Midnight Blur Films has signed a deal with French distributor Les Acacias to release Chinese arthouse drama “Three Adventures of Brooke” in France this year, the Chinese production company told Variety on Saturday. A release date has yet to be set for the film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and stars Chinese newcomer Xu Fangyi and French actor Pascal Greggory.
“We chose Les Acacias because we have been following their lineup for a long time, and we admire their taste and their cooperation with renowned filmmakers like Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing,” Midnight Blur’s co-founder and head of international sales Cao Liuying said, adding that the Paris-based distributor had offered “a satisfying minimum guarantee.”
Midnight Blur is registered in the Chinese city of Hangzhou and has agents in Shanghai, Beijing, Paris, New York and Tokyo. Les Acacias has a track record of distributing artistic works by Asian directors.
“We chose Les Acacias because we have been following their lineup for a long time, and we admire their taste and their cooperation with renowned filmmakers like Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing,” Midnight Blur’s co-founder and head of international sales Cao Liuying said, adding that the Paris-based distributor had offered “a satisfying minimum guarantee.”
Midnight Blur is registered in the Chinese city of Hangzhou and has agents in Shanghai, Beijing, Paris, New York and Tokyo. Les Acacias has a track record of distributing artistic works by Asian directors.
- 1/19/2019
- by Rebecca Davis
- Variety Film + TV
In 2018 we've published 70 interviews whose subjects have ranged from old masters to emerging new voices, and including some unexpected conversations, including those with curators (Dave Kehr of the Museum of Modern Art), as well as archival finds (a 1971 talk with Jerry Lewis).Below you will find an index of our conversations throughout the year, listed in order of publication date.Blake Williams (Prototype)Samira Elagoz (Craigslist Allstars)F.J. Ossang (9 Fingers)Jerry LewisAndré Gil Mata (The Tree)Christian Petzold (Transit)Raoul Peck (Young Karl Marx)Ashley McKenzie (Werewolf)Penelope SpheerisTed Fendt (Classical Period)Dominik Graf (The Red Shadow)Blake Williams ("Stereo Visions")Arnaud Desplechin (Ismael's Ghosts)Ruth Beckermann (The Waldheim Waltz)Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias (Cocote)Esther GarrelPhilippe Garrel (Lover for a Day)Jonas MekasJohann Lurf (★)Karim Aïnouz (Central Airport Thf)Juliana Antunes (Baronesa)Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra (Birds of Passage)Wang Bing (Dead Souls)Donal Foreman...
- 12/27/2018
- MUBI
The Toronto International Film Festival has added a lineup of directors that range from Paul Greengrass to Jonah Hill and includes a large contingent of celebrated international auteurs.
The more than 100 additions to the Toronto lineup include Greengrass’ “22 July,” about 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway; Hill’s feature directorial debut, “Mid90s,” with Katherine Waterston and Lucas Hedges in a story of a Southern California teen who discovers skateboarding; “Green Book,” from “There’s Something About Mary” and “Dumb and Dumber” director Peter Farrelly; and Joel Edgerton’s “Boy Erased,” a coming-of-age drama written and directed by Edgerton and starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges as a teen who is put in a gay conversion program.
The new films span five different sections of the festival: Galas, Special Presentations, Masters, Contemporary World Cinema and Wavelengths.
Also Read: 'Beautiful Boy,' 'A Star Is Born' Highlight Toronto Film...
The more than 100 additions to the Toronto lineup include Greengrass’ “22 July,” about 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway; Hill’s feature directorial debut, “Mid90s,” with Katherine Waterston and Lucas Hedges in a story of a Southern California teen who discovers skateboarding; “Green Book,” from “There’s Something About Mary” and “Dumb and Dumber” director Peter Farrelly; and Joel Edgerton’s “Boy Erased,” a coming-of-age drama written and directed by Edgerton and starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges as a teen who is put in a gay conversion program.
The new films span five different sections of the festival: Galas, Special Presentations, Masters, Contemporary World Cinema and Wavelengths.
Also Read: 'Beautiful Boy,' 'A Star Is Born' Highlight Toronto Film...
- 8/14/2018
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
Below you will find an index of our coverage from the Cannes Film Festival, Directors' Fortnight, and Critics' Week in 2018, as well as our favorite films.Awardstop 101. The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard)2. Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke) & Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher)4. Burning (Lee Chang-dong)5. Asako I & II (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)6. Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)7. Dead Souls (Wang Bing)8. In My Room (Ulrich Köhler)9. Climax (Gaspar Noé)10. BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)(Contributors: Gustavo Beck, Annabel Ivy Brady-Brown, Giovanni Marchini Camia, Josh Cabrita, Jordan Cronk, Jesse Cumming, Lawrence Garcia, Daniel Kasman, Roger Koza, Richard Porton, Kurt Walker, Blake Williams)Correspondences#1 Daniel Kasman previews the festival | Read#2 Lawrence Garcia on Everybody Knows (Asghar Farhadi), Dead Souls (Wang Bing) | Read#3 Daniel Kasman on Birds of Passage (Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra), Donbass (Sergei Loznitsa) | Read#4 Lawrence Garcia on Leto (Kirill Serebrennikov), Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski) | Read#5 Daniel Kasman on The Image Book...
- 5/29/2018
- MUBI
Festival doc activity included the Marche’s Doc Corner and a buzzy Doc Day that welcomed European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet.
The Cannes L’Œil d’or (Golden Eye) documentary award has been presented to Stefano Savona’s Samouni Road.
The $5,900 priz is presented by Lascam (the French-speaking authors’ society) and its president, Julie Bertuccelli, in collaboration with the Cannes Film Festival, with the support of Ina (French National Audiovisual Institute) and, new for this year, Audiens.
