“The role of festivals is to support and comment on films, not just to show them. Although the major festivals have skillfully played a role as luxury showcases for world cinema for a long time, this is no longer enough. A cinephile festival should make a real and effective intervention, expediting and encouraging recognition for filmmakers, or the emergence of a particular country on the world cinema map.” The first selection of Olivier Père is placed under the sign of discovery with two dozens of first feature films including the awaited Memory Lane by Michael Hers. Young directors will be invited along with veterans such as Benoit Jacquot, who will open the festival with his new film Deep in the Woods starring French actress Isild Le Besco -also attending as a filmmaker with Bas-Fonds.
The International Competition complies with the idea of a mix since it includes films as diverse as Christophe Honoré’s latest feature, Man at Bath, Chinese director Xu Xin’s six-hour long documentary Karamay, or L.A. Zombie by Bruce LaBruce, the story of an alien homosexual zombie starring French gay porn superstar François Sagat, also staring in Honoré’s film. The banishment of L.A. Zombie from the Melbourne Film Festival by the Australian Film Classification Commission (these things usually never happen during festivals), brought, says its director, even greater publicity to the film, which will consequently premiere in Locarno. We can not help seeing there a sad echo to our recent focus about censorship (read it here).

The Piazza Grande (outdoor place for the festival’s big screenings) will feature, amongst others and following the Festival’s policy of diversity, The Human Ressource Manager by Eran Riklis, director of Etz Limon in 2008, The Counsel by Cédric Anger, Russian Garri Bardine’s latest animation film, The Ugly Duckling, Cyrus by the Duplass Brothers starring Jonah Hill and the fantastic John C.Reilly -who will also be honoured- or the already cult film Rubber by Quentin Dupieux (Steak), the story of an avenging tyre, which was Cannes 2010 hottest sensation and provoked a crush to access its screening (see the official website).

Ernst Lubitsch will also be honoured with a retrospective featuring almost his whole filmography with a special focus upon the not so well known German part of his career. The retrospective led by Joseph McBride -if you don’t have his book Searching for John Ford stop reading this page and go get it right now!- will culminate with the screening of To Be Or Not To Be on the Piazza Grande. It will then travel through various cinematheques around the world.

We also have to mention the Leopard of Honour, which will be given to Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke (Still Life, 24 City) and to Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner (In the White City, Jonas Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000) and also the homage to independent producer Menhaem Golan, who gave, with his cousin Yoram Globus, so much pleasure to eighties teenagers with their legendary action films (Bloodsport, Cobra, Death Wish 3) but also produced directors such as John Cassavetes (Love Streams), Barbet Schroeder (Barlfy) or Jean-Luc Godard (King Lear).

Out of the competition we will also see two new short films by Luc Moullet shot in 2010, Always less and, as a world premiere, Masterpiece?, five short films by Jean Marie Straub including O Somma Luce as a world premiere and the short films directed by Lodge Kerrigan, Bertrand Bonello and Joachim Lafosse for the French Théâtre de Gennevilliers.

With this eclectic and challenging line up and the wider opening to a professional audience with the creation of the Industry Days (August 7 to 9) during which buyers from all around the world will have the opportunity to attend special screenings of the films and round tables, the 2010 Locarno Film Festival starts in the best way a new era, which we hope to be long and filled with great discoveries.

Francis Chérasse

Read the official line up, in pdf

More information about Yoyo, now in theaters in France and coming soon on DVD (last quarter of 2010 in Arte Editions’s line up).

After studies of piano, mathematics and mecanic, Otar Iosseliani, born in Georgia, learnt filmmaking at the VGIK, Moscow pretigious film school. He settled in France in 1982 where he shot Monday Morning (Lundi matin), Farewell, Home Sweet Home (Adieu plancher des vaches) and his latest film Gardens in Autumn (Jardins en automne). His new film, Chantrapas, presented in Cannes during a special screening will open on French screens on September 22, 2010.

Learn more about Otar Iosseliani’s films

If in the 70’s French cinema was readily political (from Yves Boisset movies to Going Places by Bertrand Blier), the next decade saw the emergence of many formalist filmmakers, such as Jean-Jacques Beineix with Diva, Luc Besson with Subway, Andrzej Zulawski with L’amour Braque or Leos Carax whose The Lovers on the Bridge, released in 1991 after an endless shooting, marked the end of an era.
Mauvais sang, directed in 1986, is maybe the climax of the director’s work who will make Pola X later. Like Godard, Carax neglects his film noir plot to turn the film into a poem -a poem of love and a poem of faith in the strength of expression of cinema. In every word and every shot, the absolute mastery of the direction rejects any idea of realism in order to suck the spectator up a space and a time belonging to the film only. Don’t expect to find in Mauvais Sang an omniscient analytical viewpoint: on the contrary, Carax fervently makes his film like a sorcerer’s apprentice -amazed by his new spell, with the naive first degree from the one who falls in love. Carried away by the animal glow of Denis Lavant and the autistic grace of Juliette Binoche, Mauvais sang is an ode to cinema, in which the filmmaker makes tribute to the great old ones.
Seeing Mauvais sang again today brings back a time when everything seemed possible, when cinema hadn’t been swallowed up by this will to put away everything into boxes, a time when it still seemed possible to experiment through a popular cinema, a time when image was still as important as words.

