Hungarian WWII drama 'The Notebook' wins at Karlovy Vary

KARLOVY VARY – The 48th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, one of the leading Eastern European film festivals, came to a close on Saturday.

The festival jury, presided over by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, awarded the top prize, the Grand Prix Crystal Globe ($25,000 award) to the Hungarian film The Notebook. The film is a grim and cathartic drama directed by Janos Szasz (The Witman Boys), about twins living through World War II on the farm of their cruel grandmother. It is a Hungarian-German-Austrian-French co-production and features German actors Ulrich Mattes and Ulrich Thomsen in supporting roles. Thomsen earlier appeared in a lead role in Szasz’s film Opium: Diary of a Madwoman. The project had been gestating since 2006 and is the first film to be financed by Hungary’s new film funding body, the Hungarian National Film Fund.

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The Special Jury Prize ($15,000 award) went to the bizarre British black comedy A Field in England, set during the English Civil War (1642–1651). Directed by Ben Wheatley (Sightseers, Kill List), the film has multiple distribution platforms. It was released simultaneously on U.K. cinema screens, DVD, VOD formats and the free-to-air channel Film4 on Friday, July 5 – the day after its world premiere at Karlovy Vary. Drafthouse has already secured U.S. theatrical rights for the film.

In an unusual move, the festival awarded the best actress award to four actresses in one film – Louisa Krause, Margo Martindale, Emily Meade and Amy Morton, who starred in the film Bluebird, a U.S.-Swedish co-production directed by Lance Edmands. The film also won the festival’s Ecumenical Jury Award.

The toast of the festival was Oliver Stone, who was on hand in the latter half to receive a Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema, and award that was also presented to John Travolta and Czech costume designer Theodor Pistek (Amadeus) in the festival’s first half. Stone made typical pronouncements blasting U.S. foreign policy during a press conference, conducted a master class and presented screenings of films that he had written and/or directed, such as Alexander, Scarface (directed by Brian DePalma), an open-air showing of Wall Street and the two episodes of the documentary series Untold History of the United States.

Stone used his festival press conference as a soap box to pontificate about the United States’ global security state, calling Edward Snowden a hero.

“The United States is the dominant power in the universe, with its eavesdropping abilities,” he said. “It's what they call in the Pentagon ‘full spectrum dominance.’ And the world is in danger with our tyranny.”

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Stone’s Alexander: The Ultimate Cut, the fourth and final version of his much-tinkered historical extrapolation, had its European premiere at Karlovy Vary, and will be released to DVD in North America in 2014.

Stone stammered searchingly during his acceptance speech and ultimately decided to turn his speech into a pep talk for the aspiring filmmakers, saying, “Some of you who are in this room will certainly make a contribution to the world.”

Find the list of winners below.

GRAND JURY

Agnieszka Holland, Poland (jury president)

Ivo Andrle, Czech Republic

Frederic Boyer, France

Alon Garbuz, Israel

Claudia Llosa, Peru

Meenakshi Shedde, India

Sigurjon "Joni" Sighvatsson, Iceland

Other selected awards:

BEST DIRECTOR AWARD

Jan Hrebejk

Honeymoon

BEST ACTOR AWARD

Olafur Darri Olafsson

XL

EAST OF THE WEST AWARD ($20,000)

Floating Skyscrapers

Directed by Tomasz Wasilewski

AUDIENCE AWARD

Revival

Directed by Alice Nellis

INTERNATIONAL FILM CRITICS (FIPRESCI) AWARD

Shame

Directed by Yusup Razykov

THE ECUMENICAL JURY AWARD

Bluebird

Directed by Lance Edmands

Chinese Coming-of-Age Drama ‘Tiny Times’ Eyeing Huge Local Debut

HONG KONG – Never mind its seemingly self-belittling title: Chinese coming-of-age drama Tiny Times is poised to become one of the biggest hits in the country this year, and its makers are going to extremes to make sure it opens with a bang. More than 600 simultaneously-held sneak previews will take place in China on Wednesday at 8pm local time in more than 60 cities across the country, before the film opens officially on Thursday. It’s slated to take up more than 40 percent of the total screenings in the country on its opening day – quite a feat in itself, given the presence of the recently-released Man of Steel and the Jet Li-starring Badges of Fury.

