On A High Note, AFI Fest Team Departs (IndieWire)

By Brian Brooks

Even as talk mounts that festivals may take on a larger role in the future for film distribution, the festival industry continues to experience flux. For the second time in just over two years, the American Film Institute’s AFI Fest in Los Angeles is enduring a leadership shift. Apparently facing a tight budget, Artistic Director Rose Kuo and Festival Producer David Rogers, in addition to the event’s Head of Press and Public Relations John Wildman, are all leaving the festival, the three announced Monday afternoon.

Their exit comes on the heels of what many participants and audiences considered a successful 2009 event. Despite a move from the Archlight to the Mann Chinese theaters on Hollywood and Highland as well as a downsizing of films programmed, the festival managed to lure full house audiences to its event with free screenings. “At the beginning of the year, we knew it would be an economically challenging year,” Kuo told indieWIRE back in November. “We were concerned about sponsorship and even who would buy passes or even individual tickets to see a film they may consider risky.” In the re-organization for the 2009 event, the fest featured 57 films from the previous year’s 100.

“We came in on budget, and this was a festival with a highly reduced budget,” David Rogers - who managed the fest’s budget - told iW Monday evening. “We were able to keep the delivery of AFI Fest ‘09 on par despite a drastically reduced budget.”

Rogers said AFI told both he and Kuo that they wanted the team to produce an event on a similar budget as the previous year, but they were hesitant to take on another year under the same tightly budgeted circumstances.

“The three of us asked for more favors then we like to think about,” Rogers said about last year’s event. “I think we weren’t prepared to continue with the same expectation. I didn’t think I could commit that personal time, and I don’t think I could expect those favors again.” Rogers went on to praise the festival’s sponsors, including its main sponsor Audi, as well as its vendors who offered services to the festival despite its financial constraints.

“I think going back to do it a second time [would be difficult]. We worked with two-thirds less staff. Since ‘06 when I came in, we never had this low of a staff. The three of us were able to rally around this idea of a free festival and everyone rallied around this idea too, but to do it again, I didn’t know how I was going to be able to ask [vendors and staff] for the same thing. So I felt it was a good time for me to step back and say I was proud of it, but it’s time to move on.” Rogers said he hopes to work with Kuo and Wildman going forward, saying their partnership had been ideal. He added that the three have been talking about future projects.

“Rose [Kuo] and Dave [Rogers] are going to be the ‘Valentino’ of festivals, they’re going out on top,” said AFI’s Head of Press and Public Relations John Wildman, referring to Matt Tyrnauer’s doc, “Valentino: The Last Emperor” which featured the fashion maverick retiring while on top of his game. “Thank goodness it went off successfully, but after every festival, you think, ‘what are you going to do next? What are we given going into it?’” Wildman said referring to AFI’s allotment for the 2010 edition.

“It’s certainly not the only festival dealing with this type of reality, but if this is the case, we feel that we’ve taken [the festival] to the limit and therefore it’s time to turn it over and let someone else take their shot at this,” Wildman added.

The departures of the three AFI Fest organizers certainly raises questions about the plan and leadership for the 2010 event.

indieWIRE made calls to AFI president and CEO Bob Gazzale and COO Nancy Harris, but neither was available to speak today.

“For me it’s a perfect time to make a change,” Rose Kuo told iW Monday. “I was honored to be a part of the organization and make a contribution. As you know, all festivals are in a state of change. I think we’ve made some meaningful improvements to AFI Fest. I think the free festival was one of the most successful aspects of the [event] that I’ve had the privilege to be a part of. I think we’ve built something special for Los Angeles. We streamlined the staff and made the festival sustainable for the long term and it was a good time to hand it off.”

“There was a marked difference in the philosophy, intent and programming of the festival,” added Wildman praising Kuo’s stewardship of the festival since she took over more than two years ago. “This year was the culmination on what had begun in 2007 as a sea change.”

