Category: International

MUMBAI: The 15th edition of the Sofia International Film Festival got underway on 4 March.

This year‘s festival will include 118 features, 24 documentaries and more than 70 shorts that are to be screened in its traditional sections, including International Competition for first and second feature films, The Big Five, New Bulgarian Cinema and the Balkan Competition.

Among the highlights of the International Program, in which films will compete for the Grand Prix, are the French/Swedish/Danish co-production Sounds of Noise, Polish Bar and the Bulgarian/German movie TILT.

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale is expected to be the festival‘s honoured guest who will collect a Lifetime Achievement in Cinema.Such awards are also to be handed out to Bulgarian actor Russi Chanev, French director Claude Lelouch and Georgian/French director Otar Iosseliani.

The opening night film will be The Black Swan by Darren Arnofski and The Edge by Russian director Aleksei Uchitel is to be screened at the festival‘s closing night.

The festival‘s Grand Prix and other awards are to be handed out at a closing ceremony scheduled on 13 March.

MUMBAI: CinemaCon will honour Morgan Spurlock with the Documentary Filmmaker of the Year award.

“From his documentary debut with 2004‘s Super Size Me to his upcoming release POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Morgan Spurlock continues to entertain and educate audiences around the globe with his thought provoking films,” Mitch Neuhauser, managing director of CinemaCon is reported to have said. 

“We could not be more excited in having Morgan Spurlock be on hand to accept this honor, as well as having the opportunity to screen his film for our audience at CinemaCon,” he added.

Spurlock be honored before the screening of his latest documentary POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, on 30 March.

CinemaCon takes place in Las Vegas from 28 to 31 March.

MUMBAI: Chuck Mitsui‘s One Kine Day, that won the Audience Award for Best Feature at the 2010 Hawaii International Film Festival,will have two screenings at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) on 11 and 14 March.

The film, which stars Christa B. Allen and Julia Nickson, takes us on a journey to another side of Hawaii, the side filmmakers rarely portray on screen. The film captures a day in the life of slacker-skater Ralsto (newcomer Ryan Greer) as he trudges through one of the most ‘da kine‘ days of his life. Across the islands of Hawaii, ‘da kine‘ is a pidgin phrase that can mean, well, just about anything. 

In his directorial debut, Mitsui exposes a darker side of teenage life. In the course of the film, skateboarder Ralsto sees his relatively carefree world fade away into a more complicated existence when he discovers his girlfriend is pregnant.

Filmed on location on Oahu and produced by Hawaiian film company Haolewood Productions, the film also stars Janel Parrish and Jolene Blalock.

Mitsui, who was born and raised in the Bay Area, has been a pioneer in the Hawaii skateboard scene since 1995 when he opened 808 Skate, the first skate shop in Hawaii.

MUMBAI: Fans of Harry Potter films will anxiously wait for the day in 2012 when Warner Bros. will open the doors of its Leavesden facilities where much of the franchise was filmed.

The young wizard‘s fans can catch a glimpse of how the films were made when Warner Bros. Studio Tour London — The Making of Harry Potter, takes off. The tour will feature original sets, costumes, props and effects used in all the eight Harry Potter films.

Among the exhibits on the three-hour tour is the set for the Great Hall at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, headmaster Dumbledore‘s office and other attractions to be announced at a later date.

Currently under construction outside London, Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden is set to be one of the largest studio production facilities in Europe when it opens next year.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the final instalment will release on the silver screen on 15 July.

MUMBAI: The Motion Pictures Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) has named former US Senator Christopher J. Dodd as its new chairman and chief executive officer.

Dodd, who completed five terms in the United States Senate last January, will assume his new role on 17 March.

“Chris has served our country as a highly respected and accomplished Senator for over 30 years, and we are truly fortunate that he will bring his stature and talent to support the creative efforts of our filmmakers and the many people who work in our industry, here and around the world,” commented Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos.

“We‘re also grateful to Bob Pisano, who has done an excellent job of leading the MPA during this transition period,” Gianopulos added.

