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NEWS
Zhang Yimou's One Second (2020)
- China has released a new five-year film plan. Spanning from 2021 to 2025, the plan includes goals such as the release of 10 "major" films a year, new cinemas in rural areas, a stronger presence at international film festivals like Cannes, and more.
- The Cinemateca Portuguesa has announced that the Cinemateca Brasileira will be reopening after a prolonged closure, in a first step towards a full recovery of the institution and its staff.
- Shooting has begun on Lisandro Alonso's long-awaited four-part film Eureka. The film is said to "examine the indigenous peoples of the Americas and how they’ve inhabited their specific environments across the centuries." The first part takes place on the US-Mexico border in 1870 and stars Viggo Mortensen and Maria de Medeiros. Chiara Mastroianni will also star in the film in a still undisclosed part.
- Ira Sachs has started shooting his newest film Passages, produced by Saïd Ben Saïd and starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Sachs has previously described the film as the story of "two men who’ve been together for fifteen years, and one of them has an affair with a woman."
- Hirokazu Kore-eda is teaming up with Netflix to develop "a drama series and a big-budget movie." Not much is known about either project, but at the recent Netflix Japan Festival 2021 showcase, Kore-eda stated that "through streaming, [radical] films can be actually born into the world. [...] By breaking old boundaries and limitations, there are chances to give birth to new creators and new works."
- On February 12, 2022, Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan's band SQÜRL will be in London performing live scores for four Man Ray films.
- To commemorate the centenary of Chris Marker's birth, Peter Blum Gallery presents Chris Marker: 100, an exhibition featuring seven decades of Marker's career through almost 250 photographs, film stills, and prints.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Above: Simon Liu's Happy Valley (2020)
- Ecstatic Static is currently showing five films by Hong Kong-born, New York-based filmmaker Simon Liu, including Happy Valley (2020) and Signal 8 (2019). Liu's films, which contend with the history and politics of Hong Kong's psychogeography, have been shown at international film festivals including TIFF, the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and New Directors/New Films.
- A new trailer for Paolo Sorrentino's auto-biographical The Hand of God, which is also Italy's official submission to the Oscars. Read our review of the film by Leonardo Goi here.
- The official trailer for Adrienne, a original documentary about the life and legacy of the late actress, director, and screenwriter Adrienne Shelly, which premieres December 1 on HBO Max.
- Sylvester Stallone has released a documentary on YouTube following the making of the Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago director's cut. The documentary offers a look into Stallone's editing process and his overall feelings about the Rocky franchise.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: On Cinema At the Cinema
- In light of the ongoing series On Cinema at the Cinema at the Cinema at the Museum of the Moving Image, Max Carpenter explores the "immutable catharsis" of Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington's parodic series On Cinema at the Cinema.
- A new excerpt from Adam Nayman's forthcoming book David Fincher: Mind Games deconstructs the enduring terror of Fincher's Se7en.
- Ruairí McCann writes on the homegrown Irish kung-fu film Fatal Deviation, a "richly specific and idiosyncratic cultural object" from 1998.
- "I kid you not, I held on to the last 40 pages for a full year because I didn’t want it to be over." For AnOther Magazine, Zola director Janicza Bravo reflects on the radical genius of Bill Gunn and his newly reprinted novel, Rhinestone Sharecropping.
- In a new feature at Variety, Paul Thomas Anderson discusses the inspiration behind his new film Licorice Pizza, his thoughts on the word "auteur," and enjoying Marvel films.
- Over at the Film Stage, Jordan Raup interviews Alexandre Koberidze about What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? and his favorite city symphonies.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The Licorice Pizza soundtrack will be released in December from Norman Records. It includes an original theme song composed by Jonny Greenwood, as well as tunes by Paul McCartney & Wings, David Bowie, Gordon Lightfoot and Bing Crosby.
- Florence Scott-Anderton's newest mix for NTS Radio's Sounds on Screen series is dedicated to Thomas Newman, the composer behind films like The Player, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- "That drive to create is something inherent, essentially entwined with me, my consciousness and awareness." Dalibor Barić introduces his film Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus, which is now showing exclusively on MUBI in the series Undiscovered.
- Bedatri D. Choudhury explores the revelations of Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind, a long-lost drama of greed and murder.
- Ben Prideaux locates One Shot that encapsulates Terence Davies's 1988 masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives.
- Alonso Aguilar writes on Cuban documentarian Sara Goméz's 1974 film One Way or Another, which provides a radical new perspective on her country after the revolution.
- In an interview with Jay Kuehner, Robert Greene discusses his latest boundary-pushing documentary Procession.