AFI Fest, which takes place in late October through early November is only one component of the American Film Institute, a non-profit arts organization founded in 1967. The group operates AFI Conservatory, a highly regarded film school adjacent to L.A.‘s Griffith Park as well as preserving film heritage and its annual awards show. According to a Los Angeles Times article by John Horn published on October 25th, the campus struggles with deferred maintenance issues and needs millions in capital improvements. Still, AFI head Bob Gazzale told the Los Angeles Times that the program remains top notch.

”“The equipment [the students] work on is the finest in the business,” he is quoted as saying in the article.

“AFI has a lot of moving parts,” Wildman said Monday. “The Conservatory, AFI Awards, AFI Fest, SilverDocs (the organization’s documentary festival held annually in Silver Springs, MD in June) and AFI Dallas… Like any organization, there are priorities and things get emphasized when you have a lot going on, and I don’t know that AFI Fest was ever really emphasized. That’s not to say they didn’t support us, but they have a lot under that umbrella.”

Wildman said that he plans to head up the press office at the recently re-branded Dallas International Film Festival. The festival ended its seven-figure three-year agreement with AFI last June.

“The next thing I’d like to do is start something from scratch or retool something existing,” said Kuo. “I’d like to see what we did this past year and see how it could translate to something broader.” She also said she hopes that the team she worked with at AFI Fest will be able to work together going forward. “We’re a great team and we should look for new challenges. With the industry going through such challenges, this is a great opportunity for us to broaden our outreach.”

Kuo declined to talk specifics about financials at this past year’s festival, but she praised her fellow organizer, Dave Rogers who produced the event.

“I think Dave Rogers pulled off a miracle. Given the budget they had, he and his team pulled off a miracle.”

Premios del AFI FIlm Festival (Indiewire)

Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” and Javier Rebello’s “Woman Without Piano” are the joint winners of the AFI Fest New Lights Competition. The event hosted its awards ceremony Thursday night at the historic Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Blvd. following the closing night U.S. premiere of Tom Ford’s “A Single Man” at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The film’s stars including Colin Firth, Ginnifer Goodwin, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode, and Ryan Simpkins attended the screening along with other celebs.

“I’d like to thank Rose [Kuo] and everybody at AFI and IFC [the film’s distributor] for championing independent film,” said actor Michael Fassbender reading a statement from the director Thursday night. Unfortunately, the crowd chatted during the short awards presentation, so some of the moments the films might have received were drowned out.

Actress and filmmaker Angela Bassett, who chaired the jury, presented the awards, and “Fish Tank” star Michael Fassbender accepted the prize on behalf of the film. Also serving on this year’s jury were actress/filmmaker Julie Delpy, journalist/author Bill Krohn, Buenos Aries International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI) Artistic Director Sergio Wolf and Hong Kong filmmaker Yonfan.

“The establishment of the AFI Fest New Lights Competition has been one of many highlights for this year’s festival,” said AFI Fest Artistic Director Rose Kuo in a statement. “Led by Angela Bassett, our jury enjoyed and deliberated over a truly outstanding group of films, and ultimately decided that the award should be shared by these two amazing works of art.”

New Lights Competition Award Winners:

“Fish Tank”
Director: Andrea Arnold
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Harry Treadaway, Katie Jarvis, Kierston Wareing
Producer: Kees Kasander
Exececutive Producer: Christine Langan, David M. Thompson, Paul Trijbits, UK

“Woman Without Piano” (La Mujer Sin Piano)
Director: Javier Rebello
Cast: Jan Budar, Esperanza De la Vega, Tomas del Estal, Nadia de Santiago
Executive Producer: Damian Paris, Stefan Schmitz, Maria Zamora Spain/France

Special Jury Mention

“Ajami”
Director: Scandar Copti, Yaron Shani
Cast: Fouad Habash, Nisrine Rihan, Elias Saba, Youssef Sahwani
Producer: Moshe Danon, Thanassis Karathanos
Executive Producer: James Richardson Israel/Germany

"Castro", de Alejo Moguillansky (trailer)

