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TIFF 2007: Glory To The Filmmakers!
The Toronto International Film Festival have announced 73 films today, which is, er, a lot. Too many for us to even pretend to give them even coverage, so as usual we’re just going to pick and choose from today’s announcements, which are made of films from international filmmakers, and tell you about the ones that interest us personally.
Gala Presentations gains Blood Brothers, the debut of director Alexi Tan. Produced by John Woo, it’s a tale of corruption and crime in Shanghai in the 1930’s.
Special Presentations includes Chacun Son Cinéma, 33 shorts from 33 directors including David Cronenberg, David Lynch and Wong Kar Wai, originally commissioned for Cannes’ 60th Anniversary. Also part of the Special Presentations: Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai’s Mad Detective and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis (pictured above).
Masters this year includes Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World… and Takeshi Kitano’s Glory To The Filmmaker! which seems to be a sort of continuation of the themes seen in his last film at the festival, Takeshis’, as he plays himself, “on a quest to produce a box-office hit.”
Contemporary World Cinema has a similarly inward looking film, Erik Nietzsche The Early Years. Apparently written by Lars Von Trier under the nom-de-plume Erik Nietzsche, it’s a semi-autobiographical film following a shy young man that enrolls in the Danish National Film School. Other films include Battle For Haditha by Nick Broomfield, Run, Fat Boy, Run, starring Simon Pegg and David Schwimmer (Yep, that David Schwimmer) and Enrique Fernandes and César Charlone’s The Pope’s Toilet.
Also announced were a few films for the Visions and Vanguard programmes, including Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, Pang Ho-cheung’s The Exodus and Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, which excellently features “a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator who falls for a Marilyn Monroe look-alike.”