Grasshopper Film has picked up the U.S. distribution rights to Milla, the French drama from filmmaker Valérie Massadian. The pic will bow in theaters next year followed by a VOD, home-video, and non-theatrical roll-out. It follows lovers Milla and Leo who live a clandestine life as their meager furnishings and sustenance countered by a love is neither a logic nor substitute. But such an existence will only last until forces of nature take hold. Where is there to go in its…...
- 12/13/2017
- Deadline
Studies in subtraction. Milla traces the arc of life solely through the in-betweens. Major upheavals occur, and we see both where they come from and their fallout, but not the events themselves. That is hardly new material for art films, but this is yet still something else. The big changes are background radiation, and the focus is entirely the mundane details of doing the laundry, working on a boat, cleaning a room, playing with a child. This isn’t slice of life work; its purview is too great, following the title character through a full coming of age. That macro-micro combination is utterly unique – the film’s focus can’t even be described as quotidian, because its sequences come from the moments that seem even smaller than that. I don’t think there’s a word in the English language for it.
Milla (Severine Jonckeere) and Leo (Luc Chessel) are...
Milla (Severine Jonckeere) and Leo (Luc Chessel) are...
- 11/14/2017
- by Daniel Schindel
- The Film Stage
The American Film Institute (AFI) has announced the films that will be featured in their New Auteurs and American Independents sections at the upcoming AFI Fest 2017 presented by Audi. Selections include a number of lauded features from around the festival circuit, including Cannes offerings like “I Am Not a Witch,” SXSW favorites like “Gemini” and “Mr. Roosevelt,” the Sundance breakout “Thoroughbreds,” and Joseph Kahn’s Toronto Midnight Madness favorite “Bodied,” among others.
Highlighting first- and second-time feature film directors, New Auteurs is designed as the festival’s platform for upcoming filmmakers from all over the world to showcase their new films. This year, the section includes 11 films, nine of which come from female directors. Similarly, AFI Fest’s American Independents section aims to represent the best of this year’s independent filmmaking. Pushing boundaries of form and content across narrative and documentary cinema, this section includes 11 films from both fresh...
Highlighting first- and second-time feature film directors, New Auteurs is designed as the festival’s platform for upcoming filmmakers from all over the world to showcase their new films. This year, the section includes 11 films, nine of which come from female directors. Similarly, AFI Fest’s American Independents section aims to represent the best of this year’s independent filmmaking. Pushing boundaries of form and content across narrative and documentary cinema, this section includes 11 films from both fresh...
- 10/16/2017
- by Kate Erbland
- Indiewire
The following essay was produced as part of the 2017 Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring film critics that took place during the 70th edition of the Locarno Film Festival.
Locarno isn’t just home to a major European film festival. It’s also an ideal place for many Swiss and foreign families to travel in summer and enjoy its hot weather, pleasant cuisine, and serene lake. This makes it a terrific place for contemplating new movies.
Ironically, during the 70th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, many of the films outwardly questioned the value of traditional family life. Many viewers encountered the puzzling contrast of watching subversive movies, leaving the screening rooms, and watching very conventional heterosexual families enjoying their vacations. But this only made the power of these movies stand out.
“C’est moi” says Fanny Ardant, a transgender women, in “Lola Pater,” the film by the Franco-Algerian director Nadir Mokneche,...
Locarno isn’t just home to a major European film festival. It’s also an ideal place for many Swiss and foreign families to travel in summer and enjoy its hot weather, pleasant cuisine, and serene lake. This makes it a terrific place for contemplating new movies.
Ironically, during the 70th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, many of the films outwardly questioned the value of traditional family life. Many viewers encountered the puzzling contrast of watching subversive movies, leaving the screening rooms, and watching very conventional heterosexual families enjoying their vacations. But this only made the power of these movies stand out.
“C’est moi” says Fanny Ardant, a transgender women, in “Lola Pater,” the film by the Franco-Algerian director Nadir Mokneche,...