Past, Moving Forward: The Little Theater of Pedro Costa (Los Angeles Weekly)

By Scott Foundas

“A Pedro Costa musical — now, what would that be like?” I asked in these pages two years ago when the Portuguese filmmaker, appearing at REDCAT for the first-ever Los Angeles retrospective of his work, unveiled a 12-minute preview of his in-progress film about French actress and chanteuse Jeanne Balibar. Last May in Cannes, when Costa premiered the complete, feature-length version of Ne Change Rien, the answer was obvious: not like any musical you’ve ever seen before. Indeed, as with almost all of Costa’s work, the more you try to stick a label on his black-and-white study of Balibar in various stages of performance — “backstage documentary,” “concert film,” etc. — the more it evades capture, each new descriptor seeming at once inadequate and altogether too limiting. Is Ne Change Rien live, or is it Memorex? Only this much is certain: It is an experience.

The project, which grew out of a three-way friendship between Costa, Balibar and the late sound recordist Philippe Morel (to whom the film is dedicated), was shot piecemeal over a period of several years, as Balibar and musical collaborators (including guitarist/songwriter Rodolphe Burger) gigged around Europe and Asia and rehearsed material for her 2006 sophomore album, Slalom Dame. The result is an acutely perceptive film about the process of artistic creation, composed almost entirely of those moments that other films about performers omit or reduce to crassly compressed montages. In short, Costa, who previously documented husband-and-wife filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in the 2001 feature Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, focuses on the work — the physical, emotional and psychological toil that goes into writing a lyric, perfecting a melody, interpreting a passage. Where most performance films — indeed, most performances — are about the seamlessness of the end product, Ne Change Rien endeavors to show us the seams. (At its first AFI Fest screening, Ne Change Rien will be preceded by Staub’s latest short, Le Streghe, Femmes entre elles.)

“The first time we showed the film, in Cannes, what I saw was that people started to walk out exactly when the work begins,” Costa told me earlier this month, sipping a beer and smoking a cigarette on the terrace of Lincoln Center’s newly renovated Alice Tully Hall, where Ne Change Rien was screening as part of the New York Film Festival. Tall and slender with mostly gray hair, dressed from head to toe in black, the 50-year-old Costa speaks in a low, ellipses-filled paragraphs that he seems to consider and reconsider even as he is speaking them. “In the beginning, there’s a bit of music,” he continued, “but when shit happens — I mean, when you have to concentrate, and Jeanne is not getting there, and the band is getting worried — that’s when I heard a couple of guys walking out and saying, ‘Oh, it started so nicely, but then. ...’”

For much of Ne Change Rien, Costa takes us inside Burger’s home recording studio, near the French-German border, as Balibar and company try out multiple variations on the Slalom Dame material (including, appropriately, one song titled “Cinéma”). It is, Costa said, where the idea for the film truly began to coalesce, “because those were more than rehearsals. They were inventing and trying things. Some songs you hear in the film are not on the record.” Then, in a a remarkable nine-minute shot, Costa shows Balibar taking detailed notes from an offscreen vocal coach while rehearsing for the title role in a 2008 production of Jacques Offenbach’s 19th-century opéra buffe, La Périchole. The teacher frequently interrupts Balibar’s performance, breaking it down line by line, measure by measure, to the singer’s — and some audience members’ — visible frustration.

“I thought she was very, very courageous in this singing,” Costa said. “I mean, this is an opera that Teresa Berganza sings; you can buy the EMI CD. But it takes a bit of courage just to sing. Singing is ... yeah, you could almost say that it’s the first thing, it’s even before language, and that connects back the Straubs, because they’re very suspect of language.” And like Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, Ne Change Rien is also, by turns, a love story. “These looks they give to one another, Rodolphe and Jeanne ... everybody in Cannes thought they were lovers,” he said. “That’s okay. They are not. They’re good friends, but something happens ... it’s the work that creates a little bit this loving thing.”

