Montreal Festival Adds Judd Hirsch's 'The Red Robin' to Competition Slate

TORONTO – The U.S. indie The Red Robin, starring Judd Hirsch and Ryan O’Nan, has been booked into competition at the Montreal World Film Festival.

The psychological thriller from writer-director Michael Z. Wechsler also stars C.S. Lee (Dexter), Jaime Ray Newman, Caroline Lagerfelt and Joseph Lyle Taylor.

In The Red Robin, the Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated Hirsch plays a celebrated psychiatrist specializing in trauma who is rumored to have worked for the CIA during the Cold War.

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During a family reunion, one of his adult children accuses Hirsch’s character, now dying, of adopting kids to perform mind-control experiments on them.

Wechsler produced the film with Shawn R. Singh, and Terry Keefe is co-producer.

Executive producer credits go to Jonathan Sanger, Rick Porras, Wendy Herst and Khush Singh.

The Montreal World Film Festival is set to run Aug. 22 to Sept. 2.

 

'A World Not Ours' Wins Edinburgh International Film Festival Prize

LONDON -- Mahdi Fleifel’s A World Not Ours won the best film in the international competition at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival.

The festival's awards were dished out Friday ahead of Sunday’s closing night gala Not Another Happy Ending, which brings the curtain down on this year's 12-day event in the Scottish capital.

Fleifel’s movie, a Lebanon/UAE/Denmark/U.K. co-production, was awarded the plaudit by an international jury chaired by South Korean director Bong Joon and that included actress Natalie Dormer and film critic Siobhan Synnot.

Fleifel said: "I have lived, studied and worked in the U.K. for 13 years, but I've never managed to screen any of my work at a single British film event - not even my short films which were pretty successful internationally."

He said he hopes the recognition "will help bring our film to a wider audience in the U.K. and I would like to thank the jury for this wonderful honor."

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The festival's Michael Powell award for best British film went to Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s documentary Leviathan, a U.K./USA/France production.

The winner was chosen by the Michael Powell jury, chaired by Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf and including actor and director Kevin McKidd and film critic Derek Malcolm.

Castaing-Taylor and Paravel said the award would give them "the courage and conviction to continue to keep pushing at the envelope - of cinema, of documentary, of art."

The nod for best performance in a British movie was shared by Jamie Blackley and Toby Regbo for their performances as the dysfunctional schoolboys in uwantme2killhim?

Reinstated in 2013 after a two-year absence, the audience award went to Fire In the Night (U.K.) directed by Anthony Wonke for his documentary detailing the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea.

Wonke said: "It’s 25 years ago this July that Piper Alpha exploded and sunk into the North Sea and we hope that with this film the memory of that fateful night that affected so many lives will act as a suitable remembrance."

EIFF artistic director Chris Fujiwara said: "The Audience Award, which we reinstated this year after a two-year hiatus, is not only one of the most significant of EIFF’s initiatives designed to engage audiences with cinema, it’s also one of the most fun."

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'The World's End' to Close Fantasia Film Festival

The Fantasia Film Festival has announced a sampling of the films that will be featured at the Montreal festival from July 18 through August 6.

Edgar Wright’s The World’s End will make its Canadian premiere and will close the festival. The apocalyptic comedy stars Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Rosamund Pike and Martin Freeman and follows five friends’ attempt to complete a pub crawl amidst a robot apocalypse. Wright and select members of the cast will attend.

Polish director Andrzej Zulawski will be awarded the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, celebrating a career of unconventional and often controversial works. Grotesque and surreal, Zulawski has created numerous breathtaking and cinematic films. The visionary’s most famous works include Possession, La Femme Publique and L’Amour Braque. The latter and his 1996 film Szamanka will be screened in conjunction with the award being given on July 25.

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Horror feature The Conjuring will be screened as part of the Opening Night festivities. Directed by James Wan (Saw and Insidious), the film stars Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson and Joey King.

Film won’t be the only medium screened in Montreal. Fantasia will welcome live theater to its festival lineup, premiering an adaptation of Clive Barker’s play, A History of the Devil. The play runs nearly three hours long and is directed by Jeremy Michael Segal. Three performances will take place on August 1, 2 and 3 at Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle.

Other notable films being screened at Fantasia are Magic Magic (dir. Sebastian Silva), I’ll Follow You Down (dir. Richie Mehta), Ip Man – The Final Fight (dir. Herman Yau) and Cheap Thrills (dir. E.L. Katz).

