Luz
Stuck in what feels like a Terrence Malick post-production purgatory abyss, Hong Kong filmmaker Flora Lau‘s Luz has been a yearly no-show since 2019 and we still have zero clue as to the status of this project. Having preemed her debut film Bends in 2013 in the Un Certain Regard section, we are now at the decade between projects point here. A France-Chinese co-production, the highly anticipated sophomore project has Isabelle Huppert toplining with Sandrine Pinna and Xiaodong Guo as supporting players. Benjamín Echazarreta was the cinematographer on the project here – he has since worked on Memory House and Blanquita.…...
Stuck in what feels like a Terrence Malick post-production purgatory abyss, Hong Kong filmmaker Flora Lau‘s Luz has been a yearly no-show since 2019 and we still have zero clue as to the status of this project. Having preemed her debut film Bends in 2013 in the Un Certain Regard section, we are now at the decade between projects point here. A France-Chinese co-production, the highly anticipated sophomore project has Isabelle Huppert toplining with Sandrine Pinna and Xiaodong Guo as supporting players. Benjamín Echazarreta was the cinematographer on the project here – he has since worked on Memory House and Blanquita.…...
- 1/5/2023
- by Eric Lavallée
- IONCINEMA.com
“Blanquita,” Chile’s official Oscar entry for Best International Film from rising star Fernando Guzzoni, is a cinematic and narrative revelation. Taking its cues from the real-life child prostitution and pedophilia scandal known as the “Spiniak Case” that rocked Chile in the early 2000s, “Blanquita” revolves around the young lady at the center of the scandal.
Blanca (first-time actress Laura López), more commonly referred to as Blanquita, has been subjected to abuse — emotional, sexual and physical — all her life. Poor and largely unprotected, the 18-year-old Blanquita is rarely championed; rooting for her, as Guzzoni reveals, does not always end where we hope it will.
Backed by Manuel, the priest of the home where she resides with her baby girl, Blanca alleges that a powerful businessman and a noted politician are part of a child-prostitution ring. As we watch her undergo psychological evaluations, holding her head high with a steely stare...
Blanca (first-time actress Laura López), more commonly referred to as Blanquita, has been subjected to abuse — emotional, sexual and physical — all her life. Poor and largely unprotected, the 18-year-old Blanquita is rarely championed; rooting for her, as Guzzoni reveals, does not always end where we hope it will.
Backed by Manuel, the priest of the home where she resides with her baby girl, Blanca alleges that a powerful businessman and a noted politician are part of a child-prostitution ring. As we watch her undergo psychological evaluations, holding her head high with a steely stare...
- 12/9/2022
- by Ronda Racha Penrice
- The Wrap
Click here to read the full article.
The European Works in Progress Cologne (Ewip) couldn’t have come at a better time.
For a European art house industry in crisis — box office revenues for specialty films remain well below pre-pandemic levels while the cost of producing films has only gone up —the need for exciting new “content” in the form of films that will draw audiences back to the theatres, has arguably never been greater.
For the past three days, some of Europe’s top festival programmers and international sales agents have gathered in the western German city to check out arthouse productions at various stages of development that promise to be the breakout projects of the coming months.
Programmers from the Cannes, Berlin, Venice and San Sebastián festivals, as well as from Karlovy Vary, Locarno, Tribeca and elsewhere, as well as sales heavyweights including mk2, The Match Factory, Charades...
The European Works in Progress Cologne (Ewip) couldn’t have come at a better time.
For a European art house industry in crisis — box office revenues for specialty films remain well below pre-pandemic levels while the cost of producing films has only gone up —the need for exciting new “content” in the form of films that will draw audiences back to the theatres, has arguably never been greater.
For the past three days, some of Europe’s top festival programmers and international sales agents have gathered in the western German city to check out arthouse productions at various stages of development that promise to be the breakout projects of the coming months.
Programmers from the Cannes, Berlin, Venice and San Sebastián festivals, as well as from Karlovy Vary, Locarno, Tribeca and elsewhere, as well as sales heavyweights including mk2, The Match Factory, Charades...
- 10/19/2022
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Violence — or, rather, the threat of violence — haunts every frame of João Paulo Miranda Maria’s debut feature film, “Memory House.” Set in an Austrian settlement in Southern Brazil, this discomfiting drama tells the story of a man so alienated by the world around him that the stench of death at work and the menacing environment outside it have hollowed him out. That is until his titular dwelling kicks off a transformation that turns Miranda Maria’s character study into a folk-infused fable for a country in crisis.
Cristovam spends his days listlessly working at a dairy factory. Displaced by the very company that now employs him, he’s resettled from the North and finds little in common with either his German-speaking employers or his fellow workers. At 81 years old, Pitanga is a towering presence on screen, bringing with him not just a wealth of cultural signifiers but his laconic...
Cristovam spends his days listlessly working at a dairy factory. Displaced by the very company that now employs him, he’s resettled from the North and finds little in common with either his German-speaking employers or his fellow workers. At 81 years old, Pitanga is a towering presence on screen, bringing with him not just a wealth of cultural signifiers but his laconic...
