Vancouver Film Festival

The Vancouver International Film Festival opened Thursday night with the screening of Volver, Pedro Almodovar’s female-centred drama starring Penelope Cruz.

Volver has just been named as Spain’s entry for the Academy Awards in the foreign film category and has been a hit at film festivals around the world.

The movie won best screenplay and a best actress award for the ensemble cast, including Cruz and Carmen Maura, at Cannes.

It was also on the program at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, where Cruz revealed she wore a fake bottom to play the role of a working mother tormented by a teenage daughter, a layabout husband and an interfering ghost.

The festival is celebrating its 25th anniversary in its new home at the Vancouver International Film Centre.

It’s a “watershed year” for the festival, which will show 350 films and attract an estimated 150,000 filmgoers, festival director Alan Franey told CBC Radio.

“I didn’t think ever that we would become the second-largest film festival on the continent [after TIFF] in terms of number of films shown and size of audience,” he said.

The festival’s new headquarters at VanCity Theatre gives organizers a chance to create programming year-round, he said.

Young filmmakers and a look forward

But the festival, which features a mix of Canadian and international films, has maintained a focus on young filmmakers, with many first- and second-time directors, he said.

“We have emphasized young cinema partly because a festival is about a place of discovery. It’s bringing the filmmaker to the festival to meet the audience,” he said.

The 25th anniversary is also a chance to look toward the future, he said.

“A lot of [the films] this year reflect the future and express concern about where the world is going, but a lot of them are inspirational about what is happening to us.”

On Friday night the Canadian Images program opens with Everything’s Gone Green, the first feature film written by Vancouver novelist Douglas Coupland.

Everything’s Gone Green, directed by Paul Fox, includes prominent, undisguised shots of well-known Vancouver features, including English Bay, the Lions Gate Bridge and False Creek.

Coupland his created a character who works in the movie business and specializes in disguising Vancouver to make it look like a U.S. city.

Franey reflected on the new trend in Canadian movies to have Canadian cities be themselves, calling it a sign of the industry’s “maturity.”

The program also features a rich choice of international fare, with films like Ten Canoes, an Australian work that Franey centred out as one of his favourites.

“It deals with aboriginal culture on its own terms and has its own look that takes you to another place,” he said.

The Vancouver International Film Festival continues until Oct. 13.

Robert De Niro

Actor
Robert De Niro and the growing Tribeca Film Festival he founded gave support on Thursday to Rome’s new international film competition ahead of its debut in mid-October.

The Rome festival, the pet project of Rome mayor and movie buff Walter Veltroni, will screen ten films from New York’s fifth Tribeca festival, held earlier this year, officials said at a news conference. In return, Tribeca’s 2007 festival will show a selection of films from Rome.

De Niro said he “looked forward to a long relationship” with the Rome event, which will start with a 20-minute screening next month of select scenes from “The Good Shepherd,” a film he directed starring
Matt Damon and
Angelina Jolie.

Veltroni, who has defended his new “Festa del Cinema” against concerns it would compete with Venice’s “Mostra del Cinema,” the world’s oldest film festival, said the New York festival had much in common with Rome.

“Both festivals love quality but they also love the audience,” he said. “They do not believe quality and the audience are opposites.”

Both Veltroni and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg are in favor of boosting their cities capital by establishing them as film-making hubs, but Bloomberg on Thursday focused on the cultural benefits from sharing film selections.

The films would not only be exposed to new audiences and the festivals promoted internationally, but the reciprocal screenings would “in turn help New York and Rome become even greater movie towns,” he said.

Selections shown at Tribeca this year to be screened in Rome included “The War Tapes,” a documentary filmed by National Guard Soldiers in
Iraq and “The Yacoubian Building,” billed as the most expensive film ever made in Egypt.

De Niro declined to say much about the growing impact of the New York festival, which he founded to revitalize the Tribeca area after the World Trade Center attacks, but other officials hoped its growth would inspire Rome.

“We started our festival from scratch so we know what it takes to start out,” said Jennifer Maguire, president of the Tribeca Film Festival. “And Bob De Niro loves Rome, so that is a big part of this.”

MySpace

MySpace, the social networking Web site, could be worth around $15 billion within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of parent company News Corp., a Wall Street media analyst forecast on Wednesday.

RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan said he had come away from a meeting with Fox Interactive, the managers of MySpace, believing that “media investors may not fully appreciate what has already been done with MySpace or what may lie ahead.”

“$15 billion in a few years? It is possible,” Rohan wrote in a research note to clients.

MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $580 million less than a year ago. It now boasts more than 90 million active users.