Costa’s films have never been — and never will be — for everyone. Stationed somewhere between documentary and fiction, they demand an active, critical viewer willing to consider moving images in the same complex, constantly evolving terms that Costa does, whether he is observing a creative personality at work, or illustrating the realities (and fantasies) of dispossessed Cape Verdean immigrants in the crumbling Lisbon housing slum of Fontainhas. The focus of Costa’s three best-known features — Ossos, In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth — and two subsequent shorts, it is a terrain he has now mapped as indelibly as John Ford’s Monument Valley, complete with its own resident stock company. Commercial distribution has proven elusive for the filmmaker. Early next year, the Criterion Collection will release a DVD box set of Costa’s complete Fontainhas works, all of them available for the first time in the U.S.

Like the Straubs before him, Costa is consumed by the ethical and political implications of putting a camera before another human being. When he began filming in Fontainhas, he soon gave up the comforts of a traditional crew in favor of shooting by himself, less disruptively, on a small, digital video camera (a method he carried over to Ne Change Rien). Above all, he searches for the proper distance between filmmaker and subject. In the case of Balibar, that means an intimacy close enough to see every twitch of her neck muscles, yet entirely lacking in the intrusive vulgarity of so much music video.

Costa cited a source of inspiration in a musical number from Jean Renoir’s final feature, The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir, featuring actress Jeanne Moreau. “It’s just two shots — one where she’s standing on a stage and you see her whole body, and the second half of the song is a close-up. And you see a lot of things — it’s amazing what you see in two shots.”

He also has high praise for 1957’s celebrated “The Sound of Jazz” episode from the CBS television series Seven Lively Arts, featuring Billie Holiday (accompanied by Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young) performing a heartbreaking rendition of “Fine and Mellow.” “They have three cameras, perhaps, and they don’t abuse that. The distance in that show is amazing — especially with a person like Billie Holiday, you have to be careful.”

Indeed, in his films and in his conversation, there is a feeling that Costa aims to recover a purity of expression — a primacy of image, sound and meaning — inherent in the work of the earliest cinema pioneers. “When the Lumière brothers did a shot, the movement inside the shot is almost impossible to re-create today,” Costa said of the French siblings who were the first to publicly exhibit motion pictures. “I am always very afraid when I see a little dog crossing the street in a Lumière brothers film, afraid it’s going to be crushed by a Model T. It’s something very concrete, this menace. Then Chaplin did the same thing consciously, and Stroheim took it further. We could see so many things in those films that, today, you only see in some Filipino or Chinese films, or sometimes on TV, in some documentaries. Everything beautiful and everything dangerous and everything that has to do with society disappeared a little bit from films. I’m becoming very reactionary, but Straub would say you have to go back to the past to push things forward.”

To that end, Costa’s next project will take its partial subject the work of Jacob Riis, the journalist and social reformer who used early flash photography to create an enduring record of New York City tenements and slums at the end of the 19th century. But the film also promises to revisit the rubble of Fontainhas and its many walking wounded — the methadone addict Vanda (“star” of In Vanda’s Room), the dissolute construction worker Ventura (who occupies the central role in Colossal Youth). “It’s very fresh and I don’t know how it will be organzied, but it’s a good moment to go back and show what existed there,” Costa said as he took a last drag from his cigarette. “I think Riis is somebody who should meet Vanda and Ventura.”

Ne Change Rien screens on Thurs., Nov. 5 at 10 p.m. at the Mann Chinese 6. In addition, Pedro Costa will present Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, Ossos and Colossal Youth Nov. 12-13 at the UC Irvine Film and Video Center. Complete schedule at www.humanities.uci.edu/fvc.

