A roundup of news from the inaugural St Petersburg International Media Forum includes a busy French delegation and a local controversy brewing over Leviathan.
The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.
Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.
Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...
The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.
Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.
Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...
- 10/6/2014
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
A roundup of news from the inaugural St Petersburg International Media Forum includes a busy French delegation and a local controversy brewing over Leviathan.
The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.
Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.
Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...
The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.
Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.
Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...
- 10/6/2014
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
In "The Truce", Francesco Rosi achieves something amazing: He's made a big, extroverted historical drama, complete with vast landscapes and swarms of extras, that also succeeds in evoking the most fragile, constantly shifting emotional states of its characters.
"The Truce" has an authentic spiritual dimension, a passion to separate the essential from the ephemeral in its exploration of human nature.
Based on Primo Levi's classic memoir "La Tregua" (The Reawakening), an account of the author's circuitous journey home to Italy after his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945, "The Truce" gets its strongest effects in some of its gentlest moments -- such as the expression of personal triumph on a man's face as he hands a precious slab of bread to a friend, realizing at that moment that despite all he's been through, his humanity hasn't been obliterated.
Levi, a research chemist by profession, described the experience of imprisonment and liberation with ferocious precision in three books, including "Survival in Auschwitz" and "Moments of Reprieve" in addition to "The Reawakening". Only a few scenes here depict the camps in operation, and then only in brief flashbacks, but their soul-squeezing atmosphere is vividly evoked in the behavior and body language of newly liberated prisoners.
Rosi has always had a special gift for using landscapes and enclosed architectural spaces expressively: the enveloping, official corridors of "Illustrious Corpses" (1976); the oddly canted perspectives of a sun-baked village perched on a mountaintop in "Christ Stopped at Eboli" (1979). In "The Truce", a journey from the cramped, gray chambers of Auschwitz into the desolate expanse of postwar Europe -- snaking across half the continent, deep into Russia and back out again, on foot and by train -- mirrors the expansion of constricted human spirits.
The larger mysteries of Levi's life, the evolution of the clenched prisoner of the memoirs into the acclaimed writer of playful essays and metafictional tales "The Periodic Table" and "The Monkey's Wrench" -- not to mention the forces that drove him to suicide in 1987 -- are beyond the scope of this, and perhaps any, film. But we see the beginnings of the process; and what's more, we feel them.
Rosi's sensuous approach turns out to be a perfect match for this material because so much of Levi's struggle to reconnect with the world is visual. Words like "seeing" or "observing" just don't measure up to the urgency of Levi's gaze; he seems to be interrogating reality, trying to peer all the way down into it, mining it for secrets that can help him reawaken.
John Turturro, as Levi, damps his trademark eruptive energy way down; the force of his personality remains, but as an impacted ember of intelligence. Speaking English with a soft Italian accent, Turturro shows the desperate intensity of Primo's watchfulness. "You are a scientist", a friend tells him. "You notice things". It's a description not only of a personality trait but also of the vocation Levi discovered at Auschwitz, to become a "witness" to the Holocaust. Where other prisoners burn their camp uniforms and seek to purge the experience from memory, Levi carefully saves his numbered prison shirt and wears it always under his new clothes.
There are aspects of Levi's account, especially its questing, analytical intelligence, that don't come across as powerfully onscreen as they do in print. When Turturro is required to recite some of Levi's written observations as lines of dialogue, his otherwise fine, fluid performance stiffens up.
"The Truce" is a great film in its ultimate effects, if not in every last detail. The decision to film the story in English, to build the film linguistically around Turturro, puts some of the European actors in supporting roles in an uncomfortable position, struggling with pronunciation when they should be living in the characters. Massimo Ghini, as Primo's ebullient buddy Cesare, and Agnieszka Wagner, as a radiant dumpling of a Russian nurse who plays a key role in reawakening Levi's senses, rise to the occasion. But Yugoslavian actor Rade Serbedzija turns one of Levi's pivotal traveling companions, a domineering, shrewd operator known only as the Greek, into a sub-Zorba stereotype.
