Fests and events, 11/19.

Albert Serra's Honor de cavalleria and Todd Rohal's The Guatemalan Handshake have both done quite well at the Torino Film Festival. Serra's debut has won the Lancia Prize for Best Film, Rohal's won the Prize for Best Director and the two films share the Special Jury Prize. El Duderino, who took in the next round of Masters of Horror while he was there, has the full list of award-winners at Twitch.

For most of us, it'd be a rather harrowing experience, but, writing in the Nation, Max Blumenthal almost seems to relish his days bopping around the Liberty Film Festival.

"Like Godard, Rivette works like an analytical reverse engineer, picking apart the cinema and leaving its parts strewn about. Godard's weapon of choice is a grenade, which rents the mechanism asunder, leaving only charred, unrecognizable fragments behind, which are insanely difficult to reassemble, which he does with patchwork bits of homage, dialectic, and blatant formal transgressions, all colliding, ricocheting, and generally jostling for space. Rivette, by contrast, works with the delicate touch of a clockmaker, removing the cogs and springs of his medium such that, at a later point, they can be put back together in skewed configurations (with respect to the canon)." James Crawford opens Reverse Shot's coverage of the Rivette series at the Museum of the Moving Image (through December 31).

"For decades, film festivals have reliably delivered films to audiences seated in theaters. Now at least two - Sundance, included - are bringing them to audiences in their own homes." At SF360, Susan Gerhard hails Cinequest's innovations.

Justin Peters in the New York Times on Withoutabox: "Many in the film industry praise the company for introducing independent filmmakers to a robust, if not necessarily lucrative, alternative distribution system. But Withoutabox has also helped foster low-budget anarchy, contributing to rampant growth in the number of festivals — 181 new ones in the last year alone — and flooding the market with entries from novice filmmakers whose confidence is often matched only by their inexperience."

Joe Leydon: "As he faced a full house on opening night at the 2006 Denver Film Festival, preparing the hundreds gathered at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House for the regional premiere of his coolly intelligent and subtly allusive Breaking and Entering, Oscar-winning filmmaker Anthony Minghella seemed – well, almost apologetic." Now's a good time to catch up with the Denver podcasts at SpoutBlog.

San Franciscans: Time once again to check in with Brian Darr.

Ray Pride heads to the 47th Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

Acquarello has the lineup for this year's Spanish Cinema Now series, "a tantalizing and nicely balanced slate of debut films from several first-time filmmakers along with what is perhaps the first US retrospective of Edgar Neville's work." December 8 through 26 at the Walter Reade.

"At times Tezuka's work seems to strive towards a kind of no-nonsense (if certainly heightened) realism; at others it embraces no-holds-barred abstraction, Impressionism, or—my personal favourite—Surrealism." Matt Clayfield on Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga at the National Gallery of Victoria through January 28 (the exhibition arrives in San Francisco in June).

Posted by dwhudson at November 19, 2006 1:18 PM