Dodd, a Democrat, represented Connecticut in the US Senate from 1981 to 2011, where he was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and the author of the historic Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. He also served as acting-chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee during the 2009 consideration of the Health Care Reform Act. He also was a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

MUMBAI: Writer, actor Jonah Hill will soon don the director‘s hat with Kitchen Sink.

The film has a team of a human teenager, a vampire, and a zombie who must collectively save their town from an alien invasion.

The title is a self-aware reference to the fact that story writer Uziel has thrown into his story every hot movie trope: zombies, vampires and aliens.

On 5 August, Hill can be seen in the comedy-adventure The Sitter followed by the release of Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball on 23 September. The film is based on Michael Lewis‘ book about Oakland A‘s general manager Billy Beane.

Hill is currently working on adapting 21 Jump Street for the big screen for a 16 March release next year.

MUMBAI: Tribeca Enterprises and the Sundance Institute have been experimenting with various ideas to develop a credible distribution network for independent films, exploring all kinds of possibilities offered by the emerging and fast evolving digital technology.

Tribeca Enterprises plans to create its own movie distribution arm called Tribeca Films to take its films to American audiences. On the other hand, Sundance nstitute is also putting in place a year-round strategy for the digital distribution of independent films that will involve its partners.

The Sundance programme will focus on facilitating distribution while filmmakers retain ownership of their work while Tribeca Films will also acquire films for distribution like any other conventional distribution company.

These are attempts to fill in the void left behind by the disappearance of specialty film distribution arms of major studios that did not find it worthwhile to pump in money in their subsidiaries.

Tribeca and Sundance will use their brand name to keep the cost of marketing and promotion down. There are still a great number of cynics who are not sure if these efforts will work or not.

People think that the Tribeca model may work since it is backed by American Express and LodgeNet, a VoD service that reaches out to about 1.8 million hotel rooms in North America.

MUMBAI: Jose Padilha, who directed the Brazilian cop film Elite Squad is in negotiation to direct a remake of Robocop.

The remake is a big priority of the newly reconstituted directors of MGM. Other directors on the list included Robert Rodriguez and David Slade who helmed The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.

Robocop could well go on to be the Hollywood debut of Padilha. The 1987 original, directed by Paul Verhoeven, featured a cop who is brought back from the brink of death in the form of a cyborg with no memories of his prior life. Till now, the film has had two sequels.

Padilha was attached at one stage to direct “The Sigma Protocol,” an adaptation of a Robert Ludlum novel, but has since moved on.
 

MUMBAI: Jane Russell, who personified beauty and sexuality in the times of World War II and also reigned during the era of Hollywood moguls passed away due to respiratory failure on 28February in California. She was 89.

She is survived by her three children, Thomas K. Waterfield, Tracy Foundas and Robert Waterfield, and six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Russell lived a full life, from her days as a wartime pin-up girl to her Hollywood career and to her retirement years, where she was a philanthropist and active churchgoer. She reflected the post-war era of prosperity and more free-wheeling lifestyles as Hughes promoted her relentlessly throughout World War II.

Though she was widely known as a wartime pin-up queen, she ruled in Hollywood under the tutelage of billionaire Howard Hughes who was determined to make Russell a star of the first order in Tinseltown.

Among her films were His Kind of Woman with Robert Mitchum, Double Dynamite with Frank Sinatra and The Las Vegas Story with Victor Mature.
 

MUMBAI: In his drive to expand the production company‘s film and TV operations, Anne Carey has entered into a strategic partnership with Epoch Films.

The producer, who recently made Adventureland, The Savages and The American, will have a new development fund at her disposal to find projects and develop them into an expanded slate along with Epoch founding partner Mindy Goldberg.

Epoch produced the 2005 comedy Junebug and the 2008 romantic comedy Gigantic. The company is developing Low Down with commercials director Jeff Preiss, an Epoch partner, and Little Children producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa.

Carey is also producing projects outside of the Epoch partnership, including Then We Came to the End, which Lynn Shelton will direct from a screenplay by Joshua Ferris; Last Night at the Lobster and The Listener.