In this context, though, all particular complaints are quibbles. What matters most about "The Truce" is that Rosi's magnificent film is altogether worthy of its subject.
THE TRUCE
Miramax Films
Director; Francesco Rosi
Screenplay; Francesco Rosi,
Stefano Rulli, Sandra Petraglia
Based on the book "La Tregua" (The Reawakening) by:; Primo Levi
Producers; Leo Pescarolo, Guido De Laurentiis
Directors of photography; Pasqualini De Santis, Marco Pontecorvo
Editors; Ruggero Mastroianni,
Bruno Sarandrea
Music; Luis Bacalov
Color
Cast:
Primo; John Turturro
Cesare; Massimo Ghini
The Greek; Rade Serbedzija
Daniele; Stefano Dionisi
Colonel Rovi; Teco Celio
Galina; Agnieszka Wagner
Flora; Lorenza Indovina
Running time -- 116 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
"The Truce" has an authentic spiritual dimension, a passion to separate the essential from the ephemeral in its exploration of human nature.
Based on Primo Levi's classic memoir "La Tregua" (The Reawakening), an account of the author's circuitous journey home to Italy after his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945, "The Truce" gets its strongest effects in some of its gentlest moments -- such as the expression of personal triumph on a man's face as he hands a precious slab of bread to a friend, realizing at that moment that despite all he's been through, his humanity hasn't been obliterated.
Levi, a research chemist by profession, described the experience of imprisonment and liberation with ferocious precision in three books, including "Survival in Auschwitz" and "Moments of Reprieve" in addition to "The Reawakening". Only a few scenes here depict the camps in operation, and then only in brief flashbacks, but their soul-squeezing atmosphere is vividly evoked in the behavior and body language of newly liberated prisoners.
Rosi has always had a special gift for using landscapes and enclosed architectural spaces expressively: the enveloping, official corridors of "Illustrious Corpses" (1976); the oddly canted perspectives of a sun-baked village perched on a mountaintop in "Christ Stopped at Eboli" (1979). In "The Truce", a journey from the cramped, gray chambers of Auschwitz into the desolate expanse of postwar Europe -- snaking across half the continent, deep into Russia and back out again, on foot and by train -- mirrors the expansion of constricted human spirits.
The larger mysteries of Levi's life, the evolution of the clenched prisoner of the memoirs into the acclaimed writer of playful essays and metafictional tales "The Periodic Table" and "The Monkey's Wrench" -- not to mention the forces that drove him to suicide in 1987 -- are beyond the scope of this, and perhaps any, film. But we see the beginnings of the process; and what's more, we feel them.
Rosi's sensuous approach turns out to be a perfect match for this material because so much of Levi's struggle to reconnect with the world is visual. Words like "seeing" or "observing" just don't measure up to the urgency of Levi's gaze; he seems to be interrogating reality, trying to peer all the way down into it, mining it for secrets that can help him reawaken.
John Turturro, as Levi, damps his trademark eruptive energy way down; the force of his personality remains, but as an impacted ember of intelligence. Speaking English with a soft Italian accent, Turturro shows the desperate intensity of Primo's watchfulness. "You are a scientist", a friend tells him. "You notice things". It's a description not only of a personality trait but also of the vocation Levi discovered at Auschwitz, to become a "witness" to the Holocaust. Where other prisoners burn their camp uniforms and seek to purge the experience from memory, Levi carefully saves his numbered prison shirt and wears it always under his new clothes.
There are aspects of Levi's account, especially its questing, analytical intelligence, that don't come across as powerfully onscreen as they do in print. When Turturro is required to recite some of Levi's written observations as lines of dialogue, his otherwise fine, fluid performance stiffens up.