“For people in their 30s and 40s, it doesn’t really matter whether you get to see a film before everybody else -- they are usually more rational in how they spend their money,” said Guo Jingming, who has adapted his own novel from 2008 -- also titled Tiny Times -- for his directorial debut. “But young people are more impulsive -- they really, really need to see the film the moment it’s available. That’s why we are putting on these 600 shows.”

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Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in his Shanghai office, Guo said he is confident the shows will sell out. His self-assurance stems from the frantic support shown by his fanbase: more than a decade after his career as a writer took off, he counts 19.7 million followers on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, and all three volumes of his Tiny Times novels -- which revolve around four young university graduates’ rites of passage as they navigate lives as adults -- have been best-sellers in the country.

The world premiere of the film itself at the Shanghai International Film Festival last week was packed to the rafters with his adoring fans whom, as Guo himself said, were mostly young women in their late teens.

Zhang Zhao, CEO of the film’s distributors Le Vision Pictures, told THR the day after the screening that “too many fans were coming to the show from so many different cities. “We tried to keep the number down, but we couldn’t – it’s crazy,” he added, beaming.

Guo said Tiny Times allows his viewers to dream about the future. “For example, look at Lin Shao,” he said, referring to the film’s protagonist played by A-lister Mini Yang Mi. “She began the story as an ordinary university student, and then she had to face all these things like job interviews and then intimidating bosses in the workplace. But she manages to pull through and her life gets better and better -- she’s got a great career, great friends and a handsome boyfriend. This is every girl’s dream life.”

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And it’s a fantasy befitting a country careening in its turbo-charged way towards commodity-driven capitalism too. Boasting the production design of Huang Wei -- a former creative director of the Chinese edition of Vogue -- Tiny Times maintains a glitzy sheen which wouldn’t look out of place in any of China’s burgeoning array of lifestyle magazines. The fact that it’s set in a skyscraper-littered, mall-laden Shanghai adds to the allure of the whole enterprise -- especially for most of Guo’s readers, spread across the provincial cities of the vast country.

“I’ve always lived in Shanghai and I know this city well – and I’ve seen how it has developed and changed,” Guo said. “When people talked about Shanghai in the past, they would think of [novelist] Eileen Chang’s description of a city of the Bund and the international concessions before the war; later it would be Wang Anyi’s take of life in small halls in back alleys. What I want to deliver is an image of Shanghai here and now -- a modern city at the top of the world. I want to chronicle the city as it is now -- I want people to remember Shanghai as it is now.”

Guo said he’s very aware of how his emphasis in the individualistic pursuits for gratification casts the film apart from the nostalgia-tinged dramas from directors from previous generations. Tiny Times sells imaginings of lives yet to be lived.

“We are very different from people born in the 1960s or 70s -- they were people who dressed the same and ate the same food in the same cafeteria, living the same kind of life,” he said. “But for people born in the 1980s, or even more so for those from the 1990s, it’s about trying to be different from everybody else. Whereas doing that in the past would see you branded as an anomaly, these days it’s all about looking after myself -- saying, 'I want to enjoy life the way I like it.'”

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While Peter Chan’s American Dreams in China (about the lives of three cram school teachers in the 1980s and 90s) and Vicki Zhao’s So Young (a semi-autobiographical tale about university life in the 1990s) mined the nostalgia of Chinese viewers in their 30s and 40s to maximum box-office effect -- the two films grossed $87 million (535 million yuan) and $117 million (719.5 million yuan) respectively -- Tiny Times may well top them both, largely thanks to the demographical changes among Chinese cinema-goers today.

