Festivals

The stars are starting to blossom on the Lido carpet like blooms in spring. Tight tubes of material were the preference, with belts becoming a thing.

Claes Bang made his breakthrough in the Golden Globe-nominated The Square and since then the 52-year old Dane has been on a roll. Currently, he is in Venice representing Italian filmmaker Guiseppe Capotondi’s The Burnt Orange Heresy, which will be closing the film festival on September 7.

Ladies were luminous on the opening night of the Venice Film Festival.

As the 76th edition of the Venice film festival is about to kick off tomorrow, there is a lot to contemplate for guests, reviewers and organizers alike. The competition choices as a whole look promising and are sure to generate interest, even though there is no single film that sticks out quite yet, as it had been the case when lineups were announced in previous years featuring such titles as Gravity, A Star Is Born, or Roma.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced a returning initiative in which rising filmmakers from the 2019 Venice International Film Festival and the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival will be selected for a three-week residency program in partnership with Film Independent. For the second year in a row, the HFPA and Film Independent will host a three-week program geared at emerging and mid-career filmmakers selected from the Orizzonti section of the Venice International Film Festival and the TIFF Filmmaker Lab.

For over 10 days, the Jerusalem Film Festival celebrated cinema with a program which made room for the best films coming from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and San Sebastian. Several premieres played to full houses with some reserved for new Israeli films, which competed for the prestigious awards that are the jewel of this event.

The Eurasia International Film Festival (EIFF), taking place from June 30 to July 7 in Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana), the capital city of the Republic of Kazakhstan, is the largest competition film event in Central Asia. The venue for EIFF could not be better chosen.

Now in its 65th year and set in one of the Sicilian coastline’s most ancient cities, the Taormina film festival is one of the oldest in the world, It also happens to have one of the most iconic original Greek theatres in the world and filmmakers who have their work shown in that magnificent arena can consider themselves very lucky. This year legendary director Bruce Beresford gets to see the audience reaction at the aptly named Teatro Antico for his latest, Ladies in Black, on opening night.

Cinema Ritrovato is, with the Festival Lumière in Lyon, the world’s premiere film festival devoted to classic, rare and restored films and it is not hyperbole to say that it is a magical event. For nine days the ancient city of Bologna turns into the world capital of classic movies and a cinephile’s dream, with dozens of daily screenings, talks, symposia, and master classes.

Now in its 55th edition, the Pesaro Film Festival (Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema), founded in 1965 by Lino Miccichè, is the second longest running festival in Italy, after Venice, which started in 1932 as part of the Biennale. From the start, its main goal has been to present the first or second works of new filmmakers from all over the world in order to promote growth and evolution in the art of cinema.