French first film about girls coming of age and water ballet.
Water Lilies (2007)
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French first film about girls coming of age and water ballet.
Water Lilies (2007)
"Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game."--Karina Longworth, Spout.
Set in San Francisco.
BARRY JENKINS: MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY (2007)[/URL]
Scams, fantasies and sorrows of two schoolboys in Taiwan.
GILLIES YA-CHE YANG: ORZ BOYZ (2008)
Urban intersections in Sao Paolo.
PHILIPPE BARCINSKI: NOT BY CHANCE (2007)
Athens punk couple in the summertime.
CONSTANTINA VOULGARIS: VALSE SENTIMENTALE (2007)
HERE'S AN INDEX OF ALL REVIEWS SO FAR.
SFIFF titles I had seen and reviewed on Filmleaf prior to the festival:
ALEXANDRA (ALEXEI SOKUROV)
ALL IS FORGIVEN (MIA HANSEN-LOVE)
BRICK LANE (SARAH GAVRON)
FADOS (CARLOS SAURA)
GIRL CUT IN TWO (CLAUDE CHABROL)
GO GO TALES (ABEL FERRARA)
IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (JOSE LUIS GUERIN)
LAST MISTRESS (CATHERINE BREILLAT)
MAN FROM LONDON, THE (BELA TARR)
ROMANCE OF ASTREA AND CELADON, THE (ERIC ROHMER)
STILL LIFE (JIA ZHANG-KE)
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (EROLL MORRIS)
Filmleaf reviews of SFIFF films I first saw at the festival:
THE AQUARIUM (YOUSRY NASRALLAH)
BALLAST (LANCE HAMMER)
BARCELONA (A MAP) (VENTURA PONS)
EZRA (NEWTON I. ADUAKA)
FRANCE, LA (SERGE BOZON)
FROZEN (SHIVAJHEE CHANDRABHUSAN)
LADY JANE (ROBERT GUEDIGUIAN)
LATENT ARGENTINA (FERNANDO E. SOLANAS)
MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY (BARRY JENKINS)
NOT BY CHANCE (PHILIPPE BARCINSKI)
ORZ BOYZ! (GILLIES YA-CHEE YANG)
BARCELONA (A MAP) (VENTURA PONS)
SHADOWS IN THE PALACE (KIM MEE-JEONG)
RECYCLE (MAHMOUD AL MASSAD)
SOLITARY FRAGMENTS (JAIME ROSALES)
STRANDED: I CAME FROM A PLANE THAT CRASHED ON THE MOUNTAINS (GONZALO ARIJON)
STRAY GIRLFRIEND, A (ANA KATZ)
TIME TO DIE (DOROTA KEDZIERZOWSKA)
TRAVELING WITH PETS (VERA STORZHEVA)
TWO LADIES (PHILIPPE FAUCON)
UNDER THE BOMBS (PHILIPPE ARACTINGI)
VALSE SENTIMENTALE (CONSTANTINA VOULGARIS)
WATER LILIES (CELINE SCIAMMA)
WONDERFUL TOWN (ADITYA ASSARAT)
(There will be a few more.)
Not by Chance (Não Por acaso) is set in São Paolo, Brazil. Its crossed-paths (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, Crash) plot structure is getting pretty tired by now, but this is a sophisticated and polished and engaging enough work to have been bought in the US by Twentieth Century Fox. It's already on DVD.
The film has been released on dvd by Fox's "branches" in Argentina and Brazil. They function separately from the parent company. US rights to the film have not been acquired by any distributor as of now.
AWARDS HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED, AND HERE IS A SIMPLE PASTE-IN OF THE PUBLICITY RELEASE:
Main Awards:
New Directors Award: Vasermil, Mushon Salmona (Israel, 2007)
New Directors Special Jury Mention: Wonderful Town, Aditya Assarat (Thailand, 2007)
FIPRESCI Prize: Ballast, Lance Hammer (USA, 2007)
FIPRESCI Special Jury Mention: Glasses, Naoko Ogigami (Japan, 2007)
Chris Holter Humor in Film Award: Time to Die, Dorota Kedzierzawska (Poland, 2007)
Golden Gate Awards:
Documentary Feature: Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang (Canada, 2007)
Bay Area Documentary Feature: Faubourg Treme': The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, Dawn Logsdon (USA, 2008)
Documentary Feature Special Jury Prize: Forbidden Lie$, Anna Broinowski (Australia, 2007)
Documentary Short: The Ladies, Christina A. Voros (USA, 2007)
Bay Area Short, First Prize: The Cabinet, Todd Herman (USA, 2007)
Bay Area Short, Second Prize: On the Assassination of the President, Adam Keker (USA, 2007)
Narrative Short: Thick Skinned, Jean-Bernard Marlin, Benoit Rambourg (France, 2007)
Animated Short: Madame Tutli-Putli, Chris Lavis, Maciek Szczerbowski (Canada)
New Visions Cabinet, Todd Herman (USA, 2007)
Work for Kids and Families: When I Grow Up, Michelle R. Meeker (USA, 2007)
Youth Work: Writing History with Lightning: The Triumph and Tragedy of America's First Blockbuster, Charlotte Burger (USA, 2007)
Previously announced Golden Gate Award winners (Television)
TV Documentary Long Form: Calavera Highway, Renee Tajima-Pe�a (USA/Mexico, 2007)
TV Documentary Short Form: The Mystery of the Second Painting, Muriel Edelstein (France, 2007)
TV Narrative Long Form: Operation Turquoise, Alain Tasma (France, 2007)
I won't get to see the Japanese Glasses, but I'm watching Vasermil tomorrow along with The Secret of the Grain. I definitely approve the other awards at the top of the list. Wonderful Town and Ballast are both terrific, extremely promising first films, and Time to Die deserves an award (and the relatively new Holter is one that has status at this festival).
I saw some good documentaries, but not the ones listed.
Winner of the SFIFF 2008 New Directors Award. Naturalistic story of three young soccer players in the Israeli town of Beersheba.
MUSHON SALMONA: VASERMIL (2007)
Here are some other awards not previously mentioned:
Audience Award, Best Narrative Feature:
(a tie)
Medicine for Melancholy, Barry Jenkins (2007)
La Zona, Rodrigo Pla (2007)
Audience Award, Best Documentary:
Stranded: I've Come from a Plane that Crashed in the Mountains, Gonzalo Arijon (2007)
Sci-fi film about exploitation of campesinos.
ALEX RIVERA: SLEEP DEALER (2008)
Both La Zona and Stranded won Audience Awards at Miami too. It would be entirely logical for both films to have commercial runs in the US. But neither seems to have a distributor after a number of successful screenings in American festivals. Maybe it's just a matter of time. Maybe there isn't anything logical about patterns of distribution of foreign-language films.
Maybe La Zona will get picked up here, but the trouble with Stranded is as you know, foreign language documentaries are a hard sell.
I didn't go see La Zona because you had covered it, though if there had been another day I might have. Hope to see it somehow some day.
I wanted to see new American first features and there were very few so I am sorry I missed Touching Home, glad somebody guided me to Medicine for Melancholy, glad I didn't miss Ballast, which I hope people get to see. No saying now what kind of distribution Ballast will get from IFC. A small market. Release date August 29.
Note that Medicine for Melancholy, the San Francisco based African-American narrative feature, shared the prize with La Zona, and I'm glad it got that.
Chris & Oscar: I e-mailed you today