- 9/8/2021
- by Manuel Betancourt
- Variety Film + TV
Alison McAlpine’s documentary draws out tales from locals and astronomers to evoke the magic and mystery of Chile’s stargazing hotspot
Cielo means “sky” in Spanish, and “heaven”, too. And it’s with a sense of humbled wonder at the immense mystery of it all that the Canadian film-maker Alison McAlpine casts her camera upwards in this beautiful documentary about the night sky. It’s filmed at the stargazing hotspot of Chile’s Atacama desert, where there is virtually no light pollution; the heavens appear to be within touching distance – as if a seam in the sky has been unpicked and the stars tumble out like diamonds.
For those of us who live in urban areas, we look up from noisy streets and bright city lights to the vast emptiness of the sky. In Atacama, it’s the reverse; the sky seems more alive than the earth – a bare,...
Cielo means “sky” in Spanish, and “heaven”, too. And it’s with a sense of humbled wonder at the immense mystery of it all that the Canadian film-maker Alison McAlpine casts her camera upwards in this beautiful documentary about the night sky. It’s filmed at the stargazing hotspot of Chile’s Atacama desert, where there is virtually no light pollution; the heavens appear to be within touching distance – as if a seam in the sky has been unpicked and the stars tumble out like diamonds.
For those of us who live in urban areas, we look up from noisy streets and bright city lights to the vast emptiness of the sky. In Atacama, it’s the reverse; the sky seems more alive than the earth – a bare,...
- 4/19/2021
- by Cath Clarke
- The Guardian - Film News
Luz
Produced by Sinn Gi Joseph Chan, Stephen Lam, Flora Lau
Directed by Flora Lau
Written by Flora Lau
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Pinna, Xiaodong Guo
Cinematographer: Benjamín Echazarreta
Release Date/Prediction: Luz has been delayed for so long that it could play just about anywhere. We think this might be a Berlinale comp title or Locarno if it’s a Cannes no-show.
…...
Produced by Sinn Gi Joseph Chan, Stephen Lam, Flora Lau
Directed by Flora Lau
Written by Flora Lau
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Pinna, Xiaodong Guo
Cinematographer: Benjamín Echazarreta
Release Date/Prediction: Luz has been delayed for so long that it could play just about anywhere. We think this might be a Berlinale comp title or Locarno if it’s a Cannes no-show.
…...
- 1/6/2021
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Swedish Film Institute announces Wild Card funding recipients for debut development funding.
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Burhan Qurbani is the big winner at the 2020 Stockholm International Film Festival, taking the Bronze Horse for best film and also the best actor prize for Welket Bungué.
Mexican director Fernanda Valadez’s Identifying Features was also a double winner for best director and best debut.
His compatriot Michel Franco was presented with this year’s Stockholm Impact Award for his film New Order. Gunda, by Victor Kossakovsky, won the Bronze Horse for best documentary.
Katherine Waterston won best actress for The World To Come.
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Burhan Qurbani is the big winner at the 2020 Stockholm International Film Festival, taking the Bronze Horse for best film and also the best actor prize for Welket Bungué.
Mexican director Fernanda Valadez’s Identifying Features was also a double winner for best director and best debut.
His compatriot Michel Franco was presented with this year’s Stockholm Impact Award for his film New Order. Gunda, by Victor Kossakovsky, won the Bronze Horse for best documentary.
Katherine Waterston won best actress for The World To Come.
- 11/19/2020
- by Wendy Mitchell
- ScreenDaily
A fervid supporter of new directors, Paris-based sales house Celluloid Dreams has dropped two clips and the poster of Brazilian João Paulo Miranda Maria’s “Memory House” (“La Casa de Antiguedades”), a first feature, but also the only Latin American title to be included in this year’s Cannes Official Selection.
“Memory House” will now world premiere in early September as one of 50 features at a slimmed-down Toronto. It was also confirmed on Tuesday for San Sebastian’s New Directors lineup, an influential new talent showcase.
Written by Miranda Maria, “Memory House” adds to Brazil’s fast-burgeoning canon of movies examining its urgent racial and social issues.
A first sequence catches Cristovam as he trudges down a lane taunted by local teens. An aged but still stout Black worker from Brazil’s often still dirt-poor rural North, Cristovam has relocated to Brazil’s rich South to work at a milk...
“Memory House” will now world premiere in early September as one of 50 features at a slimmed-down Toronto. It was also confirmed on Tuesday for San Sebastian’s New Directors lineup, an influential new talent showcase.
Written by Miranda Maria, “Memory House” adds to Brazil’s fast-burgeoning canon of movies examining its urgent racial and social issues.
A first sequence catches Cristovam as he trudges down a lane taunted by local teens. An aged but still stout Black worker from Brazil’s often still dirt-poor rural North, Cristovam has relocated to Brazil’s rich South to work at a milk...
- 8/5/2020
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
Didar Domehri’s Paris-based company, Maneki Films, is on board to produce “Memory House,” the feature debut of young Brazilian director João Paulo Miranda Maria, whose short films have played in Cannes and Venice.
