Fests and events, 10/16.

"The Band's Visit, it turns out, has not been welcomed with open arms," writes Anthony Kaufman. "While first-time filmmaker Eran Kolirin's much-beloved movie about a group of Egyptian musicians astray in Israel won a special prize in Cannes, a distribution pact with Sony Pictures Classics and was looking like a shoo-in as a foreign-language Oscar nominee, the fish-out-of-water comedy has recently faced a series of roadblocks. In the same week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) deemed The Band's Visit ineligible for the foreign-language category because it contained too much English dialogue, the film found itself at odds with two Middle Eastern film festivals, the Cairo International Film Festival and the new Middle Eastern International Film Festival (MEIFF) in Abu Dhabi, neither of which will be showing the film."

Also at indieWIRE, Ryan Harrington's dispatch from Woodstock.

"The Hessischer Filmpreis for Best Film was presented on Friday evening at a gala ceremony in Frankfurt-am-Main to Maria Speth's second feature Madonnas, the story of an irresponsible mother of five delinquent and instable children," reports Bénédicte Prot at Cineuropa.

Trans-Video Express: Recent Video Art From Germany, Thursday and October 25 at the Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York.

Bruce Conner at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles: Saturday through November 24.

With the Hollywood Film Festival opening Wednesday and running through October 22, Robert W Welkos, in the Los Angeles Times, previews Generation Tehran, a documentary "made by a 30-year-old West Hollywood filmmaker named Sara Bavar, who traveled to Iran's capital last year and chronicled the thoughts of young people living in a country that the Bush administration has labeled an 'axis of evil' and a 'terrorist state.'"

At Film Threat, Mark Bell presents the schedule for the Hollywood Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Film Festival, sort of a weekend sidebar that'll be opening with Damon Packard's Spacedisco One.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw picks ten to catch at the London Film Festival, opening tomorrow and running through November 1.

At SF360, Dennis Harvey looks back on the just-wrapped 30th edition of the Mill Valley Film Festival.

Signandsight translates Jann Ruyters's report for Trouw from the Netherlands Film Festival, which wrapped last week.

Posted by dwhudson at October 16, 2007 9:37 AM