Rohan said MySpace could demonstrate a value of between $10 billion and $20 billion within a few years. Acknowledging he was making an “audacious claim” he justified the forecast on the basis of MySpace’s “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

He also said the site’s “massive” international appeal, capacity to become “an intellectual property distribution powerhouse” and experienced management team lent credibility to his prediction.

Rohan based his view on an extrapolation of estimates for the value of Internet properties ranging from $1 billion for both MySpace rivals YouTube and Facebook to the market capitalization of $120 billion for Google Inc..

He said MySpace was currently sold out of space for video advertising. The CPM, or price per thousand ad views, on a premium show such as Fox’s The Simpsons runs as high as $35-40 on MySpace, he said.

MySpace management believes its video service ranks No. 3 among U.S. Web users behind Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO – news) and YouTube, Rohan said following the Tuesday meeting with Fox officials.

Britain is adding 25,000 MySpace member profiles per day. Australia has 2 million unique users. MySpace France began public testing three weeks ago, he noted.

MySpace is internally developing a MySpace Web application to run on mobile phones that should be launched in three to four months with a major U.S. carrier, he said.

Rome`s first film festival

A mix of big Hollywood productions and arty European movies will mark Rome’s first international film festival next month, organizers said on Tuesday as they played down rivalry with Venice’s venerable film contest.

French and Italian movies dominate the 16-film lineup for the Rome festival’s main competition, which has a distinct European, art-house flavor and includes no U.S. title.

Four American films will screen in the section devoted to international premieres, with
Steven Shainberg’s “Fur” — the story of U.S. photographer Diane Arbus played by
Nicole Kidman — opening the nine-day festival on October 13.

In fact, the official competition is almost certain to take a back seat to a series of special events and screenings which include the presentation of
Martin Scorsese’s new thriller “The Departed” and a tribute to
Sean Connery.

Other celebrities who organizers expect to grace Rome’s red carpet are Leonardo Di Caprio,
Richard Gere,
Viggo Mortensen,
Monica Bellucci and
Harrison Ford.

Ever since the capital’s mayor Walter Veltroni, a movie buff, announced plans for his Festa del Cinema, he has been accused of trying to divert stars and money away from the world’s oldest film competition in Venice.

But Rome organizers say their budget of some 12 million euros ($15 million) mostly comes from private funds and insist theirs will be a city festival with a more popular approach than the traditionally high-brow Venice event.

“This will mainly be a festival for the public and not just for the film industry,” the head of Rome’s festival, Goffredo Bettini, told a news conference.

Veltroni said his and the Venice Lido event would walk “hand in hand” but appeared to take a swipe at Venetian organizers — who have voiced concern at the challenge from Rome — by saying that “Italy is a country where people are afraid of novelty.”

The director of the Venice festival, Marco Mueller, triggered a storm last month when he asserted that the films screened in Rome were those that “neither we or Cannes wanted.”

Since then Rome officials have said that after this year’s event, they are ready review the dates of their festival — currently regarded as too close for Venice’s comfort.

One big difference between the events is that unlike Venice’s star-studded jury, in Rome it will be up to 50 ordinary film-goers, under the supervision of Italian director Ettore Scola, to decide who deserves the best movie award.

Patrick Quinn

Veteran actor and union official Patrick Quinn died Sunday of a massive coronary in at his summer home in Pennsylvania. He was 56.

Quinn had recently been appointed executive director of Actors’ Equity Assn. after serving as president of the New York-based 45,000-member organization since 2000,

The Philadelphia native began his Equity career in 1970. He made his Broadway debut in a revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” with Zero Mostel and boasted 10 other Broadway credits, including “A Class Act,” “Beauty and the Beast” and the revival of “The Sound of Music.”

Quinn’s TV credits included recurring roles on “Bosom Buddies” with
Tom Hanks, “As the World Turns,” “All My Children” and guest appearances on all three versions of “Law & Order.” He also voiced characters in the animated films “Aladdin,” “Pocahontas” and “Anastasia.”

Pedro Almodovar

The International Federation of Film Critics has named Pedro Almodovar’s Volver the best film of the year.

Volver, which premiered in Spain in March, stars Penelope Cruz as a working mother with a teenage daughter and a layabout husband whose mother, played by Carmen Maura, comes back from the dead to tie up loose ends.

The federation, which includes 350 critics from around the world, announced the award late Thursday at a ceremony at the 54th San Sebastian International Film Festival in the northern Basque city.

The movie won best screenplay and a best actress award for the ensemble cast at Cannes.

It was also on the program at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, where Cruz revealed she wore a fake bottom to play the role.

This is the second Fipresci award for Almodovar, who also won in 1999 for All About My Mother.