"The Truce" is a great film in its ultimate effects, if not in every last detail. The decision to film the story in English, to build the film linguistically around Turturro, puts some of the European actors in supporting roles in an uncomfortable position, struggling with pronunciation when they should be living in the characters. Massimo Ghini, as Primo's ebullient buddy Cesare, and Agnieszka Wagner, as a radiant dumpling of a Russian nurse who plays a key role in reawakening Levi's senses, rise to the occasion. But Yugoslavian actor Rade Serbedzija turns one of Levi's pivotal traveling companions, a domineering, shrewd operator known only as the Greek, into a sub-Zorba stereotype.
In this context, though, all particular complaints are quibbles. What matters most about "The Truce" is that Rosi's magnificent film is altogether worthy of its subject.
THE TRUCE
Miramax Films
Director; Francesco Rosi
Screenplay; Francesco Rosi,
Stefano Rulli, Sandra Petraglia
Based on the book "La Tregua" (The Reawakening) by:; Primo Levi
Producers; Leo Pescarolo, Guido De Laurentiis
Directors of photography; Pasqualini De Santis, Marco Pontecorvo
Editors; Ruggero Mastroianni,
Bruno Sarandrea
Music; Luis Bacalov
Color
Cast:
Primo; John Turturro
Cesare; Massimo Ghini
The Greek; Rade Serbedzija
Daniele; Stefano Dionisi
Colonel Rovi; Teco Celio
Galina; Agnieszka Wagner
Flora; Lorenza Indovina
Running time -- 116 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 4/24/1998
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
"La Tregua" (The Truce) is a multilevel saga about a man making peace with himself. In this case, it is the magical awakening and spiritual revitalization of a former Auschwitz prisoner who, during a long and arduous trek home after his concentration camp imprisonment, rediscovers his feelings and humanity.
Magnificently scoped and elevated by a rousingly tender musical score, this competition entrant should win much praise for its ambitious and eloquent equivocation of one of the most horrifying sagas in human history.
A picaresque saga of both physical and psychological dimension, the film begins with the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army. Centering on Primo (John Turturro), a deferential Italian chemist who has endured the heinous degradations of Auschwitz, the complex, spare narrative uses Primo's experiences and observations as a prism for all prisoners of the concentration camps -- Jews, gypsies or anyone else considered an "undesirable."
A diffident and intelligent man, Primo is somewhat baffled by his own survival: Why did God grant him life when others, such as the youngest children, were led to their immediate slaughter? Like Abraham, he questions God's notion of mercy. Throughout the film, philosophical quandaries as well as religious questions magnify the story beyond its mere logistical dimension. Nevertheless, screenwriters Franceso Rosi and Tonino Guerra have fortified this odyssey with observations and ruminations from Primo's intelligent and introspective recollections that have profound significance. Admittedly, the pronouncements sometimes radiate with a specious simplicity that takes its credence from the enormity of the subject, but, in general, they are of a solid and illuminating nature.
But not all is speculation and discourse. "La Tregua" bursts out with energy and high spirits as Primo travels, largely by train, from Auschwitz to his hometown in Italy. Exuberant ethnic celebrations enliven the trip and, for Primo, serve as catalysts to touch down to his most decent emotions -- feelings almost subsumed by the callous shell he developed as a means to survive the concentration camp. While these musical outbursts are wonderfully colorful and serve as intellectual rest stops from Primo's ruminations, they are at times overdrawn and somewhat glorified. Roaring scenes of the Red Army, booming away en masse on some nationalistic march, are somewhat prolonged and, alas, aesthetically old-fashioned. Indeed, director Francesco Rosi's narrative cadence occasionally trips into a lock-step mode: reflection, musical production number, train. Nevertheless, it is an overall percussively powerful filmic journey.
As the focal point of this largely wonderful work, Turturro's incisive performance is a wonderful portrait of a man's reawakening and his reaffirmation not only in himself but humanity. Coursing the production with some flesh-and-blood gusto, Rade Serbedzija is terrific as an irrepressible Greek.
Compositionally grand, thanks to cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis' robust framings and composer Luis Bacalov's rich shadings, "La Tregua" resounds with hard wisdom and compassion.
