NEWS
Photo by Luca Dieguez
- The Locarno Film Festival has announced its awards, which include the Golden Leopard for Ralitza Petrova's Godless, Special Jury Prize for Radu Jude's Scarred Hearts, and Best Direction to João Pedro Rodrigues for The Ornithologist. Eduardo Williams, who we interviewed at the festival, won the top prize in the Filmmakers of the Present Section for The Human Surge, and Nele Wohlatz, who we also talked to, won the Prize for Best First Feature for her El Futuro Perfecto. See our index of Locarno coverage here.
- Michael Haneke has wrapped shooting on his follow-up to Amour. Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Isabelle Huppert and Mathieu Kassovitz, Happy End "revolves around the life of a middle-class family in Northern France who are faced with a number of setbacks but pay little attention to the dire situation in the refugee camps just a few miles away from their house."
- The Criterion Collection has announced its latest set of fall releases, which include Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, Lone Wolf and Cub, Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks and Akira Kurosawa's Dreams.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The trailer for Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, the director's long-awaited follow-up to his first feature, 2008's Medicine for Melancholy. It's scheduled to play at the Toronto and New York film festivals.
- David Lynch's first film! The 1967 short film Sailing with Bushnell Keeler.
- Watch Werner Herzog critique and praise the video for Kayne West's Famous.
RECOMMENDED READING
- We've been fans of American actress Kate Lyn Sheil since her (relatively) early days working with Alex Ross Perry and Joe Swanberg. Her star has continued to gently rise in the indie world, and her collaboration this year with documentarian Robert Greene, Kate Plays Christine, is bringing her even more attention. Melissa Anderson at the Village Voice profiles the actress:
Her ability to so smartly lay bare the existential pitfalls of performing may be rooted in her early disenchantment with the profession. As Sheil says in the opening minutes of Greene's film, in what seems to be a "real" autobiographical précis, she had wanted to be an actor since she was nine, explaining of the profession's appeal: "Acting somehow became this outlet for me to be seen." Yet shortly after graduating from New York University's drama program in 2006, she quit.
- David MacKenzie's Hell or High Water was one of the few genre movies to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this year. At the A.V. Club, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (an avowed MacKenzie fan at the Notebook) interviewed the director about his process:
AVC: So, help me imagine this environment. Were these standard shooting days? DM: I don’t like to do more than 10 hours a day. And it was hot, and there were challenges with the cars—a lot of car stuff you can’t really control so well. We did six-day weeks because we had to squeeze in everything we could with Chris. And it eased off, because we had the lawmen and you can see it in the film—they’re a bit slower and they’ve got more time to talk. It’s less frenetic. It was very fortunate to divide the filming into those two sections: You had one frenetic half and one that’s more stately, more relaxed. We had four and a half weeks to shoot that stuff, which was a very reasonable time to do it.
RECOMMENDED LISTENS
- Speaking of Herzog, the director has a new documentary headed to cinemas this month (Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World) and not one but two additional new films headed to fall film festivals. For his WTF podcast, Marc Maron chatted with the prodigious Werner Herzog.
EXTRAS
- We love Benjamin Marra's poster design for the re-release of Takeshi Kitano's Boiling Point (1990).
- Keanu Reeves photographed by Gus Van Sant. One of several Polaroids by the director posted at AnOther.