The jury – headed by director Emmanuel Finkiel – praised the Directors’ Fortnight entry for its “intelligent way of filming, the right distance in its point of view,...
The Cannes L’Œil d’or (Golden Eye) documentary award has been presented to Stefano Savona’s Samouni Road.
The $5,900 priz is presented by Lascam (the French-speaking authors’ society) and its president, Julie Bertuccelli, in collaboration with the Cannes Film Festival, with the support of Ina (French National Audiovisual Institute) and, new for this year, Audiens.
The jury – headed by director Emmanuel Finkiel – praised the Directors’ Fortnight entry for its “intelligent way of filming, the right distance in its point of view,...
- 5/20/2018
- by Wendy Mitchell
- ScreenDaily
In 1957, the Communist Party of China launched an Anti-Rightist Campaign that sought to purge the so-called ‘rightists’ from its country. Over the next three years, this conveniently ambiguous term was largely used to persecute intellectuals who had voiced criticisms of the regime during the brief period of ‘openness’ referred to as the Hundred Flowers Movement (1956-1957). To this day, the Campaign is only partially documented: official government lists reveal 558,900 people were accused of being ‘rightists,’ though the real figure is likely up to six times that number. From across Gansu, a province in northwest China, over 3,200 men were sent to a set of appallingly makeshift work camps in the Gobi Desert named Jiabiangou, where they were forced to undergo “ideological re-education through labour.” The vast majority starved to death in horrifying conditions.Of the approximately 500 men who survived the camps, around 120 were interviewed by Wang Bing, as part of the...
- 5/14/2018
- MUBI
In the second of our series of interviews with women at the heart of industry change, we spoke to Doc & Film CEO Daniela Elstner, one of Europe’s most respected sales executives. Just a few months ago Elstner was on a high after her movie Touch Me Not scooped the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear top prize, her second film to do so. The president of French sales agent union Adef is now in Cannes with Wang Bing’s Official Selection documentary Dead Souls and Directors’ Fortnight entry Samouni Road.
Elstner is an unassuming expert, however. For example, few people know that in 2016 she received the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian honor for services to film. Until recently, even fewer were aware of a dark secret from her past—the fact that Elstner was once a victim herself. Twenty years ago while attending a festival for film promotion agency UniFrance,...
Elstner is an unassuming expert, however. For example, few people know that in 2016 she received the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian honor for services to film. Until recently, even fewer were aware of a dark secret from her past—the fact that Elstner was once a victim herself. Twenty years ago while attending a festival for film promotion agency UniFrance,...
- 5/10/2018
- by Andreas Wiseman
- Deadline Film + TV
The Notebook is covering Cannes with an on-going correspondence between critics Lawrence Garcia and Daniel Kasman.Dear Danny,It's truly a pleasure to plunge into the jarring bustle of the Croisette once again—though Cannes, with its predilection for pomp, inevitably feels less like a familiar friend than an acquaintance that periodically seems to forget you exist. Still, for a non-veteran like myself, the luster has yet to fade—and if Cannes does, indeed, go on the offensive, it will be a more than welcome change. The excitement is high, the potential for failure, even higher, but the chances of a serendipitous discovery—the kind of cinematic encounter that makes, or should make, every festival experience worth it—are perhaps highest of all. At the very least, it’s a chance to learn some new names.First, though, an instantly recognizable one: Iran’s Asghar Farhadi, here with the aptly,...
- 5/10/2018
- MUBI
An eight-hour-and-15-minute documentary is not something you walk into lightly, especially when its subject is the imprisonment and slow-motion murder of human beings. But Wang Bing’s “Dead Souls” is a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony. Wang, like Claude Lanzmann in “Shoah,” isn’t just making a historical documentary; he’s using oral memoir to forge an artifact of history. “Dead Souls” has its longueurs, and it may not be as staggering a work as “Shoah” or Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” but it does just what a movie that’s this long should: It uses its intimate sprawl to catalyze your view of something — in this case, how the totalitarianism of the 20th century actually worked. (One is tempted to say: quite well.)
Almost the entire film consists of interviews with survivors of the Jiabiangou and Mingshui re-education camps,...
Almost the entire film consists of interviews with survivors of the Jiabiangou and Mingshui re-education camps,...
- 5/9/2018
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Though it runs over eight hours, Dead Souls is not Chinese auteur Wang Bing’s longest film. But it definitely ranks as his most explosive outing. Charting the origins, operations and outcomes of a far-flung Chinese labor camp in the late 1950s/early 1960s, the documentary offers affecting and harrowing accounts from those who survived the gulag. On another level, it is a fiery j’accuse against the persecution unleashed during the Chinese Communist Party’s “Anti-Rightist Campaign” more than five decades ago, and the way the party chose to whitewash the man-made/Mao-made catastrophe rather than learn from its mistakes.
Despite its mammoth length...
Despite its mammoth length...
- 5/9/2018
- by Clarence Tsui
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The Notebook is covering Cannes with an on-going correspondence between critics Lawrence Garcia and Daniel Kasman.Dear Lawrence,I am very glad you are joining me in Cannes this year to cover the various film festivals—separate and hardly equal—that take place simultaneously in this large resort town each May. The Cannes Film Festival, along with the Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week and Acid festivals, all converge here and now with the main goal being to celebrate moviemaking, but in fact are deeply entrenched in a cultural war to assert the importance, relevance, and power of the art of cinema at time of declining audience awareness and interest, multiplying media rivals, and general distractibility.The official Cannes Film Festival, far and away the most prestigious festival in the world and debatably more important than America’s Academy Awards, was once a relatively unassailable institution—one to criticize, yes, for programming choices or attitude,...
- 5/9/2018
- MUBI
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