LA TREGUA (THE TRUCE)
In competition
Capitol Films
In association with Channel Four Films
A 3 Emme production
A film by Francesco Rosi
Producers Leo Pescarolo, Guido de Laurentiis
Director Francesco Rosi
Screenplay Francesco Rosi, Stefano Rulli,
Sandro Petraglia
Based on the book by Primo Levi
Dirs. of photography Pasqualino De Santis,
Marco Pontecorvo
Editor Ruggero Mastroianni, Bruno Sarandrea
Music Luis Bacalov
Costume designer Alberto Verso
Production designer Andrea Crisanti
Casting Shaila Rubin
Sound mixer Alain Curvelier
Cast:
Primo John Turturro
Cesare Massimo Ghini
The Greek Rade Serbedzija
Daniele Stefano Dionisi
Col. Rovi Teco Celio
Running time -- 117 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Magnificently scoped and elevated by a rousingly tender musical score, this competition entrant should win much praise for its ambitious and eloquent equivocation of one of the most horrifying sagas in human history.
A picaresque saga of both physical and psychological dimension, the film begins with the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army. Centering on Primo (John Turturro), a deferential Italian chemist who has endured the heinous degradations of Auschwitz, the complex, spare narrative uses Primo's experiences and observations as a prism for all prisoners of the concentration camps -- Jews, gypsies or anyone else considered an "undesirable."
A diffident and intelligent man, Primo is somewhat baffled by his own survival: Why did God grant him life when others, such as the youngest children, were led to their immediate slaughter? Like Abraham, he questions God's notion of mercy. Throughout the film, philosophical quandaries as well as religious questions magnify the story beyond its mere logistical dimension. Nevertheless, screenwriters Franceso Rosi and Tonino Guerra have fortified this odyssey with observations and ruminations from Primo's intelligent and introspective recollections that have profound significance. Admittedly, the pronouncements sometimes radiate with a specious simplicity that takes its credence from the enormity of the subject, but, in general, they are of a solid and illuminating nature.
But not all is speculation and discourse. "La Tregua" bursts out with energy and high spirits as Primo travels, largely by train, from Auschwitz to his hometown in Italy. Exuberant ethnic celebrations enliven the trip and, for Primo, serve as catalysts to touch down to his most decent emotions -- feelings almost subsumed by the callous shell he developed as a means to survive the concentration camp. While these musical outbursts are wonderfully colorful and serve as intellectual rest stops from Primo's ruminations, they are at times overdrawn and somewhat glorified. Roaring scenes of the Red Army, booming away en masse on some nationalistic march, are somewhat prolonged and, alas, aesthetically old-fashioned. Indeed, director Francesco Rosi's narrative cadence occasionally trips into a lock-step mode: reflection, musical production number, train. Nevertheless, it is an overall percussively powerful filmic journey.
As the focal point of this largely wonderful work, Turturro's incisive performance is a wonderful portrait of a man's reawakening and his reaffirmation not only in himself but humanity. Coursing the production with some flesh-and-blood gusto, Rade Serbedzija is terrific as an irrepressible Greek.
Compositionally grand, thanks to cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis' robust framings and composer Luis Bacalov's rich shadings, "La Tregua" resounds with hard wisdom and compassion.
LA TREGUA (THE TRUCE)
In competition
Capitol Films
In association with Channel Four Films
A 3 Emme production
A film by Francesco Rosi
Producers Leo Pescarolo, Guido de Laurentiis
Director Francesco Rosi
Screenplay Francesco Rosi, Stefano Rulli,
Sandro Petraglia
Based on the book by Primo Levi
Dirs. of photography Pasqualino De Santis,
Marco Pontecorvo
Editor Ruggero Mastroianni, Bruno Sarandrea
Music Luis Bacalov
Costume designer Alberto Verso
Production designer Andrea Crisanti
Casting Shaila Rubin
Sound mixer Alain Curvelier
Cast:
Primo John Turturro
Cesare Massimo Ghini
The Greek Rade Serbedzija
Daniele Stefano Dionisi
Col. Rovi Teco Celio
Running time -- 117 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 5/14/1997
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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