Andy Warhol

Were he around to experience PBS’ four-hour documentary on his life, Andy Warhol would no doubt be reveling in the delicious irony of his being granted 225 minutes beyond his famously stated 15.

But it is precisely because so much debate surrounds his work, and mystery shrouds his life, that getting the two-night “American Masters” treatment from PBS is altogether fitting and merited. And while there is invariably repetition and drag in writer-producer-director Ric Burns’ “Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film,” it also bursts with compelling detail and extraordinary insight into an enigmatic figure about whom we come away more or less enlightened.

Warhol is described here as “a gay and a swish with a bad nose and who was bad with people and had a really freaky mother.” It doesn’t sound like the stuff of which legends are made. But that’s what the man who created the pop art form would become even before he died in 1987 from complications from gall bladder surgery at age 58. Burns’ production makes full use of the Andy Warhol Museum archives in the artist’s native Pittsburgh, blending the material with a slew interviews ranging from Warhol’s brother John Warhola to the late writer George Plimpton to weave an ethereal tapestry befitting the oddball genius being profiled.

The first night’s installment chronicles Warhol’s rise from the Pittsburgh slums as the frail, shy and altogether guileless son of penniless European immigrants. It follows his art studies at Carnegie Tech and rise to hipster status in the world of artistic expression, as a guy who blended art and commerce as no one had before. At day’s end, we learn, Warhol mostly was skilled at making new things out of old things and putting a different spin on the tried and true. He was a nonartist who somehow became a great artist of sorts. But his real contribution might have been his embracing of kitsch when it was still mainstream.

Part of “Andy Warhol” takes a probing look at Warhol’s seldom-seen screen tests and films — like “Sleep” (1963), which chronicles 5-1/2 hours in the life of poet John Giorno as he lay sleeping in his bed. Not everybody’s cup of java, to be sure, but as is made evident here, you’ve got to admire a man who was able to make weird stuff, say it was art and have it be so simply because he believed it.

While Burns goes to great lengths to paint Warhol as one of the 20th century’s most important artists, he still isn’t quite able to reconcile whether the guy was a true visionary or a mere charlatan who specialized in appropriating the photographs and images of others. Warhol, for his part, seemed to harbor no great illusions of his artistry. He’s heard here admitting that he’s lazy and can’t claim much credit for originality because he puts his imprint on existing creations. And why did he work this way? Because it was easier than having to make it himself.

This might be interpreted as the emperor admitting he has no clothes. And for his part, Burns demonstrates an adroit touch while helping his subject strip down.

Narrator:
Laurie Anderson

Executive producers: Peter Brant, Larry Gagosian, Diane Von Furstenberg; Co-executive producer: Roger Kass; Producers: Donald Rosenfeld, Daniel Wolf, Ric Burns; Co-producers: Marilyn Ness, Mary Recine, Robin Espinola; Director: Ric Burns; Teleplay: James Sanders, Ric Burns; Editors: Juliana Parroni, Li-Shin Yu; Music: Brian Keane; Cinematographers: Buddy Squires, Peter Nelson, Allen Moore, Michael Chin, Don Lenzer; Voice of Andy Warhol: Jeff Koons; Additional voices: Philip Bosco, Josh Hamilton,
Robert Sean Leonard, Callie Thorne.

Atlantic Film Festival

The 26th Atlantic Film Festival opens Thursday evening in Halifax with The Journals of Knud Rasmussen and an opening night street party downtown.

The new movie from Zacharias Kunuk, director of Atanarjuat The Fast Runner, received a warm reception last week at its southern Canadian premiere in Toronto.

The film, based on the journals of a Danish explorer, is the story of one of the last great shamans of the Canadian North.

It is the first of 223 movies to be screened in Halifax this year, the largest lineup of films to date at the festival.

The party on Argyle Street is expected to attract more than 3,000 revellers for an evening of Acadian music.

There are 11 gala presentations planned over the next 10 days, including Mary Walsh’s Young Triffie’s Been Made Away With on Friday evening.

Walsh’s film, starring Rémy Girard, Andrea Martin and Colin Mochrie, follows a gormless young ranger investigating the murder of a young woman who washes up on a Newfoundland beach in 1946.

Friday’s festivities include an alfresco screening of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz on Citadel Hill.