AFI Fest 2009: What if Movies Were Free? (Los Angeles Weekly)

Link (Recomendaciones)

A changing film world — and hard times — means comp tickets

By Scott Foundas

They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but what about a free film festival? “We were looking to make a bold move,” says AFI Fest artistic director Rose Kuo. She wasn’t kidding: The American Film Institute’s decision to transform its venerable fall film showcase (October 30-November 7) from a paid event into a gratis one is an unprecedented gesture for a festival of this size and stature. “Since last year, the conversation among indie distributors and festival programmers has been, ‘Is the sky falling?’ ” Kuo continues, on a recent afternoon at the festival’s rustic office (dubbed the “manor house”) on AFI’s Hollywood campus. “It was time to turn the conversation around, to do something somewhat audacious, and to get people excited about indie film.”

Indeed, depending on where you stand, AFI’s free festival arrives at one of the best or one of the worst moments for the health of “indie” movies — for the purposes of this discussion, anything not released under the banner of a major studio. On the one hand, thanks to the explosion of the DVD market and the proliferation of Web-based and on-demand viewing streams, audiences now have greater access to more films than at any other time in history. On the other hand, an overcrowded marketplace for “art house” movies, coupled with a recessing economy, has left everyone from exhibitors and distributors to festivals themselves struggling to stay in business. The past year alone saw the shuttering or dramatic downsizing of many of the studio-owned specialty divisions (Paramount Vantage, Warner Independent, et al.) that had sought to replicate the golden touch of Miramax in its 1990s heyday, while the ether has percolated with reports of Harvey Weinstein’s own imminent demise. The recent Toronto International Film Festival — traditionally a seller’s market — was as slow on wheeling and dealing as real estate offices in San Bernardino. Then, just as Toronto was drawing to a close, word arrived that Las Vegas’ decade-old Cinevegas festival — widely considered a rising star among U.S. fests — would be taking an indefinite hiatus due to economic factors.

As far back as January, Kuo tells me, she and other AFI executives began discussing their own festival’s bottom line and the challenges of meeting it in a recession year. “We were uncertain as to what was going to be the state of sponsorship and how individuals were going to be feeling the economic crunch,” she says, noting that AFI Fest, like most U.S. festivals, has traditionally been budgeted on a combination of corporate sponsorship and projected ticket sales. So Kuo and her colleagues began to think about removing one variable from that equation. At the time, three of AFI Fest’s longtime corporate partners — Audi, Absolut and Stella Artois — had already pledged their support for the 2009 edition. “We knew we had them,” says Kuo, “and the idea was floated that if we know we have this amount of money, what about doing this size of festival and not worrying about what kind of revenue we’re going to get?” That in turn relieved anxiety about possibly going into the red. Still, the question remained: What if people can’t afford to come to a film festival this year? Kuo posed the matter to a colleague, Telluride Film Festival co-director Gary Meyer. “And his response was, ‘Well, make it free and then they’ll all come.’ ”

The result is a sleeker, smaller AFI Fest (67 feature films, down from a little more than 100 last year) that, one week before opening night, had already sold out advance tickets to all but two screenings — although Kuo was quick to note that there will be a same-day standby line for all movies. “We don’t want anyone to be discouraged. Fifteen percent of people [who reserve advance tickets] don’t show up,” she says. (For the deep-pocketed, a $500 “Patron Pass” guaranteeing admission to all festival screenings is also on sale.)

If free screenings are the biggest news at the festival this year, they’re far from the only change. After being based since 2002 in the ArcLight complex at Sunset and Vine, AFI Fest will this year spend seven days in the Grauman’s Chinese and adjacent Mann Chinese 6 theater at Hollywood & Highland, before moving to Santa Monica for a final weekend at the Monica 4-Plex. Following on last year’s successful retrospective of French director Arnaud Desplechin, staged in tandem with LACMA, the festival has opened its arms even further to L.A.’s year-round specialized film venues, offering a slate of screenings presented in partnership with REDCAT and Los Angeles Filmforum. In addition, Kuo has a new partner in the form of programming director Robert Koehler, a veteran Los Angeles film critic. Koehler joined the AFI Fest team this past spring in the latest move by Kuo (who came aboard in 2007) to bring new blood into a programming department that had largely atrophied under the festival’s previous leadership. And, in person, Koehler comes across very much like the yang to Kuo’s yin — excitable where she is a voice of calm, hyperbolic where she prefers understatement.