- 9/14/2017
- by Francisco Noronha
- Indiewire
Mrs. Fang director Wang BingBelow you will find the awards for the 70th Locarno Festival, as well as an index of our coverage.AWARDSInternational CompetitionGolden Leopard: Mrs. Fang (Wang Bing) Special Jury Prize: Good Manners (Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra) Best Direction: F.J. Ossang (9 Doigts) Best Actress: Isabelle Huppert (Madame Hyde) Best Actor: Elliott Crosset Hove (Winter Brothers)Filmmakers of the Present Golden Leopard: ¾ (Ilian Metev) Special Jury Prize: Milla (Valerie Massadian) Prize for Best Emerging Director: Kim Dae-hwan (The First Lap) Special Mentions: Distant Constellation (Shevaun Mizrahi), Damned Summer (Pedro Cabeleira)Signs of Life Best Film: Cocote (Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias) Mantarraya Award: Phantasiesätze (Dane Komljen)First Feature Best First Feature: Scary Mother (Ana Urushadze)Art Peace Hotel Award: Meteors (Gürcan Keltek)Special Mention: Those Who Are Fine (Cyril Schäublin)Favorite MOMENTSFestival coverage by Daniel KasmanYacht Strafing, Gym Rivalry, Alcatraz Island: On Jacques Tourneur's Nick Carter, Master...
- 8/28/2017
- MUBI
Valérie Massadian. Photo by Locarno Festival | Marco Abram.Six years ago, Valérie Massadian won the Opera Prima, the Locarno Festival’s first feature prize, for Nana, a great film that has since developed a small but deeply impassioned following. She returned to the festival this year with Milla and received another award, the Special Jury Prize in the Filmmakers of the Present competition. Simultaneously tender and brutal, in the film 17-year-old Milla (Séverine Jonckeere) runs away with Leo (Luc Chessel) before a series of incidents cause her to mature faster than nature had intended and make the uneasy transition from childhood to motherhood. We sat in a shady courtyard in Locarno to speak with Massadian about Milla and how it relates to, and expands upon, the project she undertook with Nana, as well as what it means to make films with and about young women. This transcription may give an indication of her demeanor,...
- 8/28/2017
- MUBI
Update: Audience award winner revealed; Good Manners, Winter Brothers also among winners.
Documentary filmmaker Wang Bing became the fifth director from China in Locarno’s seven-decade history to win the top honour of the Golden Leopard at this year’s edition.
Mrs. Fang, which is the first documentray ever to win the festival’s top prize, follows the last days of a 67-year-old Alzheimer’s patient in southern China.
Previous Golden Leopard winners from China were Hongqui Li with Winter Vacation in 2010 and Xiaolu Guo with She, a Chinese a year before, as well as Shuo Wang with Father in 2000 and Yue Lü with Mr Zhao in 1998.
The decision by the international competition jury, headed by director Olivier Assayas, reflects a trend at international festivals of recent years for documentaries beating out competition from fiction productions.
While the special jury prize went to the Brazilian writing and directing team Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s Good Manners about...
Documentary filmmaker Wang Bing became the fifth director from China in Locarno’s seven-decade history to win the top honour of the Golden Leopard at this year’s edition.
Mrs. Fang, which is the first documentray ever to win the festival’s top prize, follows the last days of a 67-year-old Alzheimer’s patient in southern China.
Previous Golden Leopard winners from China were Hongqui Li with Winter Vacation in 2010 and Xiaolu Guo with She, a Chinese a year before, as well as Shuo Wang with Father in 2000 and Yue Lü with Mr Zhao in 1998.
The decision by the international competition jury, headed by director Olivier Assayas, reflects a trend at international festivals of recent years for documentaries beating out competition from fiction productions.
While the special jury prize went to the Brazilian writing and directing team Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s Good Manners about...
- 8/12/2017
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
Days of Glory (1944)This year at the Locarno Festival I am looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes from films across the 70th edition's selection that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.***“Like anything you will ever tell me,” dreamily says a Soviet dancer-turned partisan (Tamara Toumanova) to her lover and commander Vladmir (Gregory Peck in his first role), “it’s learned by heart.” Days of Glory (1944), a highly evocative masterpiece from Jacques Tourneur conjured in that brief moment during World War 2 when Hollywood was asked to make movies in support of our Soviet allies, with disjunctive, lyrical surrealness casts this dancer among the hardened Russian soldiers isolated in a crumbling, underground redoubt behind enemy lines. She comes from a world of art unknown to these fighters,...
- 8/11/2017
- MUBI
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