April 24, 2007

Fests and events, 4/24.

Cannes Blogging from France, Scott Foundas looks over the titles lined up for the Competition in Cannes, notes the multi-national pedigree of many of those titles, and then tosses in the kicker: "[I]n Paris last week, I was able to attend a small advance screening of one competition entry, and I am happy to report that it is nothing less than superb. The film is called Secret Sunshine and it is the fourth to be written and directed by South Korea's Lee Chang-Dong, whose first three films - Green Fish (1997), Peppermint Candy (2000) and Oasis (2002) - pegged him as one of leading figures in his country's recent cinematic renaissance." The rave follows.

"In its 60 years, Cannes has managed to keep its identity intact and resist rampant commercialism," argues Agnès Poirier in the Guardian. "I'm obviously not talking of the parallel circus going on around diamond-laden and scantily clad stars walking up the famous red carpet each evening. I'm talking about films."

Far East Film Festival "The mood among Korean filmmakers in early 2007 is one of deep concern." Darcy Paquet's essay for this year's catalog for the Far East Film Festival (through Saturday in Udine, Italy) is now up at Koreanfilm.org.

"This year HotDocs has stepped up their embrace of new media and knowledge-sharing by recording almost their entire industry conference and posting the sessions online as free audio and video podcasts." Joel Heller's got the linkage.

At Twitch, Canfield's happy announces the launch of the site for June's Cornerstone Festival Imaginarium.

At indieWIRE, Steve Ramos takes stock of the highlights of the Nashville Film Festival, which runs through Thursday.

"Last night's Silver Jew screening was quite special," blogs Michael Tully from Nashville. "Our special guest introducer was Nashville's own cinematic wunderkind, Harmony Korine, who's latest, Mister Lonely, made it into the Un Certain Regard program in next month's Cannes."

Doug Block's zipping from festival to festival.

Picture House: Film, Art and Design at Belsay: May 5 through September 30.

David Lowery looks back to Sarasota - lots of pix!

At AICN, Scott Green's got lots of news from the Anime Boston Convention.

Erica Abeel looks back on last month's New Directors / New Films series for Filmmaker.

Posted by dwhudson at April 24, 2007 3:53 PM

Comments

Scott Foundas's brief review of Lee Chang-dong's "Secret Sunshine" has me excited as a little schoolboy. Lee's "Oasis" is the film that got me hooked on Korean cinema, so it's only natural that I'm looking forward to seeing his first project in nearly 5 years. Foundas also mentions the transcendant performance of Jeon Do-yeon, one of Korea's most talented actresses, which would be reason enough to want to see this film.

Posted by: jon pais at April 25, 2007 7:44 AM