Of their working relationship, Kuo notes, “Bob and I have been talking about films for ages, and from the day I started here, we’ve had regular conversations — sometimes daily conversations — about films, certainly during and after film festivals. There was a way, even before he came on staff, in which it almost felt like he was an additional programmer.”

“Our first conversations about this [job] really began almost at this time last year,” Koehler adds. “From my end, I just wanted to get much more involved with programming. Not programming film series, which I’ve been doing, or coming up with a juicy little wish list and then phoning it off to the folks who really do the spade work in terms of getting the films. What I wanted to do was blend the conceptual side of it with the spade work.”

Koehler’s appointment was not without its share of raised eyebrows. Writing about the hire last April, Cinematical blogger Peter Martin (himself a former AFI Fest employee) deemed it an “odd move” while quoting at length from a Koehler essay in the Canadian film quarterly Cinema Scope that chided North American festival programmers for their laziness and herd mentality: “The essence of interesting, vital festival programming is an intelligent argument for a certain kind of cinema — this kind, not that kind.” With his new job, Martin surmised, Koehler would get a chance “to put his money where his mouth is.”

Implicit in Martin’s provocation was the bane of every film programmer’s existence: how to challenge an audience without alienating them? How, in Koehler’s case, for a passionate champion of radical and avant-garde filmmaking (his “certain kind of cinema” in a nutshell) to program a festival with movies that Joe the Plumber might also want to see? As Koehler himself puts it, it all comes down to “finding a balance of tendencies, of kinds of films. You certainly want to avoid both a vanilla drift toward the middle on the one hand, and you also want to avoid an ideological purity that veers on the obnoxious on the other.”

To these eyes, this year’s AFI Fest lineup walks that tightrope ably, with the audience-pleasing likes of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox and the Robert De Niro road movie Everybody’s Fine at one end of the spectrum and the more rigorous likes of Pedro Costa’s black-and-white anticoncert film, Ne Change Rien (see related story) at the other. In-between, an assortment of Oscar bait, political documentaries, world cinema discoveries and midnight movies fill out the bill. “Even if we wanted films X, Y and Z, sometimes we didn’t invite them because they would have tipped the program too much in one direction or another,” says Kuo. “At the same time, it’s not a popularity contest either.”

Oh, really? Don’t tell The New York Times. Included in AFI Fest are exactly half of the 28 films recently screened at the New York Film Festival (where this critic serves on the selection committee) — a selection lambasted by Times critic A.O. Scott as overly grim and esoteric in an October 6 editorial memorably titled “Wallowing in Misery for Art’s Sake.” “What was once a wide and crowded middle ground between popular taste and high art has eroded,” Scott opined, while marshaling such unlikely evidence as Pedro Almodóvar’s comic melodrama Broken Embraces and Michael Haneke’s Cannes-winning The White Ribbon — two of the New York festival’s most heavily attended attractions — to support his claim.

To be fair, there hasn’t exactly been a surplus of sparkling cinematic farces on the festival circuit this year, which may say more about the state of the world (which art, after all, is supposed to reflect) than about the specifics of festival programming. Even Juno director Jason Reitman’s lauded Up in the Air, one of the highlights of this year’s Telluride and Toronto festivals, is a “comedy” about unemployment and existential dread, while Sundance and Toronto Audience Award winner Precious (also screening at AFI Fest) is a grueling portrait of an obese, illiterate, physically and sexually abused teenager coming of age in Harlem in the 1980s. Still, Koehler understandably chafes at the suggestion that festival programmers intentionally favor “obscure” or “difficult” films.

“I honestly never look at it that way,” he says. “I just think about the films that I like, the filmmakers who I love, and then I ask, ‘Well, have they shown very much in Los Angeles?’ Philippe Grandrieux [director of AFI Fest selection A Lake] has never shown in Los Angeles — okay, that’s wrong. That has to be redressed. This city is frankly so far behind in catching up with so many filmmakers who matter right now. You could have a 300-film festival of works by important filmmakers who have almost never shown in Los Angeles. You could do that easily. You could do that in your sleep.”

