GreenCine Daily: SFIFF, fests, events, 5/8.

May 8, 2007

SFIFF, fests, events, 5/8.

"It's one of the best Asian film events in North America and the first titles for the 2007 edition of the New York Asian Film Festival have just been announced." Todd's got 'em at Twitch.

Recently, regarding the San Francisco International Film Festival:

Brian Darr's worries as to how the Notes to a Toon Underground program of animated shorts accompanied by live musicians soon dissipated. Brian also rounds up several Bay Area events that don't have anything to do with SFIFF.
Darren Hughes writes up capsule reviews of over a dozen entries.

"In just ten years, Japanese filmmaker Satoshi Kon has put together a startlingly original, ambitious body of work that explores the tensions and connections between technology, celebrity culture, class, identity, mental illness, the corporate media, and the nature of reality, all of it animated," writes Mel Valentin at Hollywood Bitchslap. "Kon's latest film, Paprika [site], a futuristic mind-tripper/mystery thriller based on Yasutaka Tsutsui's novel, is no less adventurous and provocative than his previous work."
Brian Brooks and Susan Gerhard cover the glamorous Film Society Awards night for SF360, where Robert Avila talks with Hal Hartley.

In the Guardian, Graham Fuller talks with Isabella Rossellini about her mother and about opening the retrospective of her father's work running at the BFI Southbank throughout May.

Robin McKie: "Star Wars: The Exhibition opened on Friday - presumably to give its promoters a chance to put 'May the Fourth be with you' on their invitations - and runs until September."

As the stage production of A Matter of Life and Death, artistic director Emma Rice tells Claire Armitstead that the original Powell and Pressburger film "is a story about coming to terms with peace [after WWII], and with the new power relationships between Europe and America, colonialist and colonised. In the 'other world,' the dead gabble in different languages; the celestial jury is dismissed because it embodies old colonial grudges; the judge has to be convinced that a British man and an American girl could truly love each other (part of the purpose of making the film was to reinforce the 'special relationship')." Through June 21.

"The 1970s were the best and worst of times for cinema, a fact the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian and Aero theatres is warmly embracing with its ambitious May festival, The Seventies: The Good, the Bad and the Strange." Susan King reports in the Los Angeles Times.

The Lumière Reader begins its coverage of New Zealand's traveling Human Rights Film Festival. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell are in New Zealand, by the way, catching up with Kiwi cinema.

The Telegraph runs an excerpt from Kieron Corless and Chris Darke's Cannes: Inside the World's Premiere Film Festival and offers a list of "10 of the most intriguing films to be premièred at this year's Cannes festival." May 16 through 27.