The Fantasia Film Festival will showcase at least 100 feature films over its near three-week duration, along with many conferences and parties. Audiences can look forward to many international premieres and numerous Canadian debuts of the best works from this year’s Cannes, Sundance, SXSW, Berlin and Tribeca festivals.

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Brett Hendrie New Exec Director of Canada’s Hot Docs Festival

AMSTERDAM -- Longtime Hot Docs executive director Chris McDonald is moving aside to allow festival managing director Brett Hendrie to fill the post.

McDonald, who held the job for 15 years, will take on the new position of Hot Docs president, overseeing the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto, the festival’s year-round home.

Hendrie, who worked alongside McDonald for 10 years to take the festival into the international arena, assumes the day-to-day running of North America’s largest documentary festival and related year-round programming.

The handover was blessed June 19 at a board meeting for Hot Docs.

McDonald, having joined Hot Docs in 1998, has taken the festival from a small gathering of Canadian filmmakers to an annual public event that draws international doc makers and industry players, including for a key documentary co-production market.

 

 

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'Haute Cuisine' Wins Audience Award at Provincetown Film Festival

Christian Vincent’s Haute Cuisine, the story of Danièle Delpeuch, who was the private chef to French President François Mitterrand, received the audience award for best narrative feature at the Provincetown International Film Festival, which handed out its awards Sunday night.

The audience award for best documentary feature went to Morgan Neville’s Twenty Feet From Stardom.

Other awards were given to Marnie Crawford Samuelson’s Selina Trieff Will Not Stop, audience award for best short film; Whoopi Goldberg’s Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ To Tell You, the John Schlesinger Award given to a first-time documentary or narrative feature filmmaker; David Schlussel’s Setup, Punch, jury award/live-action short film; Conor Finnegan’s Fear of Flying, jury award/animated short film; Sam Handel’s The River, jury award/New England short film; and Ainslie Henderson’s I Am Tom Moody, jury award/student short film.

Cinematographer Ed Lachman received the Faith Hubley Career Achievement Award, and Harmony Korine received the Filmmaker on the Edge Award.

 

Shanghai Festival: 'The Major' and 'Reliance' Win at Golden Goblet Awards

HONG KONG – Yuri Bykov’s The Major and William Olsson’s Reliance have emerged as the top-ranked entries at the Shanghai International Film Festival’s Golden Goblets awards, each taking home three titles.

A dark tale about a Russian detective's spiraling into moral oblivion as he attempts to conceal a hit-and-run which led to the death of a passer-by, The Major – which premiered at the Critics’ Week at Cannes last month – was named Best Film, while Bykov himself secured the Best Director prize as well as an Artistic Achievement Award for his score for the film.

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Meanwhile, Reliance won a Jury Prize, with screenwriter Angus MacLachlan and cinematographer Vachan Sharma also netting prizes in their respective categories. Released a week before its international premiere in Shanghai, Olsson’s film revolves around the breakdown of a family after one of its members were subjected to a sexual assault at home.

Financed by mainland Chinese studio Bona Film Group, Dante Lam’s Unbeatable brought some cheers to the local crowd with its stars Nick Cheung and Crystal Lee winning the Best Actor and Actress titles. Cheung plays an ex-convict forced to make a living in illicit boxing matches, with Lee delivering a critically-acclaimed turn as the ten-year-old girl he’s trying to take care of.

The competition jury was chaired by Tom Hooper, who was joined in Shanghai this year by fellow directors Chris Kraus (Germany), Khosro Masoumi (Iran), Jiri Menzel (Czech Republic) and Ning Hao (mainland China), and also Chinese actress Yu Nan and French critic Michel Ciment.

The festival’s Asian New Talent Awards were already unveiled on Friday, with South Korean director Roh Doek’s Very Ordinary Couple winning the Best Feature prize. Singapore’s Wong Chen Hsi was named Best Director for his work Innocents, while mainland Chinese filmmaker Liu Juan took the Jury Prize for Singing When We Are Young.

The jury for this young-director showcase was led by mainland Chinese director Lu Chuan, and also comprised Indian festival programmer Aruna Vasudev, Korean director Choi Dong-hoon, US producer Gary Kurtz and French actress Laura Weissbacker.

The festival, which began on June 15 by bestowing Oliver Stone and Tsui Hark with honorary awards before screening Monsters University, concluded its nine-day run on Sunday with a screening of the U.S. heist caper Now You See Me.