Among the other highly anticipated galas are:

* Sarah Polley’s Away from Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent, about an elderly couple confronting Alzheimer’s.
* Délivrez-Moi, a film from Denis Chouinard about a woman trying to rebuild relations with her daughter after being imprisoned for killing her lover.
* Snow Cake, a Canadian-British production that premiered in Berlin earlier this year about an autistic woman played by Sigourney Weaver who befriends a lonely man played by Alan Rickman.
* Strangers with Candy, a film about an unlikely stripper, which is already playing in cinemas.
* Congorama, Philippe Falardeau’s film about an inventor who travels to Quebec looking for his family.
* Brothers of the Head, a film about Siamese twins on a quest for rock ‘n’ roll fame.

The festival includes documentaries, industry panels and discussions with filmmakers and musical talent including Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning.

The Atlantic Film Festival closes on Sept. 23 with After the Wedding, from the Danish director Susanne Bier.

Lost Play

The manuscript of a one-act play by the late Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey has resurfaced after being lost for 80 years.

The Cooing of the Doves, typewritten with the writer’s notes on the side, is being donated to Princeton University in the U.S. by Leonard Milberg, a financier and collector. Princeton is Milberg’s alma mater.

Milberg revealed recently that the play is part of a massive collection of Irish drama and memorabilia he is handing over to the university, documenting 160 years of theatre in Ireland.

It contains more than 1,000 items, including photographs, playbills and materials such as a French first edition of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and works by W.B. Yeats, Brian Friel and Martin McDonagh.

“There’s nothing quite like this in Ireland itself,” Princeton Prof. Paul Muldoon, a northern Irish poet, told the Guardian newspaper.

“It’s an extraordinary resource for our local scholars, who are more and more interested in Irish theatre.”

Details of the manuscript’s journey are still murky. It is valued at $75,000 US.

O’Casey submitted the play to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1923 but it was never performed. Parts of the work were then incorporated into The Plough and the Stars, which premiered at the Abbey in 1926. It was around that time that the original manuscript is believed to have disappeared. O’Casey thought he had lost it.

Milberg says Cooing of the Doves appeared at a sale at an Irish auction house. Book dealer Howard Woolmer, acting for Milberg, bought it.

Milberg says the play was owned for a period of time by an actor, Eric Gorman, a member of the Abbey Theatre company, and O’Casey’s friend.

The 73-year-old financier says he’s donating the collection in honour of Muldoon, also founding chair of the university’s Center for the Creative and Performing Arts.

Princeton is celebrating the donation with a three-day symposium on Irish theatre next month. It will feature productions of Brian Friel’s Translations and William Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. Irish actors such as Stephen Rea and Gabriel Byrne are expected to attend.

O’Casey, born in a Dublin slum in 1880, suffered from poverty and poor eyesight most of his life. He died in 1964.

A self-described socialist and nationalist, his plays centre on the plight of the working class and issues of justice. They include Within the Gates, The Star Turns Red, Red Roses for Me, Oak Leaves and Lavender, and Cock A Doodle Dandy.

Bury My Heart at Wounded knee

Hundreds of First Nations people from southern Alberta are being hired for a made-for-TV movie based on the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

The HBO production is casting now for a shoot beginning later this month.

The film is to be directed by Quebec-born Yves Simoneau, who also directed Marie-Antoinette and Nuremberg for TV.

It stars Aidan Quinn and Canadian actor August Schellenberg and chronicles the plight of First Nations people in the U.S. during the days of Sitting Bull and George Custer.

The book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an Indian history of the American West by Dee Brown, tells of the tragic end of the U.S. Indian wars. It chronicles the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the murders of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and the slaughter of Sioux prisoners at Wounded Knee.

This weekend, Alyson Lockwood of Classic Casting signed up hundreds of people from the Lethbridge, Alta., area to take speaking roles and serve as extras in the production.

“We’ve got battle scenes where we need a large number of horse riders and we’ve got some warrior dance scenes where we’re needing drummers and dancers and singers,” she told CBC Radio.

“And then we’ve got lots of extras we’re going to need for camp scenes and battle scenes. So we’re looking for a large number, probably close to about 2,000 people for the whole show.”

Both veteran actors and relative newcomers were among those applying for work.

Audra Foggin and her sons Cody and Carson all applied together.

All three have acted before in other films featuring native stories, including Dream Keeper and the popular miniseries Into the West, which were also shot in Alberta.

“I was actually cast as a man in Dream Keeper because they didn’t have enough male riders one day,” Foggin said.

Shannon Wells, her husband, Craig, and two-year-old son were all in Dream Keeper.

The pay is outstanding and the work rewarding, but the best part is watching the finished movie, Wells said.

“That was exciting when we had brief glimpses of my son and myself in the movie,” she said. The experience will also be a story to tell her son when he is older, she said.

A further casting call is planned for Friday.

Shooting of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee begins Sept. 20 on the Tsuu T’ina reserve near Calgary. The film is expected to air in 2008.