The director started developing the script of “Memory House” in 2015 as part of the Next Step Program, a workshop created by Cannes’ Critics’ Week to help the directors of the 10 shorts playing in the sidebar to make their feature debut. Miranda Maria then took part in Cannes’ Cinéfondation program, and presented his project at the Paris Coproduction Village, an industry event organized by the team behind Les Arcs European Film Festival.
Miranda Maria has earned critical praise for his three shorts, “Command Action,” which played at Critics’ Week in 2015; “The Girl Who Danced With the Devil,” which won Special Mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016; and “Meninas Fomicida,” which played at Venice in 2017.
Lensed by Benjamín Echazarreta,...
The director started developing the script of “Memory House” in 2015 as part of the Next Step Program, a workshop created by Cannes’ Critics’ Week to help the directors of the 10 shorts playing in the sidebar to make their feature debut. Miranda Maria then took part in Cannes’ Cinéfondation program, and presented his project at the Paris Coproduction Village, an industry event organized by the team behind Les Arcs European Film Festival.
Miranda Maria has earned critical praise for his three shorts, “Command Action,” which played at Critics’ Week in 2015; “The Girl Who Danced With the Devil,” which won Special Mention at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016; and “Meninas Fomicida,” which played at Venice in 2017.
Lensed by Benjamín Echazarreta,...
- 8/2/2019
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
Despite opening atop Chile’s Las Campanas Observatory, Cielo is not strictly a scientific documentary, or even a film about astronomy. It does not purport to contain answers to our deepest questions about what lies far beyond the stars in the night sky. Instead, it’s a film that looks in wide-eyed awe at the vastness of the universe as seen from the vantage point of northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, a place where the view of the night sky is almost unnaturally beautiful and the landscape looks more like Mars than of our own planet. It’s that painfully earnest sense of awe that keeps the film from breaking beyond the realm where IMAX movies have gone before. Individual images are truly a sight to behold, but the film never comes together to form anything cohesive in the end, beyond an eye-popping look at the Chilean night sky.
Gorgeously...
Gorgeously...
- 8/15/2018
- by Tony Hinds
- The Film Stage
A few months ago, I found myself feeling sorely disappointed by a film I had long waited to see. The time was August, the place was Locarno, and the movie was Nadir Moknèche’s Lola Pater, screened in the festival’s iconic Piazza Grande. Featuring legendary French actress Fanny Ardant as a transgender woman reunited with her long-lost son (a plot that, unoriginal as it may have been, promised plenty of drama), I thought I was in for a treat. But Lola Pater never met my expectations. In fact, I felt as though it mocked the transgender lead it purported to celebrate, and in ways I couldn’t fully articulate then, I began wondering whether Ardant was herself somehow part of the problem. The actress’s legendary portfolio may have made her look like a bullet-proof choice, but in the context of the recent renaissance of Lgbtq cinema, with storytellers...
- 2/1/2018
- MUBI
At the core of this indelibly moving film – Chile's entry in the Oscar race for Best Foreign-Language feature – is a performance of surpassing beauty and tenderness. Daniela Vega is the first openly transgender actress and model in Chile, and her portrayal of Marina Vidal, a trans woman who works as a waitress in Santiago to support her career as a cabaret singer, signals her as a world-class talent. With such cisgender actors as Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl), Jeffrey Tambor (Transparent) and Hillary Swank (Boys Don't Cry) scoring career triumphs in trans roles,...
- 1/31/2018
- Rollingstone.com
Rising Chilean director Sebastián Lelio celebrates the endurance of a woman under suspicion of murder in a film that could bring the first major acting award for a transgender performer to Daniela Vega
The dynamic Chilean comedy Gloria went down a storm at the 2013 Berlinale where Paulina García was named best actress for her portrayal of a divorcee hitting the Santiago singles circuit. Now its director, Sebastián Lelio, is back at this year’s festival with another story of a resilient female refusing to live her life according to the demands of others. A Fantastic Woman has emerged as the mid-festival favourite for the Golden Bear, with the newcomer Daniela Vega likely to get her hands on the same prize as García. Such a win would be not only deserved but unprecedented, since it would make Vega the first transgender performer to scoop a major acting award.
Although A Fantastic Woman reunites the Gloria team,...
The dynamic Chilean comedy Gloria went down a storm at the 2013 Berlinale where Paulina García was named best actress for her portrayal of a divorcee hitting the Santiago singles circuit. Now its director, Sebastián Lelio, is back at this year’s festival with another story of a resilient female refusing to live her life according to the demands of others. A Fantastic Woman has emerged as the mid-festival favourite for the Golden Bear, with the newcomer Daniela Vega likely to get her hands on the same prize as García. Such a win would be not only deserved but unprecedented, since it would make Vega the first transgender performer to scoop a major acting award.
Although A Fantastic Woman reunites the Gloria team,...
- 2/14/2017
- by Ryan Gilbey
- The Guardian - Film News
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