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Tag: Carlo Chatrian

  • Japanese production house to be honoured at Locarno Filmfest

    Japanese production house to be honoured at Locarno Filmfest

    NEW DELHI: Japanese company Office Kitano will be honoured with a tribute that recognizes the most significant players on the international independent production scene.

     

    The Locarno Festival is slated to take place from 5 – 15 August.

     

    Founded in 1988 as a theatrical agency, Office Kitano was created to answer the need to manage the TV activities of Takeshi Kitano and a group of comic actors linked to him. In 1991 it became a production company with A Scene at the Sea, Kitano’s third feature film, and since then has produced all of the actor-director’s films.

     

    Under its president Masayuki Mori, the company also started producing other Japanese directors, starting with Hiroshi Shimizu’s Ikinai (1998). During those same years, Shôzô Ichiyama joined forces with the company; Ichiyama had already worked with Kitano on his first feature, Violent Cop (1989) and co-produced three films by Hou Hsiao-hsien.

     

    In 2000 the company began an inspired collaboration with JIA Zhang-ke. The first film was Platform (2000), which was followed by Unknown Pleasures (2002), The World (2004), 24 City (2008), A Touch of Sin (2013) and Mountains May Depart (2015).

     

    In 2001 the company produced Delbaran, a film by the Iranian director Abolfazl Jalili, which was selected for Locarno’s Concorso internazionale where it won the Special Jury Prize.

     

    In addition to producing and distributing a range of films, in 2000 Office Kitano launched Tokyo FILMeX, a film festival created to raise the profile of independent production.

     

    Festival artistic director Carlo Chatrian said, “With the decision to pay tribute to Office Kitano’s twenty years of activity, the Festival is choosing a territory and a company in which it has a particular interest. Not only because we love the Japanese actor-director’s productions but also because of the studio’s stated desire to support young Japanese filmmakers, and work with other major directors, such as JIA Zhang-ke. An award is both a recognition for the work they have done and an encouragement to continue in the path they have chosen: both are completely appropriate in the case of Office Kitano, to whom we wish a brilliant future.”

     

    Office Kitano president Masayuki Mori and producer Shôzô Ichiyama will be at Locarno to receive the award.

     

    Three films will be shown at the Festival to mark this tribute: Hana-bi (1997) and Dolls (2002), both directed by Takeshi Kitano, and JIA Zhang-ke’s Unknown Pleasures. 

  • Marco Bellocchio to receive the Pardo d’onore at Locarno 2015

    Marco Bellocchio to receive the Pardo d’onore at Locarno 2015

    NEW DELHI: Renowned Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio will receive the Pardo d’onore Swisscom during the 68th Festival del film Locarno. 

     

    The occasion will be marked by a Piazza Grande screening of Marco’s debut film I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket), some 50 years after its first screening at Locarno.

     

    With this award, the Festival pays tribute to an extraordinarily rich career, and affirms the strong links between Locarno and Bellocchio, first forged in 1965 with the screening in the Grand Hotel of his debut feature film. The stunning anarchy of his film overwhelmed the audience, the critics and the jury, who awarded him the Vela d’argento. 

     

    Over the years Bellocchio has been featured at Locarno on many occasions: in competition in 1976 with Marcia trionfale (Victory March), in 1997 when he was president of the jury and part of the collective project Locarno demi-si?cle; réflexions sur l’avenir, and in 1998, the year the Festival mounted a major retrospective of his work.

     

    Locarno Festival’s Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian said, “I pugni in tasca remains one of those films that demonstrate Locarno’s history as a festival, which discovers and launches films that could be described, with no fear of contradiction, as challenging. We are showing the film in a restored print as both an appropriate tribute to the start of his trajectory as a major filmmaker, and an indication of a programming policy that has remained faithful to its principles. The choice of Marco Bellocchio for the Pardo d’onore is also prompted by an awareness that the way he makes films – above all, in recent years – has a great deal to say to anyone living in Italy but also to those making films in the rest of the world.”

     

    The Locarno Festival’s tribute to Bellocchio will be accompanied by screenings of a selection of his films. I pugni in tasca will be shown in the Piazza Grande on 14 August. The restored print was produced by Kavac Film, via the Cineteca di Bologna at the laboratories of “L’immagine ritrovata,” with support from Giorgio Armani, and will be distributed internationally by The Match Factory.

     

    The Festival audience will also have an opportunity to talk to the director and discover the secrets of his art at a masterclass in the Spazio Cinema.

     

    The Pardo d’onore, supported by Swisscom for the seventh consecutive year, is the Festival del film Locarno’s award in recognition of major contemporary filmmakers. Previous recipients include those of the caliber of Samuel Fuller, Jean-Luc Godard, Ken Loach, Sidney Pollack, William Friedkin, JIA Zhang-ke, Alain Tanner, Werner Herzog and, in 2014, Agn?s Varda.