According to the latest statistics from the China Film Distribution and Exhibition Association, the average age of a moviegoer in the country has dropped from 25.7 in 2009 to 21.2 in 2012. While more mature viewers have now elected to stream movies on mobile or home platforms, a trip to the cinema has remained a bonding ritual for students -- and it’s hardly a surprise that they tend to prefer films drenched in optimism and bling.

Having presided over a few successful marketing campaigns during his two-year tenure at Le Vision Pictures -- including that of The Expendables 2, released in the same week as The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man last September -- Zhang Zhao has been pragmatic in his approach to Tiny Times. “We’re not marketing a film -- we’re shaping the market,” he said, referring to the brutally precise campaigns deployed to zero in on the film’s young clientele.

Zhang said most of the film’s marketing activities are online, and that his team “didn’t put up one single advertising billboard” across the country. Knowing their fanbase is mostly high school students, the company put most of their effort into pushing the film through threads in China’s burgeoning social media networks, which count about 94 million students among their users, according to a report about new media released by the Chinese Academy of Social Science on Tuesday.

Not that Guo and his stars have eschewed all fo the traditional ways of movie promotion, however. The director has been traveling across the country with his cast -- which, apart from the more well-known Yang, also include Taiwanese stars Ko Chen-tung (You Are the Apple of My Eye) and Amber Guo (Au Revoir Taipei) -- and their presence at the Shanghai festival last week was the pinnacle of their tour, with the director’s pedigree boosted at industry panels at the film market, and the stars getting loads of exposure at the opening and closing ceremonies of premier Chinese festival.

For his part, Guo Jingming said he had turned down the offer of adapting the film in 2010 when China Film Group bought the adaptation rights to his novel. “I didn’t feel I was ready then -- and also the Chinese film market wasn't as vibrant then as it is now. Today the environment is good and allows for the presence of new directors,” he said, referring to how first-timers like Zhao and Xu Zheng (Lost in Thailand) have flourished with their debuts.

The success of homegrown dramas also signals how Chinese audiences have reconsidered what they want in their cinemas, Guo added. “They are not just looking for effects-driven, epic-looking Hollywood blockbusters or simple romantic comedies,” he said.

“We need to find something new so that we can get them excited – and what’s been lacking are stories addressing how particular generations of people became who they are. So you have to have stories which can resonate with them, something they can call their own.”

With a sequel planned for release in December and two volumes of his Tiny Times novels yet to be adapted, Guo would certainly hope for an unyielding explosion of the obsession.

 

THR's Must-Reads of the Week: 'Newsroom' Drama, Reality Roundtable, James Gandolfini

Between industry dinners, premiere parties and countless meetings, here's what you may have missed this week in entertainment news.

Cover Story: In this week's issue of The Hollywood Reporter, TV Editor Lacey Rose peeled back the curtain on HBO's The Newsroom with an extensive report detailing the depths to which Aaron Sorkin went to bring a more realistic story to the cable news drama.

Emmy Season: THR's annual Comedy Actress Roundtable features The Big Bang Theory's Mayim Bialik, House of Lies' Kristen Bell, Girls' Zosia Mament, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Kaitlin Olson, Arrested Development's Jessica Walter and Hot in Cleveland's Betty White dishing on auditions, on-screen crushes and the funny women who inspired them. Meanwhile, producers Tom Bergeron (Dancing With the Stars), Phil Keoghan (The Amazing Race), Heidi Klum (Project Runway), Gordon Ramsay (Hell's Kitchen) and Padma Lakshimi (Top Chef) swapped horror stories on nightmare contestants and moments they wish had never made it to the air during THR's annual Reality TV Roundtable.

The Real Man of Steel: How studio-mogul-turned-producer Jon Peters scored a $15 million payday for doing nothing on box office record-breaker Man of Steel.

Gavin Polone on WME's CAA Prank (Guest Column): The former top shark-turned-producer on the agency madness around the CAAN'T campaign: "Focus on the core business and get me and my friends f---ing jobs."