It’s maybe because he’s very -even too much- intimately linked to its time, and therefore liable to expiration, that this kind of cinema has been progressively abandoned by French authors. Yet, it’s what make its value today and what actually makes it ageless.

Available again on DVD in a French edition.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Mauvais sang

More information about The Trepasser.

Emmanuel Agneray founded Bizibi Productions, which Jérôme Bleitrach quickly joined later as an associate. As a producer, he follows authors from their short films to their feature films such as Israelian director Keren Yedaya (Lulu, Or –Camera d’Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival-, Jaffa) or Lebanese director Hany Tamba (Beyrut After Shave, A Song in the Head) or these days actress-director Aure Atika, who is about to shoot her first feature film after some really promising shorts films.

* Think tank created in 2008 by director Pascale Ferran and made of 13 personalities of French cinema: 1 writer (Cécile Vargaftig), 3 directors (Jacques Audiard, Claude Miller, Pascale Ferran), 4 producers (Denis Freyd, Arnaud Louvet, Patrick Sobelman, Edouard Weil), 1 distributor (Fabienne Vonier), 3 cinema owners (Stéphane Goudet, Claude-Eric Poiroux, Jean-Jacques Ruttner) and 1 international sales agent (François Yon).
** French art house independent films with budget between 3 and 8 million euros that can not be called low budget nor “big” productions.

How and why did you found Bizibi Productions a dozen year ago ?
I was working in film distribution, I was more precisely in charge of film programming. It was very instructive concerning what happens to the films during their lives on screen. It lasted for four or five years and it helped me to get a foot in the business, to meet with people. I had producing films in mind since my teenage years, without having any link to this activity. I created the company with two partners, with the idea -very French- to start with directors from short films and help them direct feature films. One of my partners left quickly to direct films. As it was not going very well with the other partner and as I didn’t want to produce alone, Jérôme Bleitrach joined me quickly and we still now work together. We produced a number of short films –around twenty five– and four feature films by directors, the short films of whom we produced. We now also work with directors whose short film we haven’t produced.

You worked with an Israeli director (Keren Yedaya), a Lebanese filmmaker (Hany Tamba), how do you choose the directors you work with?
What was clear was that we did not want to work with French directors only. First of all because there are talented directors in many other countries but also because the French system allows, through coproduction agreements, to produce foreign directors with French funds under the French law. To take Israel as an example, a film which fits in those agreements has both French and Israeli nationalities. It helps financing those films.

What makes those films fit the agreements?
What is important in the financing, mostly for television networks, is to get the CNC (French National Cinema Center) agreement. To get this, you need to have a number of points. The points are delivered through the nationality of the technicians, of the actors and the nationality of the companies involved in the film production. When the films get the agreement they are considered as European. But they may not be considered as French films by television. The spoken language has to be French to be considered French and fill the television quotas. Being European is the basis, being French is even better. The CNC agreement is also important for distributors because they can raise subsidies.
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The Hays code disappears for good in 1968 and follows the same evolution as in other western countries: the censor used to decide what the audience was supposed to see or not. Now it’s the audience that decides, after being informed of the film’s content. Originally (until 1970) the following ratings were decided:
- G for General Audience
- M for Mature Audience
- R for Restricted - Children under 16 are not admitted without an accompanying parent or adult guardian
- X - Children under 17 will not be admitted
The vague situation in the first years will enable the production of more explicit films in terms of violence and sexuality, which will not be restricted to an underground ghetto like Bonnie and Clyde by Arthur Penn in 1967, The Night of the Living Dead by George Romero in 1968 or The Wild Bunch by Sam Peckinpah in 1969. The first industrially produced pornographic revues were born in the sixties. In the seventies the number of theatres dedicated to pornography increased incredibly from the western to the eastern coast of the US. Some movies even gained some respectability in regular theatres like Behind the Green Door directed by the Mitchell brothers in 1972, which is selected at the Cannes Film Festival, or Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones, both directed by Gerard Damiano, these three films being some of the biggest commercial hits of the decade, all genres included. The new moral order Hays wished so hard seemed very far away.
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Synopsis: When her husband is sent of to war during World War II and is killed in action, a young Russian woman resigns herself to marrying her husband’s brother, whom she does not love.

More information about The Cranes are Flying.

Well known in France as one of the historical writers of the most famous satyrical shows on TV, Les Guignols de l’Info, with his fellowmate Frank Magnier, Alexandre Charlot then took up film writing and gave birth to the two biggest 2008 French hits: Asterix at the Olympic Games and Welcome to the land of Shtis, amongst other works. After he directed his first feature film starring Catherine Frot, Imogène McCarthery, he is now preparing a new film as a director.

The Koji Wakamatsu Boxset Vol.2 (4(disc set) is now available and each film can also be purchased individually here:
Buy The Season of Terror
Buy Sex Jack
Buy Running in Madness, Dying in Love
Buy Ecstasy of the Angels

The films are introduced by directors Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Gaspar Noé, Danielle Arbid and André S. Labarthe.

Also available: the Koji Wakamatsu Set Vol.1 (4 DVD) which contains : Secrets Behind the Wall, The Violated Angels, The Embryo Hunts in Secret and Go Go Second Time Virgin.

The Koji Wakamatsu Boxset Vol.3 (4-disc set) will be released on November 2, 2010 and will include: Violence Without a Cause, Shinjuku Mad, Naked Bullet and The Violent Virgin.