Munich Film Festival to open with Me Too

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and Danish actor  Mads Mikkelsen are to be honoured with CineMerit Awards at this year’s Filmfest München (June 25 – July 3, 2010) which kicks off with the Spanish film Me, Too! (Yo, Tambien!) by Alvaro Pastor and Antonio Naharro.

The CineMerit award is presented in recognition of outstanding personalities in the international film community for their extraordinary contributions to film as an art form.

The award to Kiarostami will be complemented by a six-film retrospective including his Cannes competition film Copie Conforme, while Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising and Anno Saul’s The Door will be shown in honour of Mikkelsen.

This year’s Retrospective will be dedicated to the most comprehensive ever review of the work of the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl, presenting all of his films from the past 30 years, including his first short at the Vienna Film Academy Einsvierzig as well as the work for television and little known shorts.

In addition, Seidl will be bringing “work in progress” footage from two of his latest productions – the documentary Im Keller (working title) about the everyday life in Austrian cellars and the feature film Paradies – to show in a special event during the festival.

Traditionally, Munich presents the latest crop of the newest German feature films and the 2010 is no exception with world premieres of such titles as The Silence by Baran bo Odar, The Last Nice Day Of Autumn by Ralf Westhoff, The Last Employee by Alexander Adolph and The Bumblebee by Sebastian Stern.

Other films having their world premieres at the Filmfest include Gandulf Hennig’s Merle Haggard: Learning To Live With Myself, Rex Bloomstein’s This Prison Where I Live, Lorenz Knauer’s Jane’s Journey, while American indies Bass Ackwards, Life 2.0 and Some Days Are Better Than Others will be celebrate their European premieres in Munich.

Festival director Andreas Ströhl and his programmers have also lined up such international titles as the Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, last weekend’s Transilavian Trophy winner Mundane History, Olivier Assayas’ “extended version” of Carlos, as well as Nicolas Entel’s Signs Of My Father, Sebastian Lelio’s Navidad, Jia Zhang-ke’s I Wish I Knew, Tommy Pallotta’s American Prince, Cam Archer’s Shit Year, and Andrei Ujica’s The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu.

Other highlights range from a Focus on Indian Cinema showcasing films which have received little or no attention outside their home country such as Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance, Girish Kasaravalli’s Gulabi Talkies and Paresh Khamdor’s Khargosh, to a tribute to three of the greatest filmmakers of New German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff and Werner Herzog.

The Filmfest will have the world premiere the restored version of Fassbinder’s 1976 film I Only Want You To Love Me as well as screen the ‘Director’s Cut’ of Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum and Herzog’s My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done and two documentaries on Fassbinder and Herzog.

In total, more than 200 films from 42 countries will be shown as German premieres at the Munich festival which will close on July 3 with Jean-Stephane Bron’s Cleveland Versus Wall Street putting US banks in the dock. More information can be found at www.filmfest-muenchen.de.