“Some of these films are challenging — I’m not going to say that they aren’t,” counters Kuo. “But I think in the context of a film festival, you should have a range of everything, from films that are accessible to a broad audience all the way to those that push the audience to some other end. When you’ve attended a festival like the BAFICI in Buenos Aires and you see some of these obscure, challenging films and the house is completely packed with 600 or 700 people, you realize it’s possible. So why not here in Los Angeles? I don’t expect everyone who goes in to say, ‘Oh, that was a wonderful film,’ but I hope they walk out and say, ‘Well, I didn’t totally get that, but I wonder why that film was in the program and what its place is in the canon.’ At the end of the day, it’s a leap of faith. If we’re doing it right and people come back year after year, hopefully their trust and their loyalty in us grow.”

There’s one subject, I find, on which Koehler and Kuo see completely eye to eye. At a time when so many festivals (including, increasingly, the summer’s Los Angeles Film Festival in Westwood) chase after world or U.S. premieres of studio films and starry American indies, they have resolved to bring L.A. audiences the best available films, regardless of where they may have shown before. (To that end, Koehler and Kuo this year lifted a rule that had previously limited the festival’s “New Lights” competition section to U.S. premieres.)

“I took it from my own perspective of living in Los Angeles, reading about certain films endlessly and then coming to the end of the year, when critics are putting out ‘10 best’ lists and year-end roundups, and thinking, ‘I haven’t seen over half of these films. When are they going to play in L.A.?’ ” Kuo says. “When Bob came on, we just decided we should become a festival of festivals. It’s what Toronto used to be, but they’ve now become more of a market festival that debuts new product. Especially in Los Angeles, it makes sense that we would be a yearbook of the year prior.”

“In some ways, it’s simply a return to the beginning of Los Angeles film festivals, with Filmex, which was also a festival of festivals,” Koehler says of AFI Fest’s ancestral predecessor, whose inaugural 1971 edition likewise took place at Grauman’s Chinese.

“Hopefully, we end up at the end of the year with the films that are essential to see,” Kuo concludes. “So, if you haven’t seen these films, run, don’t walk.”

“Fox” Opening AFI Fest (IndieWire)

Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” will open the 2009 AFI Fest when it has its North American premiere on Friday, October 30, 2009 at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

Based on Roald Dahl’s book—and written by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach—the animated movie includes the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Wally Wolodarsky, Eric Anderson, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, and Jarvis Cocker. The film is produced by Allison Abbate, Scott Rudin, Wes Anderson and Jeremy Dawson.

“Wes Anderson is an American original,” said Bob Gazzale, AFI President & CEO, in a statement. “It is a distinct honor for the American Film Institute to shine a proper light on his extraordinary talents by premiering his latest gift to the nation and to the world.”

The fest is set for October 30 - November 7, 2009 in Hollywood.

AFI Fest taps Robert Koehler (Variety)

Un grosso, Bob...


Robert Koehler, longtime film critic and freelance writer for Variety and other publications, has been tapped director of programming for this year's edition of AFI Fest.

Due to assume his duties in May, Koehler will work as the fest's No. 2 under artistic director Rose Kuo and will scout for possible entries at numerous international festivals, beginning in Cannes.

Dates for this year's fest aren't yet finalized, but the event will run beginning at the end of October or early November.

"Acné", ganadora del AFI Fest de Los Angeles

Federico Veiroj's coming-of-age tale "Acne" took home the Grand Jury Prize in the International Feature Competition at AFI Fest 2008.

The winners, announced Sunday, also saw the International Documentary Grand Jury Prize go to Kief Davidson's "Kassim the Dream," a portrait of the world champion boxer Kassim Ouma. "Kassim" also shared the audience award for best documentary with Patrick Davidson's "The World We Want."

