Ioncinema

It’s year two for the Toronto Intl. Film Festival’s Centrepiece programme – the place where we find films from the film festival circuit as old as this year’s Sundance and as fresh as the future film premieres to be found in Locarno and Venice. Oh and there are indeed some world premieres in the mix as well. From Sundance, Steven Soderbergh‘s Presence receives a showcase and from the Berlinale, Kazik Radwanski receives a hometown showcase with Matt and Mara (The Cinema Guild folks are releasing it in September). From the Cannes competition Mohammad Rasoulof‘s The Seed of the Sacred Fig will receive the spotlight and Lou Ye‘s masterwork An Unfinished Film also gets some love.… Read the rest

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It has been over a dozen years in the making. We can confirm that Isabelle Huppert has indeed remained on board, so has Sophie Rois, and they will be surrounded by Birgit Minichmayr (of Everyone Else fame) and Huppert’s About Joan co-star in Lars Eidinger in Ulrike Ottinger’s long-gestating The Blood Countess. At eighty-two years young, the German filmmaker has been receiving some much needed pre-production coin support as of late and just landed another round of coin via German funding bodies Film und Medienstiftung NRW, FFF Bayern and Hessen Film & Medien. Tilda Swinton, Udo Kier and Irm Hermann (who passed away in 2020) were once mentioned way back in 2010.… Read the rest

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Winner of the prestigious Caméra d’Or in 2019 for his debut Our Mothers (we were on hand – check out our coverage) Guatemalan filmmaker César Díaz‘s highly anticipated sophomore feature receives its world premiere next week in the glorious lieu that showcases the Piazza Grande offerings at the Locarno Film Festival. Continuing in the same cinematic exploration of Guatemala’s brutal civil war as in his previous film (watch our interview), starring Bérénice Béjo (in Spanish), Mexico 86 is originally set in 1976. Death threats force Maria, a Guatemalan rebel activist fighting against the corrupt military dictatorship, to flee to Mexico, leaving her son behind.… Read the rest

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Someone is emerging from early (filmmaker) retirement, and we might have Cannes topper Thierry Frémaux to thank for it. After a cool volunteer job as the head of the Un Certain Regard jury this summer, Xavier Dolan‘s creative spark was reignited. He has dusted off a project he wrote before the pandemic and is now putting the finishing touches on what will be his ninth feature film—a venture into the horror genre. It’s worth noting that Dolan had a small role in Pascal Laugier’s gore-filled Martyrs before debuting as a director with I Killed My Mother in 2009. This new energy also came ab out from a trio of projects that Dolan has climbed on as an actor.… Read the rest

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Eleven Golden Shell competition films have been announced this morning, joining the previously selected quintet. This year’s lineup features a mix of veteran directors, and filmmakers transitioning from non-fiction to narrative debuts, and they even made room for two directorial debuts. Costa-Gavras, François Ozon, Mike Leigh and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (premiering Serpent’s Path, and not Cloud which is headed to Venice) are joined by Joshua Oppenheimer‘s The End (Telluride/TIFF) and Maite Alberdi‘s El Lugar De La Otra — the Chilean filmmaker’s fiction debut is actually backed by Netflix and is a period film set 1950s Santiago and focuses on the case of novelist Maria Carolina Geel who killed her lover in front of stunned diners at the Hotel Crillón.… Read the rest

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It was arguably the most engaging film at this year’s Cannes (Thierry Frémaux might have included it in the competition if not for Caught by the Tides shoring up), and I believe, it stands as the most groundbreaking piece of contemporary cinema dealing with the profound anxiety felt during the pandemic. Similarly, this docu-fiction exemplifies what was at stake when COVID-19 disrupted the entire system: the flow of creativity, freedom, and the indispensable role of the auteur. A Special Screenings selection, I hadn’t experienced such a level of second-guessing what I was watching since my first viewing of Sarah Polley’s flawlessly told Stories We Tell (2012).… Read the rest

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Today, Focus Features release Dìdi (弟弟) – the 2024 Sundance Film Festival winner of the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast. As part of a Global Press Conference day this week, we got to ask Sean Wang a question about his experience at the Sundance Labs and what he gained from it. The film should be in the running for multiple category noms at the Gotham awards and the Indie Spirits. Here is some of our coverage from Park City and the transcript from the question we asked:

IONCINEMA.com: You had the opportunity to workshop DIDI at the Sundance Labs, when living with these characters for so long, what was it like to reappraise them and then refine their DNAs by adding or subtracting elements.… Read the rest

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Earlier last month we reported that actresses Léa Drucker and Noémie Merlant were going to topline Laura Wandel’s highly anticipated sophomore feature, L’Intérêt d’Adam. We now learn via the Cineuropa folks that Anamaria Vartolomei will instead take the role that was originally assigned to Merlant. Vartolomei recently gave a masterful performance in Jessica Palud’s Being Maria (read review) and has Ana Teodora Mihai’s highly anticipated Heysel 85 in the pipeline. Production begins tomorrow until the first week of September and we’ll likely be looking at a possible Cannes premiere – a competition slot is not out of the cards.… Read the rest

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It was considered a “risky” film selection by Thierry Frémaux that divided critics but found a large swath of defenders (including our chief film critic Nicholas Bell) and now Coralie Fargeat will have its North American premiere at the fest that showcased her feature debut — Revenge (read review) back in 2017. Mubi landed the rights to The Substance prior to the film’s world premiere. In our review, Nicholas points to how it “starts out in slow, familiar territory before slamming into fever pitch for a Grand Guignol bloodbath which might just be the best bit of straight faced body horror since Cronenberg’s clutch of 1980s titles solidified its merits as a veritable sub-genre.”… Read the rest

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After showcasing three of the five Small Axe films, Steve McQueen is set to have the international premiere of Blitz at the New York Film Festival. After world premiering at the London BFI Film Festival on October 9th, he’ll be jetting down to the big apple to close out the 62nd edition. Many were scratching their heads when it was announced that the film favored a London premiere – many had the film on their Venice, Telluride and Toronto bingo cards. Apple Original Film will put this in theaters on November 1st ahead of its global premiere on Apple TV+ on November 22.… Read the rest

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