Cesar Academy Nominates French President's Mistress! (Who cares about movies anyway?)

Julien, your french correspondent, here to discuss the César nominations.

OUTRAGE ! Twitter was in uproar this morning when the nominees for the Best Actress César were announced, and the name Adèle Exarchopoulos was nowhere to be seen. While Léa Seydoux made the cut for her arguably supporting role, Adèle’s astounding lead performance in Blue is the Warmest Color was relegated to the Most Promising Actress category.

Before you raise your pitchforks, consider this perfectly logical explanation: since Tahar Rahim won both the Best Actor and Most Promising Actor gongs for A Prophet in 2010, the rules were altered so that a single performance can only be nominated in a single category -the one which collects the most votes. Fair enough César, but when a category which is supposed to promote new talent prevents the year’s most celebrated performance to be nominated in its rightful place, you’re clearly doing something wrong.

All the nominees and a lot of gay drama and political mischief after the jump...

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Team Experience Top Tens. The Stories They Tell...

I, Nathaniel, am still in the process of cramming screeners into my bloodshot eyeballs (I know that's not the best way to do it but that's what happens each year at this exact time). Next weekend, at the very latest, I'll deliver my own top ten list. Until then, I thought it might be fun to see what our magic elves were into this year. A few of the regulars opted out, since they like quite a lot more time to mull things over or they're too busy with their classic hollywood obsessions (you are going to LOVE what Anne Marie has cooking for 2014). But Jose, Amir, Glenn, Tim and Michael and an unexpected guest perservered and their lists are here for your perusal and rental queue consideration. 

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Interview: Asghar Farhadi on Globe Nominee "The Past"

Amir and Asghar Farhadi @ TIFFAmir here, to share with you my fantastic experience of interviewing the director of The Past, A Separation and About Elly. About a decade ago, when Asghar Farhadi made his first feature film after years of successful theatre and TV work, even the most optimistic fan of Iranian cinema could not imagine his stratospheric rise to International Auteur status in such a short span of time. It is heart-warming for an industry that has only gained international prominence in the past two decades to see one of its sons holding an Oscar statue. Farhadi’s popularity comes at a critical point for Iranian cinema, when festival presence is not as regular as it was in the nineties and several major filmmakers have had their careers stalled for political reasons.*

Farhadi's follow up to the Academy Award-winning classic A Separation, The Past will be representing Iran in the Best Foreign Film Oscar competition and was just nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. Farhadi's latest is a Paris-set melodrama starring two recognizable stars in The Artist's Berenice Bejo (Cannes Winner Best Actress) and Tahar Rahim as well as Iranian superstar Ali Mosaffa.** In the film, Bejo plays Marie, a French woman married to Ahmad (Mosaffa) who is in custody of their children after a breakup. When Ahmad receives a letter from his wife to return to Paris to finalize the divorce, he is confronted with Samir (Rahim), Marie’s new boyfriend, himself married with a son to a woman in a coma. And that’s just the beginning of the complications in this romantic triangle.

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TIFF13 Lineup Announced

Amir here, with a sore throat after a few hours of screaming in excitement. Like Oscar nomination morning, 'TIFF lineup announcement day' (what a mouthful)  is marked on my calendar in prominent colours every year. It's a day that brings a combination of excitement, endless 'what-to-watch?'  dilemmas, and the dread of having to plan a 40 film a week schedule while still attending to unwanted obstacles like eating and sleeping and day jobs. If you followed this morning's press conference by the festival's directors, you know that only about a quarter of the films that will eventually grace the screens were named and the actual schedule isn't even out yet, but such is the nature of festival going. It gets you going long before the curtains are raised.

TIFF's opening night film: Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate

Naturally, for a festival that screens nearly 300 films every year, the list is an eclectic mix of hotly anticipated Oscar players, critically acclaimed titles from other festivals earlier in the year and auteur titles that have slipped under the radar so far. It is among this latter bunch, for instance, where my most anticipated film of the year, Sylvain Chomet's live action debut Attila Marcel, showed up in the announcement this morning, greeted by a shriek that had my poor co-workers jumping in their seats.

One mild surprise came in the words "World Premiere" that preceded the not-so surprising inclusion of 12 Years a Slave. [more...] 

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