Ava DuVernay Documentary to Open New York Film Festival

by Murtada

The Fall Film Festivals (Venice, Toronto, Telluride, New York and London) are almost upon us. Or at least the announcements of their programmes are. TIFF announces next Tuesday, Venice at the end of of July. New York announced its opening night selection this week, Ava DuVernay’s The 13th, a documentary about the high incarceration rate, particularly of African Americans, in the United States.

The title refers to the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”

The film mixes archival footage - from the civil rights movement, Ku Klux Klan to the Black Lives Matter movement - with modern day commentary to present the ramifications of the amendment and the history of racial inequality in the US. It’s an apt choice for all that’s unfolding in 2016. The 13th will be released in cinemas and on Netflix on October 7th.

Lupita Nyongo'o and Madina Nalwanga in Queen of Katwe

Meanwhile lists are also being made for what other movies will appear on the festival circuit. London will open with Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom, and Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe will have its European premiere there, meaning it will debut somewhere on this side of the Atlantic first. Let’s speculate what else could play at New York, based on precedent that is arbitrary and will probably mean nothing in the end. But it’s fun to speculate:

• Damien Chazelle’s La La Land - this film, with the beloved trailer, will open Venice. Another Emma Stone film, Birdman, opened Venice and closed New York, it could happen again.

• Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk - because Life of Pi opened NYFF in 2012.

• Martin Scorsese's Silence - remember when Hugo started its Oscar campaign with a surprise screening in New York in 2011?

• Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals - the rumour is that it will play in competition at Venice. Come to New York soon after, Tom. We'd like to see Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal together in a movie, too.

• Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By the Sea - there’s always a Sundance movie that makes it to NYFF, Whiplash and Brooklyn being the last two examples.

• Robert Zemeckis’ Allied - his last two films, The Walk and Flight, both played at NYFF before opening nationwide.

That's just a few titles, we will know much more in the next few weeks. Are you planning to attend any of the fall film festivals?

The 50 Greatest Films by Black Directors

Slate magazine has drawn up an interesting list of great black films, the twist being that they have to have been directed by a black person rather than about the black experience so out go Old Hollywood musicals like Carmen Jones or Cabin in the Sky or Oscar favorites like Sounder.  In the wake of recent conversations about Hollywood's power structures and overwhelming whiteness, Slate assembled a field of critics and filmmakers and scholars to produce the list.

Eve's Bayou

I need to get cracking on my gaps in knowledge from this list, especially because of the titles I've seen from this list several were great and the ones I didn't personally connect to were still interesting (Night Catches Us) or memorable (Eve's Bayou - I've been meaning to give that another shot now that I'm older). Unsurprisingly Spike Lee has the most titles with six. Curiously, though I've seen many Spike Lee joints (and tend to like them - I'd have included Chi-Raq on this list), I've only seen half of his titles that actually made it (gotta get to Mo' Better Blues, Crooklyn, and When the Levees Broke soon). The list is after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Avu DuVernay to direct A Wrinkle in Time

Lynn here, chewing on another bit of non-Oscar related movie news.

Ever since it was announced earlier this week that Ava DuVernay had signed on to direct the upcoming film version of Madeleine L’Engle’s much-beloved A Wrinkle in Time, I’ve been trying to imagine just how the director of Selma is going to approach a sci-fi fantasy that features benevolent shape-shifting inter-dimensional beings, entire planets controlled by a single giant brain, and children who literally cross the universe by bending the laws of both space and time.  She won’t be starting from scratch, at least; the project’s apparently been in the works for some time, with a script by Frozen’s Jennifer Lee.  But this will be the first time the book’s ever been brought to the big screen.  It’s frequently, and unsurprisingly, been called unfilmable, and the only previous adaptation – a 2003 TV movie on ABC – was such a failure that it’s best known for the quip it inspired from L’Engle:

I expected it to be bad, and it is.”

In other words, there’s every reason for apprehension.  Is there also reason for hope?

Click to read more ...

Jessica Chastain Can't Stop, Won't Stop, Launches All-Female Production Company

Daniel Crooke here. When it comes to gender inequality in the film industry, Jessica Chastain would like the means of production to know that she finds it very disrespectful. Deadline reports that Chastain has thrown her Zero Dark Thirty Aviators in the ring and founded her own production company, Freckle Films. This is obviously hugely exciting news and such an Aries move. As if her engine of multifaceted roles wasn't already roaring on overdrive, she decides to kick it up another notch and become the president of her cinematic brainchild. Hold onto your Coca-Colas because it gets better: Freckle Films will be employing all-female executives and (we assume) zero sex-stymying stereotypes onscreen.

Freckle Films has partnered in a first dibs development deal with Maven Pictures – whose execs’ credits include The Kids Are All Right, Still Alice, and Black Nativity – with two film adaptations (from female authors with female protagonists) already in the works. Ten cheers for the endlessly inspirational Chastain, who constantly reminds us of how to be an unrelenting champion on and off the screen and on Twitter. We’re not surprised that in the midst of #OscarsSoWhite and torrential reports of gender wage inequity, when the call for industry diversity is arguably louder now than it has ever been, Chastain is on the side of shaking things up in the name of representative evolution. More power to the people after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Lupita In Space

Jason from MNPP here with today's best movie news -- with #OscarsSoWhite (side-note: I accidentally typed "OscarsSoShite" at first, ha!) dominating the movie conversation these past few weeks, and with all eyeballs slowly rightfully side-eyeing over to the studios themselves to see what they're gonna do about it, the number of projects that have been attached to Selma director Ava DuVernay has been a heartening development of the past few months, at least. She seems very much in demand. But she also seems very picky (thank goodness) - Marvel's Blank Panther movie? Notsomuch!

Anyway THR is reporting today that she's maybe going to direct a sci-fi movie called Intelligent Life, which Steven Spielberg's producing and Jurassic World helmer Colin Trevorrow wrote, and in further "That's a Bingo" news the movie is set to star Oscar winner and baby fashion icon Lupita Nyong'o. YES I WANT THIS ALL OF THIS.

Intelligent Life is described as "the story of a low-level worker at the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs who accidentally makes first contact with a beautiful woman from another world." Three guesses who's the "beautiful woman from another world"? And thankfully, according to sources the alien is actually the leading role in the film. Let's just hope that Lupita's exquisite face is good enough, and we don't get any Star Wars style CG cover-up again. I wanna look at her, for goodness' sake.