June
18
Seattle Film Fest: Oscar Bait, Evening, Awards Wrap
Nora and I are in Seattle at the annual International Film Fest programmed by tireless film enthusiast Carl Spence. "It's the largest and best-attended festival in the U.S.," Spence said at Sunday's annual Space Needle awards brunch. SIFF stretched from May 25 through June 17, screening 405 films (including 117 shorts) from 60 countries. Ticket sales were up an estimated 6 %. Every movie we saw over the fest's last weekend, no matter how obscure, was packed. I moderated two panels Saturday morning, on digital distribution of indie films and the impact of the internet on movie criticism. (I'll report more on the panels anon.)
Among the 17 feature premieres were the National Geographic Films doc Arctic Tale, Kirt Gunn's Lovely by Surprise, which won a special New American Cinema jury prize, and Daniel Waters' Sex and Death 101, which won the audience award for best director. Norwegian Eric Richter Strand won the New Director grand jury prize for Sons. Jeff Nichols' Shotgun Stories won the New American Cinema grand jury prize. Austrian Harald Friedl won the best documentary grand jury prize for Out of Time. The Golden Needle audience award for best film went to John Jeffcoat's Outsourced, about a guy who goes to India to train his company's staff replacements.
OSCAR BAIT
At the fest awards brunch on Sunday, Marion Cotillard won the best actress audience prize for La Vie En Rose. No surprise there. The Academy screened the movie for its members last weekend and they ate it up, too. Cotillard is on her way to a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
Claire Danes was a runner-up in Seattle for her incandescent performance in Lajos Koltai's Evening, an old-fashioned adaptation of Susan Minot's novel which attracted an extraordinary cast. Koltai had the advantage of having worked with Danes and Glenn Close during his long cinematography career. Focus Features asked Koltai to direct Evening after seeing his first feature, Fateless, which was Hungary's submission for the Oscar last year. He had never met Vanessa Redgrave, and went to London; she hung in with the project while he assembled his cast. Danes plays the young Redgrave back in the 50s, who embarks on a sweet affair with Patrick Wilson during her best friend's Newport wedding. (Wilson and Danes co-starred in the "I can do anything better than you" Gap ad. That chemistry is magnified in this movie tenfold.)
MOMS ACTING WITH THEIR KIDS
Redgrave's daughter Natasha Richardson plays one of her daughters in the film; Koltai cast Mamie Gummer to play Meryl Streep as a young woman, he said at the Q & A, before learning that she was Streep's daughter. Her mother, who shares a powerful scene with Redgrave, insisted on having her screen credit fall below her daughter's. The movie opens June 29. Focus is presumably saving its heaviest hitters for fall release. But I suspect that the Academy actors will embrace this movie, especially Redgrave. She could join Julie Christie on this year's list of Academy Silver Fox contenders.
ORPHANS
We saw two movies about orphans. The Hungarian Iska's Journey is a bleak hand-held tale of a tough teen girl who collects scrap metal. Her parents are drunks who beat her for her hard-earned pennies. She and her little sister are rescued by a local orphanage, but her mother brings her home, leaving the sick younger sibling behind. It reminded me of David Gordon Green's George Washington. Debut filmmaker Csaba Bollok found his leading lady, Maria Varga, on a scrap heap; after researching the homeless kids in a Carpathian Mountains mining town, he put her into his movie.
The driver who picked us up at the airport was raving about the documentary Angels in the Dust. At dinner Friday night, we talked with the film's producer, USC screenwriting professor James Egan, who praised the African singer who improvised the film's soundtrack. He was right; Simphiwe Dana's music is powerfully emotive. (I hope they release a soundtrack.) Director Louise Hogarth was researching "the virgin myth" in Africa--men who have sex with virgins to ward off AIDS. Unfortunately, many men believe and act on this idea. Hogarth discovered an orphanage north of Johannesburg where the Cloete family are coping with a village where 50% of the residents are HIV positive. As they die, the parents send their kids to the Cloetes for care. Hogarth won the Cloetes' trust and got close to them and several of the young girls who were raped and infected. Participant Productions backed the film. Amid overwhelming grief and sadness, the childrens' faces light up the screen. The film won a documentary special jury prize.
KINSKI'S BERLIN
Seattle always features a rich music program of docs and events. Friday night the local psych rock band Kinksi played their rhythmic original score at the swank Triple Door supper club, accompanying Walther Ruttmann's 80-year-old silent black-and-white avant-garde documentary Berlin: Symphony of a City, which inspired Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. I knew the Vertov but had never seen this gorgeous ode to a day in the city of Berlin. The movie and live score were fabulous.
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"Koltai cast Mamie Gummer to play Meryl Streep as a young woman before learning that she was Streep's daughter."
This is right up there with Tori Spelling auditioning for 90210 "under an assumed name."
Posted by: Rob | June 18, 2007 at 09:37 AM
Hey, that's what Koltai claims. It helped that she was a dead ringer for her Mom. She's quite good, BTW.
Posted by: Anne Thompson | June 18, 2007 at 01:17 PM