Category: media

Italy’s press is complaining that Italian films were shut out of the awards at this year’s Venice Film Festival. “Mike Leigh’s film Vera Drake took the Golden Lion for best film and Briton Imelda Staunton won best actress. But Italy’s newspapers voiced their disappointment that Le Chiavi di Casa (The House Keys) by Gianni Amelio was missing from the award winners.”

“By the time this year’s Toronto International Film Festival ends on Saturday, 328 films will have been screened. Spread over the 10 days of the festival, which began on Thursday, that comes to more than 30 movies a day, which means, according to my bleary-eyed calculations, that to see one movie is to miss about seven others, and that the statistical accuracy of any single critic’s impressions of the festival as a whole will be roughly 12.5 percent. What this suggests is that the Toronto festival, which has become, during the last decade or so, the most important such event in North America, is really 8 or 12 or 35 festivals gathered under one roof.”

A clandestine group of “urban explorers” calling themselves La Mexicaine de la Perforation and which claims its mission is to “reclaim and transform disused city spaces for the creation of zones of expression for free and independent art” has claimed ownership of a cinema located in a cave under Paris. The place was discovered by puzzled police last week. “They (the police) freaked out completely. They called in the bomb squad, the sniffer dogs, army security, the anti-terrorist squad, the serious crimes unit. They said it was skinheads or subversives. They got it on to national TV news. They hadn’t a clue.”

Might the BBC sell off some of its profitable assets? “The BBC is under pressure to become more profitable in the run-up to its charter renewal in 2006 as it needs a war chest to prove to the government it can deliver outstanding programmes. The sale of its commercial wing, BBC Worldwide, could generate up to £2 billion and prevent cuts to the corporation’s 27,000-strong workforce.”

Architect Daniel Libeskind says seeing Hitchcock’s “North By Northwest” changed his life. “Seeing people climb on George Washington’s nose and hang from the eyebrows of Teddy Roosevelt formed my eternal image of America, with all of its grandeur and illusion. Alfred Hitchcock captured me and took me on a journey into the adventure and unimaginable beauty of the sublime American continent. The movie is a testament to the visual power of film.”

These days there’s a film festival for every taste. “The big festivals, Sundance (ski bums and L.A. players), Toronto (largely sold out before it starts) and Cannes (essentially a massive scrum of 3,500 journalists), mean congestion in the streets, lineups for everything and a hierarchy of press, industry and VIPs that can overwhelm a mere film lover. Add the logistics of getting tickets, getting into the theatre — never mind a party — and the bigger fests can start to feel suspiciously like work. Fortunately, for someone willing to travel, there are so many festivals that there is an almost endless choice of alternatives.”

Every year hundreds of short films are made. But aside from landing on the lineups of film festivals, shorts are rarely seen in movie theatres. “So why then, do so many Canadian filmmakers continue to produce them in such numbers? The answer is as complex and varied as the films themselves.”

The Toronto International Film Festival is a massive event and a vitally important industry showcase, there’s no doubt about that. But Ron Weiskind was stunned by how disorganized the whole event has become, and wonders if it reflects a downturn in TIFF’s fortunes. “Last year, I did interviews for nine movies, most of them major releases. This year, none of the top studios (except MGM, which may be sold soon) is offering press roundtables.” Admittedly, one could argue that making life easy for the press is not the mission of a festival, but in an industry that lives and dies by its media coverage, it’s a bad sign when reporters can’t navigate the proceedings.

A new audio-guided walking tour of lower Manhattan has just launched, memorializing the fall of the World Trade Center towers. At first blush, the idea of listening to the horrific sounds of 9/11 seems like a ghastly exercise, but the tour, put together by two National Public Radio producers, blends together such a wide array of aural experiences that you can’t help but be drawn in.

“Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris’s most intriguing recent discoveries.”