldering dark haired beauty, Penelope Cruz, the Spanish star being accompanied by hairless British actor Ben Kingsley, and Catalan femme director Isabel Coixet, representing the competition film “Elegy” in which Ben and Pen are the improbable fo...
2008 is not only the 58th edition of this major European film festival, all told, but it is also the ninth anniversary of the move from West Berlin to Potsdamer Platz in the actual physical center of the new undivided Berlin. The present location, now an ultra-modern stand of new architecture including the space age SONY Center, a film museum, many upscale restaurants and two sets of state-of-the-art cinema multiplexes among its many attractions, was once a No-Man’s-Land hugging the sinis...
This was a surprising year all around as a monster film dressed up as a neo-Western from the Coen Brothers of Minnesota took the top film prize, and four European actors swept all the acting prizes leaving the likes of Johnny Depp and George Clooney out in the cold. London born Daniel Day-Lewis (50) picked up his second Best-Actor Oscar, to no one's surprise for his work in Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood", but Best Actress to Marion Cotillard (33) for her portrayal of ...
The Academy awards coming nearly a month earlier than usual this year (late February instead of late march) brought a certain "freudenschade" (Joy over other people's misery) to Western Europe and an air of gloom to Warsaw. The German newspapers were practically gloating over the fact that all four acting Oscars went to European rather than American performers (UK, France and Spain), whereas the Poles, placing high hopes on Andrzej Wajda's WW II Massacre epic "Katyn", recei...
The final film of the day was a most off-beat and slightly off-the-wall Swiss-French feature entitled "1 Journée" (One Day) by Swıss-French-English director Jacob Berger, with the director in attendance to field audience questions. Although the action of this film is compressed into a single 24 hour period a lot more happens here than in Zeynep's eight days mentioned earlier, in fact, so much happens that there is nearly enough material for two films. The compressed synopsis is...
Day four of the fest started out with a Master Class by Dutch-Frisian documentary specialist Henk Penninga, and for once an event at a film festival dubbed "master class" actually turned out to be instructive and educational as well as fascinating fun. What Henk did was to take an old documentary apart, remove the sound, then show portions of the film as still segments while asking the students what they thought was really going on in the film and what they thought the intentions of t...
Eskişehir. "Zeynep's Eight Days" ("Eight Day Daze" would be more to the point) is a film which won a best actress award at Ankara for the yoemanlike work of actress Fadik Atasoy in March. This debut feature by Cemal Şan is a long sterile meditation on the alienation of lonely livıng in sterile modern high rise apartments in a faceless big city in which the main actress who is in nearly every scene is called upon to act like a zombie or cyborg throughout. The film f...
One of the interesting sidebars of the festival is a three room Visconti exhibit on view at the main city art museum of Eskişehir, sponsored by the İtalian Cultural İnstitute in the capital, Ankara. A half dozen Italian classics by Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni. et al, will also be shown. The Anadolu campus has a major department of film studies and therefore a rather sophistıcated youthful vıewership. In an educational vein four early Hitchcock films from the thirties are scheduled and a ...
The 10th Eskişehir (Turkey) Film festival opened on Saturday, May 2 on the spacious modern-looking campus of Anadolu University wıth a flourish and gala celebration worthy of many an A-festıval. While this festival is relatively minor sandwiched in between the big Turkish festivals of İstanbul, Ankara, and Antalya, it has a truly international flavor and offers extraordinary hospitality to foreign visitors in a forested college campus setting with handsome modern buildings, guest houses, a...
Senior American superstar actor Robert De Niro (65 in August) was the trophy guest of the 45th Karlovy Vary film festival where he received a crystal globe career award for his "extraordinary contribution to world cinema" at the opening ceremony on July Fourth. But the real star of the festival here in the Bohemian valley of eternal thermal springs has turned out to be 86 year old British actor Christopher Lee who dazzled the Czech press and fans with his exraordinary knowledge of Cze...
ALEX'S FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS -- ANNO 2005 WITH A MERRY X-MAS TO ALL! 1.TROMSO, January -- A fantastic place to open the festival year if you love snow and don't mind fifteen minutes of daylight, MAX ...in January. That was just a joke, folks -- by late January you get almost a whole hour of sunlight -- around eleven AM -- but really, who needs it? ...when fest topper, irrepressible Norskie-American MARTHA OTTE, is guaranteed to provide a slate of such interesting films that you'll spend th...
LONDON -- PETER SELLERS WRITHES AGAIN "THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS" Viewed at Muswell Hill Odeon, London, Oct. 21st Not in the festival but on commercial release here in London, is a biopic, the subject of which is obvious, and which will undoubtedly arouse curiosity around the world. This biting "docu-drama" is directed by newcomer Stephen Hopkins and stars Australian Geoffrey Rush in the title role of a not very savoury Sellers. The picture has opened to "...
HAUGESUND, AUGUST 2003by Alex Deleon After two visits to Tromso (2002 and 2003) and two as well to the the Rouen Festival du Cinema Nordique in Northern France, I have been developing a taste for Nordic Cinema, so, based on these connections I applied for accreditation to the Haugesund ferstival in the Fjord country of Western Norway, which takes place in August, and was accepted -- probably because Signe Overgaard, a major figure of the Norwegian Film Institute knew me from these other No...
GDYNIA, SEPTEMBER 18, 2007ALEX DELEON FOR www.filmfestivals.com"KATYN FEVER” IN POLAND AS THE WAJDA VERSION OPENS GDYNIA FESTAndrej Wajda’s new film “KATYN” concerning the mass murder of Polish Prisoners of War perpetrated by the Russians in 1940 and for years either hushed up or cynically blamed on the Germans, is more than just another film by a famous director. It has become a “cause celebre” and a national event stirring up the collective Polish memory of this incredible Rus...
YIDL MITN FIDL Complete Plot Synopsis by Alex De Leon (Chaim Pevner) The film opens with a series of establishing shots establishing the small town of Kazimierz nad Wisla, (Kazimierz. on the Vistula) a town between Warsaw and Lublin which, at the time (1937) had a large and very old Jewish community. The camera holds on the castle on the hill and then pans to the left over many tiled rooftops coming to rest at last on a high crane shot of the central market square. We see several quick sh...
Items to Watch for at the Festivals in 2008 by Alex Deleon Harvey Milk by Gus Van Sant Tom Cruise as German Officer with Eye-patch Bollywood version of Casablanca A Polish version of Don Giovanni The Earth Stands Still Once Again ... Macho actor Sean Penn (47) is set to play gay San Francisco mayor, Harvey Milk, who was murdered by a rabid gay-baiter in 1978 -- the assassin, by Matt Damon! The Milk affair has been milked nearly dry before in various documentaries, but this wi...
Thessaloniki day 9 : A Clamorous Reception for “Honeydrippers” And a Stream of Walkouts on “Jesse James” -- November 25, 2007 PHOTO: Georges Corraface, festival president, and Despina Mouzaki, artistic director of the festival, looking on at Glover/Sayles joint press conference for ”Honeydripper” Day number nine was largely dominated by the Dynamic Duo, director John Sayles and actor Danny Glover. The day started with a Master Class by Glover (attended by Sayles) whic...
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About AlexDeleon
 Deleon Alex
(www.filmfestivals.com) THE FESTIVALS BLOG by Alex Deleon. Watch for festival coverage from the circuit. Ambiance and reviews from the hot spots. Welcoming your comments too. United States View my profileSend me a message
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