All Venice articles – Page 94
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News
Italian sales agents announce deals on eve of Venice
Italian sales agents have announced two pick-ups on the eve of the 65th Venice Film Festival, which kicks off Aug 27.Rai Trade has picked up Pupi Avati's competition title Il papa di Giovanna, about a man who has to put his daughter in a mental institution after she murders a ...
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Celluloid Dreams picks up two Venice titles
Celluloid Dreams has added two Venice titles to its line up. Amir Naderi's Vegas: Based On A True Story and Matt Tyrnauer's Valentino: The Last Emperor now join Celluloid's slate, the company announced Tuesday. Valentino will have a gala screening at La Fenice and is also set to run in ...
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Beta Cinema handling sales on two Venice world premieres
Beta Cinema is to handle international sales on two Italian films - Marco Pontecorvo's Pa-Ra-Da, the opening film of the Horizons sidebar, and Uberto Pasolini's Venice Days title Machan - which are having their world premieres at next week's Venice Film Festival.Pa-Ra-Da, DoP Pontecorvo's feature film debut, tells the true ...
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Venice Horizons adds Iranian debut Tedium (Khastegi)
Tedium (Khastegi), the debut film of Iranian director Bahman Motamedian, is the first of two surprise films to be added to Venice's Horizon's line-up, the Biennale announced today.The Tehran-set film follows the experience of seven transsexuals within the confines of Iran's conservative culture. The film's title underscores the public and ...
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Natalie Portman makes directorial debut with Venice short Eve
American actress Natalie Portman's directorial short film debut Eve will open The Venice Film Festival's Corto Cortissimo section dedicated to short films.Portman will preside over opening events for that section onSept 1. She was featured in Venice last year in her cameo in Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Unlimited.Portman's debut, entitled Eve, ...
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The Match Factory picks up Turkish Venice title Milk
Cologne-based The Match Factory has picked up international distribution for its third Venice competition title with the acquisition of Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu's Milk (Süt), the second part of his Yusuf trilogy.With a mother-son relationship as its main focus, Milk stars Melih Selçuk, Basak Köklükaya, and Riza Akin, and is ...
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Match Factory handles Venice competitors Jerichow, Teza
Cologne-based The Match Factory will handle international sales on two Venice competition titles - Christian Petzold's Jerichow and Haile Gerima's Teza - screening as world premieres at the festival.Jerichow marks The Match Factory's second collaboration with Petzold after his Berlinale 2007 competition film Yella which won lead actress and Petzold ...
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Theo Angelopoulos pulls Dust of Time from Venice
Just one day before theVenice Film Festival announces its line-up (Tuesday), one of the most eagerly-awaited world premieres, Theo Angelopoulos' Dust of Time has been pulled from the selection.The decision by the Greek auteur and his producers came after screenings slots could not be found that would have allowed leading ...
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Marco Mueller confirmed for another four years in Venice
Marco Mueller has been confirmed as the artistic director for the Venice Film Festival for four more years.The new board of directors of the Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia (the Venice Biennale arts festival foundation), chaired now by Paolo Baratta, confirmed the appointment at the board's first meeting today.Marco Mueller ...
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Croff ousted at Venice Biennale after four years
Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli will not be renewing the mandate of David Croff, the Minister declared at a Biennale Foundation summit meeting last night.Croff has acted as President of the Venice's Biennale and worked alongside Cinema artistic director Marco Mueller for four years.The President of the Biennale is in ...
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Reviews
Glory To The Filmmaker (Kantoku Banzai)
Dir. Takeshi Kitano. Japan. 2007.Takeshi Kitano's last couple of films confirm that Japan 's maverick filmmaker is having a hard time deciding which way to go next and feels the urgent need to share it with his audience. After the jaundiced look at the film industry in general, and his ...
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Reviews
In the City of Sylvia (En la ciudad de Sylvia)
Dir. Jose Luis Guerin. Spain / France, 2007. 90 min.In the City of Sylvia is likely to be defined by some as 'a work of genius' and by others as like 'watching paint dry'. An audience in search of a plot with a beginning middle and end should look elsewhere. ...
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Reviews
The Obscure (Xiaoshuo)
Dir. Lu Yue. China 2006. 84 min.Potentiallya powerful soporific for any audience not fluent in Mandarin, Lu Yue's combination of documentary and improvised live action is almost self-defeating in its insistence to stick, for the first hour, to a purely theoretical seminar. As it is, Lu's picture could interest scholars ...
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Reviews
Mad Detective
Dir. Johnny To, Wai Ka Fai. Hong Kong 2007. 89 min.The prolific Johnny To and his occasional collaborator Wai Ka Fai here put a new twist on the standard police yarn. No longer simply good cop versus bad cop, they add a third angle, the mad cop, who uses neither ...
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Reviews
Cargo 200 (Gruz 200)
Dir: Alexey Balabanov, Russia 2007, 86minsAlexey Balabanov's eleventh feature is one of his bleakest. Set in provincial Russia in 1984 as the USSR enters its death throes, it portrays a society that is sickly, violent and cynical. The title refers to the name given to corpses of Russian soldiers being ...
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Reviews
Don't Think About It (Non Pensarci)
Dir: Gianni Zanasi Italy 2007. 108 mins.The real surprise of the 2007 Venice Days sidebar on the Lido , Don't Think About It is that rarest of things: an exportable Italian comedy that features neither Roberto Benigni nor Nanni Moretti. Directed with an admirable lightness of touch by Gianni Zanasi ...
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Reviews
The Sweet and the Bitter (Il Dolce e l'Amaro)
Dir: Andrea Porporati Italy 2007. 99 mins.The Italian Mafia film comes of age with The Sweet and the Bitter, a Sicilian Goodfellas that offers a refreshingly unheroic, sometimes darkly comic take on the grubby reality behind the rituals and myths of Cosa Nostra. Like another recent title, Stefano Incerti's L'Uomo ...
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Reviews
Exodus
Dir: Penny Woolcock UK 2007. 110 mins.As much community project as feature film, Exodus transplants the Biblical story of Moses and the children of Israel to the depressed British seaside resort of Margate, in a dystopian future where racist politicians hold sway and asylum seekers are fenced inside a refugee ...
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Reviews
Nightwatching
Dir: Peter Greenaway, Netherlands-Canada-Poland-UK. 140mins.Peter Greenaway takes The Night Watch - arguably Rembrandt's most famous painting, and certainly his most earnestly discussed and interpreted work - as the basis for a rambling, theatrical, frequently didactic study of a turning point in the Dutch painter's life. By turns both murder mystery, ...