Coming Very Soon: Oscar Submissions "Burning" and "Border"

NYFF/TIFF screenings from Nathaniel R

"My what lovely posters!" he said, as he struggled to decide how to review two pictures that are best seen cold, knowing as little as possible. "But people don't buy tickets / get excited about movies without knowing something," he reasoned with himself about reviewing both South Korea and Sweden's Oscar submissions which are opening in US theaters very soon.

"Okay, okay," the purist in him, responded. "I'll say a little something about each but only if I can limit my discussion to the posters! People absolutely shouldn't watch the trailers." "Deal" his practical self muttered rolling his eyes, having been through this existential crisis of movie blogging numerous times. "Proceed..."

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Middleburg Film Festival Announces Its (Oscar-Seeking) Lineup

by Nathaniel R

The Middleburg Film Festival is one of The Film Experience's favorite stops on the road to Oscar. It's only one weekend long (like Telluride) and takes place in scenic Virginia, just one hour from DC, at the Salamander Resort and Spa. The festival began in 2013 and has been upping the ante each year (last year's festival prominently featured future Oscar nominees and winners like Greta Gerwig, Mudbound, James Ivory, and A Fantastic Woman.) Inbetween movies you can go horseback riding, visit the charming town and its wineries, or go for walks on the grounds.

One of my favorite events, unique to this festival, is a concert featuring a famous film composer -- the Nicholas Britell concert last year was just phenomenal. This year, they're throwing a bit of a curveball since the event will be in honor of a songwriter instead. Nine-time Oscar nominee Diane Warren will be performing some of her work.

Diane Warren

The lineup this year is as follows and tickets are now on sale...

Opening Night:  ROMA 

Friday Spotlight: BOY ERASED
Centerpiece: THE FRONT RUNNER

Closing Film: GREEN BOOK
Tributes/Honorees: Actress Yalitza Aparicio, Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, Songwriter Diane Warren, and Director Nadine Labaki (Capernaum).

The Rest of the Films AT ETERNITY'S GATE • BEN IS BACK • BIGGEST LITTLE FARM (doc) • BORDER (Sweden's Oscar submission) • CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? • CAPERNAUM (Lebanon's Oscar submission) • COLD WAR (Poland's submission • DIVIDE AND CONQUER: ROGER AILES (doc) • EVERYBODY KNOWS • THE FAVOURITE • HAPPY AS LAZZARO • LITTLE WOODS • MARIA BY CALLAS (doc) • NEVER LOOK AWAY (Germany's submission) • A PRIVATE WAR • RUBEN BRANDT, COLLECTOR (Animated) • SHOPLIFTERS (Japan's submission) • SUNSET (Hungary's submission) • THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD (doc) • WHAT THEY HAD • WIDOWS • WILDLIFE • WOMAN AT WAR (Iceland's submission)

We have almost the full list of Foreign Oscar Contenders now

by Nathaniel R

We're now up to 79 entries for Best Foreign Language Film, so this will be our last chart update before the official announcement by AMPAS in a week or so. There's probably only 10-12 that weren't officially announced that will show up on the list as that list generally tops out at around 90 titles.

A few of the most recent entries are from Argentina (the beautiful-boy-on-crime-spree drama El Angel), Bangladesh (No Bed of Roses headlined by international star Irffan Khan), Kyrgyzstan (road trip drama Night Accident), and Costa Rica (university student pregnancy drama Medea). I'm kicking myself that I didn't see El Angel at TIFF because it was on the schedule but I dropped it on an exhausting day.

RafikiFinally, perhaps you've been following the drama around Kenya's submission. The director of the initially-banned lesbian romance Rafiki (which Chris reviewed here from TIFF) fought valiantly to get the film screened at home to make it eligible for submission. The government caved to allow it but, as we predicted, Kenya still wouldn't actually submit it. The less political (and thus a very political choice!) inspirational drama Supa Modo about a terminally ill little girl was submitted instead.

FOREIGN PREDICTIONS
Submissions pt 1 - Algeria through Estonia
Submissions pt 2 - Finland through Morocco
Submissions pt 3 - Nepal through Vietnam

Two Visual Triumphs Seeking Distribution: "The River" and "Shadow"

Since we're already deep into NYFF - thanks to Murtada and Jason for this excellent reviews (I'll join them shortly) --  I must accept that all the full reviews I had planned for things without release dates I saw at TIFF just aren't going to happen. But several films we caught are hitting theaters soon so they will get reviews: A Star is Born (10/5), Beautiful Boy (10/12), Border (10/26), and Boy Erased (11/2). In the meantime here are the final two TIFF films I must pinpoint because they don't have distribution yet but they totally deserve it.

Shadow
I'm calling this one 'camp without color,' because we always think of "camp" as something innately colorful, don't we? Director Zhang Yimou (House of the Flying Daggers) gifts for visual spectacle remain undimmed and this time he organizes his mise en scene around the duality of the yin yang symbols as well as inkwash paintings...

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NYFF: A Family Tour

Murtada Elfadl reporting on the New York Film Festival

Early on in A Family Tour a reporter asks the lead character, a Chinese film director exiled in Hong Kong, why she makes political films. She answers that everything she makes is personal. Over the next two hours the film shows us exactly how the political is never separate from the personal.

The film is autobiographical, the director Ying Liang having lived in exile in Hong Kong since making When Night Falls (2012), a sharply critical look at the biased judicial system in China. He has switched the protagonist’s gender so we are following a female director (Gong Zhe) as she travels to a film festival in Taiwan with her husband and small child...

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