Fests and events, 10/27.

"As in Venice last month, the program of the Rome International Film Festival (RIFF) is heavy on locally produced films and lacks international star power," writes Boyd van Hoeij at indieWIRE. "Though Venice blamed the writers' strike and the fact that many films simply weren't ready in time, Rome had already indicated that it wanted to focus more on local films after new director Gianluigi Rondi took over from Goffredo Bettini as the head of the festival earlier this year."

Also in Rome is Gabriele Barcaro, who reports in Cineuropa on When a Man Comes Home (trailer), "a rather autobiographical title for the new film by Thomas Vinterberg." And Timothy M Gray, writing for Variety's Circuit: "You gotta love any fest that schedules The Baader Meinhof Complex, High School Musical 3 and Michael Cimino lecturing about dance sequences in movies."

"The San Francisco Film Society and Pacific Film Archive - both in collaboration with the Instituto Italiano di Cultura - are bringing Italy to the Bay Area via the 12th edition of New Italian Cinema running mid-November at Landmark's San Francisco Embarcadero Center Cinema and PFA's Moments of Truth: Italian Cinema Classics [runs] late November through December." A preview from Michael Guillén.

"Celebrating the powerful visuals of wide-gauge film, next year's Berlin Intl Film Festival's Retrospective sidebar will screen nearly two dozen works shot in 70 mm film, including rarely seen classics from the Soviet Union and East Germany as well as Hollywood epics such as David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, William Wyler's Ben-Hur and Joseph L Mankiewicz's Cleopatra." Ed Meza has details in Variety; for more, turn to the release.

Richard Linklater and Todd Haynes will speak at SXSW in March, reports Michael Jones. Also speaking: IMDb founder and VP Col Needham and Stanley Kubrick producer Jan Harlan.

Jette Kernion wraps up the Austin Film Festival for Cinematical.

For those who read German, today Film Zeit gathers reports from the just-wrapped Hofer Filmtage and a preview of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, opening today and running through Sunday.

Posted by dwhudson at October 27, 2008 1:08 PM