Michel Lipkes' "The Legless Boy Cannot Dance" earned the Shorts Jury Prize.

The audience award for best feature went to Daniel Stamm's "A Necessary Death," which follows a couple of documentary filmmakers who want to film a person contemplating suicide.

Lagan Sebert's and Sandra Sampayo's "Busco Personas: The Faces of Columbia's War" won the audience award in the shorts section.

AFI Fest: Showcase on Argentina (Los Angeles Weekly)

Championship Season

By Diego Lerer
published: October 30, 2008

Two-thousand-eight will be remembered as a landmark year for Argentine cinema, beginning with the selection of not one but two local films for the official competition in Cannes. Those two movies — Pablo Trapero’s Lion’s Den and Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman — anchor AFI Fest’s five-film “Showcase on Argentina.”

Trapero’s fifth movie — his best since El Bonaerense (2002) — tells a deceptively simple story about a pregnant woman who goes to prison accused of murder. While waiting for the trial, she gives birth in jail, and her whole perspective on her life changes. Anchored by Martina Gusman’s powerful performance, the film becomes a study of the changes a woman goes through after an unexpected situation turns her life around.

Where Trapero’s movie is full of incidents, Martel’s equally absorbing third film is elusive, mysterious, at times head-scratching. And yet, The Headless Woman may also be seen as a movie about the same subject as Lion’s Den. In this case, María Onetto plays an upper-class woman from the provinces, who has a weird accident on the road (she appears to have killed a dog, but thinks it may have been more than that). From there, she suffers a strange kind of amnesia and starts seeing her world as a different place: blurry, enigmatic, full of secrets. She doesn’t even know who she is anymore. Neither do we.

Martel (La Ciénaga, The Holy Girl) and Trapero are both “veterans” of the so-called New Argentine Cinema, as are the makers of two other very good Argentine films showing here: Pablo Fendrik and Lisandro Alonso. Whereas The Headless Woman and Lion’s Den address the subject of female empowerment and the role of women in a male-dominated society, Fendrik’s Blood Appears (which premiered in the Critic’s Week at Cannes) and Alonso’s Liverpool (which screened in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight) are centered around male violence and the complex family relationships caused by it.

Fendrik’s second movie is the story of a father who struggles to contain “the beast within” and a son who goes through life without much care — like a younger version of the Robert De Niro character in Mean Streets — until he has to face some ugly truths. Scorsese and Cassavetes are two key influences in Fendrik’s work: nervous camera moves, intense acting, and verbal and physical violence always on the verge of exploding.

Alonso, by contrast, strips his story of all the conventional narrative elements, but you can sense a similar tension in his main character, a man who left his family in Argentina’s deep south to work as a sailor and comes back after 20 years to see what’s left of them. A sort of contemplative anti-Western, Liverpool shows the visual mastery of Alonso, his sense of place and his ability to convey complex emotions with minimal elements. It’s a film of stunning beauty and infinite sadness.

Thanks to these films and a few other titles, including Mariano Llinás’ Extraordinary Stories, Celina Murga’s A Week Alone and La Rabia (also screening in AFI Fest), Albertina Carri’s very personal and provocative film about man’s relationship to nature, this has become, surprisingly, one of the best (if not the best) years in Argentine cinema’s history.

Except where otherwise noted, all screenings in AFI Fest’s “Showcase on Argentina” take place at ArcLight Hollywood: Blood Appears, Sun., Nov. 2, 4 p.m. and Mon., Nov. 3, 9:45 p.m.; The Headless Woman, Thurs., Nov. 6, 9:50 p.m. and Sat., Nov. 8, 3:30 p.m.; Lion’s Den, Wed., Nov. 5, 9:30 p.m. (at Mann Chinese 6) and Fri., Nov. 7, noon; Liverpool, Sun., Nov. 2, 9:45 p.m. and Thurs., Nov. 6, 3:45 p.m.; La Rabia, Thurs., Nov. 6, 7:15 p.m. and Fri., Nov. 7, 3:30 p.m.