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16th Athens International Film Festival |
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"You will meet a tall dark stranger" with Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones, Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderas, and Josh Brolin Follows a pair of married couples, Alfie (Hopkins) and Helena (Jones), and their daughter Sally (Watts) and husband Roy (Brolin), as their passions, ambitions, and anxieties lead them into trouble and out of their minds. After Alfie leaves Helena to pursue his lost youth and a free-spirited call girl named Charmaine (Punch), Helena abandons rationality and surrenders her life to the loopy advice of a charlatan fortune teller. Unhappy in her marriage, Sally develops a crush on her handsome art gallery owner boss, Greg (Banderas), while Roy, a novelist nervously awaiting the response to his latest manuscript, becomes moonstruck over Dia (Pinto), a mystery woman who catches his gaze through a nearby window.
Mesa sto Dasos (In the woods), a film by Angelos Frantzis.
Τhe Killer Inside Me- Michael Winterbottom shocks telling a story through the eyes of a serial killer. K. Affleck, K. Hudson and J. Alba starring.
"Kaboom" - Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, good old roman style parties, murderers, CIA agents and aliens. The perfect after midnight mix! Directed by G. Araki (of course...)
"Chatroom"- Ring's director explores the darker paths of cyber world through a provocative touch.
"A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop"- The Cohen brothers Blood Simple gets the Chinese treatment in an unexpected remake featuring martial arts, over the top costumes, swords, murders and lots of fun set in medieval China
"Freakonomics" - One of the strangest documentaries in film history combining economics, pop culture and wicked humor in a lesson hard to forget.
"Hearless"- It's been 15 years since Reflecting Skin and finally Philip Ridley returns with a Freudian tale sure worth the long wait
THE 16TH ATHENS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
OPENING NIGHTS BY CONN-X
15-26 SEPTEMBER, 2010
Autour de Minuit is a film production company based in Paris created in 2001 by Nicolas Schmerkin. The company aims at supporting aesthetically innovative projects, and develops original graphic worlds with a solid content. Hybridization -at the heart of the artistic approach of most of the works born in the company- gives the opportunity to explore new ideas and sensations in plastic art and intent to provide with visuals never to be seen before.
Since 2004, Autour de Minuit also deals with world distribution of animations and digital works.
•Academy Award Winner Best Short Animation 2010 with Logorama
•Procirep Award 2006 Best French producer
•More than 150 awards in festivals in total for the films produced
During this festival they will be presenting 13 short-length movies!
Titles include: Oscar award-winning "Logorama" / "4"/ "Splitting the Atom"/ "Empire" / "Flesh" /"Carlitopolis"/ "Dix"/ "Ombras"/ "Babioles"/ "Mrdrchain"
The 16th Athens International Film Festival Opening Nights Conn-x in collaboration with the Locarno International Film Festival and the French Cinemateque, have scheduled a must see retrospective to the great master of comedy Ernst Lubitsch. During this year's festival which runs from Sep.15 to 26, 2010 audiences will get acquainted with the delicate style and classy humour which are a trademark of the Lubitsch touch. A more detailed presentation will follow soon.
Retrospective includes:
«Monte Carlo» (1930), the funniest side of the high class
«One Hour With You» (1932), starring Maurice Chevallier and filled with twits and infidelities.
«Design For Living» (1933), based on Noel Coward's masterpiece play including probably the finest trio in film history, starring Garry Cooper
«Angel» (1937), one of Marlen Dietrich's most memorable performances as a married woman who falls in love with a stranger
«Nonitchka» (1939), Garbo's sole comedy. Enough said.
«To Be Or Not To Be» (1942), Remade by Mel Brooks years later, a classic anti-nazi feel good comedy
«Cluny Brown» (1946), Hottest female of her era Jennifer Jones in her desperate attempt to become a plumber.
Olivier Smolders Retrospective
Unknown outside of die hard art house circles, Belgian director Olivier Smolders has been turning out surreal, often inscrutable short films since the mid-1980s. His work teems with imagery involving human skin, religious iconography, and reptiles and insects, while his formal aesthetic style immediately invites comparisons with other European (or Euro-friendly) directors, most obviously Peter Greenaway (whose A Zed and Two Noughts is an obvious influence), Terry Gilliam, Francois Ozon, and Luis Bunuel. Eventually he completed a feature-length film, shot on DV but manipulated to look for all the world like a moody 35mm film, entitled Black Night (Nuit Noire), and its release has allowed his entire body of work to finally gain some appreciation in North America thanks to two releases from Cult Epics.
More a dreamlike experimental experience than a coherent narrative, Black Night begins with a pair of old men unveiling a small snowbound stage with two child puppets. Inter cut with random shots of insects, the story focuses in on the two children, now real, a brother and sister. After the death of the young girl, the boy, Oscar (Rodriguez), grows up to take over as an animal conservator at his father's Natural Sciences Museum, while the world has been consumed entirely in darkness except for a few fleeting seconds of sunlight each day (a device mirrored by the symbolic image of stage curtains opening and closing). One day he finds one of his coworkers, an African woman, ailing in his bed, and she and Oscar copulate (or do they?) before she dies. Then things get really strange, as his bed is taken over by a giant coccoon...
In this festival, Dark Night and 8 short-length films of Olivier Smolders:
"Journey Around My Room", "Picture’s Concise Anatomy", "Death at Vignole", "Adoration", "Vanishing Point", "The amateur", "Philosophy in the Boudoir", "Alone."
The section consisting of the best musical documentaries of the year lives up to the expectations once more. 'Music & Films' section sounds already interesting not only music wise but because of its cinematographic approach as well.
This September the venues will be filled with beats coming from the following:
Benda Bilili!(In competition)- They were homeless and crippled, living in Kinshasa, Congo. Their love for their native rhumba, rhythm'n'blues and reggae enabled them to be known worldwide. A unique taste of soul's power and a fine example of rising above life's worst misfortunes.
Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt And The Magnetic Fields? (In competition) - 89 minutes seem strangely enough to capture almost everything regarding the unable to be copied sound of The Magnetic Fields and its genius Stephin Merritt.
Sex And Drugs And Rock'n'Roll?- Ian Dury and the Blockheads, polio and its effects, sex, love, drugs and rock'n' roll in a stylish biopic. You'll have many reasons to be cheerful after seeing this.
TICKETS are on sale!
