Rotterdam Opening Film; Paul Schrader Avellino Honor; New UNESCO Paris Film Fest & Clermont Ferrand Confirms Reduced 2024 Edition – Festival Briefs

Melanie Goodfellow
·3 min read
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Rotterdam Film Festival Sets ‘Head South’ As Opening Film

Jonathan Ogilvie’s post-punk, coming-of-age comedy Head South has been announced as the opening picture of the 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), running from January 25 to February 4. The festival has also teased a handful of early selections. They include Indian filmmaker Ishan Shukla’s dystopian, sci-fi animation Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust and U.S. director Billy Woodberry’s biodoc Mário, about African independence activist Mário de Andrade, which will both world premiere. Further confirmations include European premieres for Amanda Kramer’s  So Unreal and Ann Hui’s Elegies as well as Omar Hilal’s Voy! Voy! Voy!, which is Egypt’s Oscar entry this year. The festival will unveil its full line-up on December 18.

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Paul Schrader To Be Feted At Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Avellino Festival

U.S. director and screenwriter Paul Schrader will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 48th Laceno d’Oro International Film Festival, running in the southern Italian town of Avellino from December 3 to 10.  The tribute will include a retrospective and the director will give a masterclass on his career, spanning the screenplays for Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and Raging Bull and more recent directorial credits for The Card Counter and Master Gardener. The Laceno d’Oro festival was founded by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1959 with local intellectuals Camillo Marino and Giacomo D’Onofrio. In recent years it has hosted the likes of Abel Ferrara, Alexander Sokurov, Elia Suleiman, Jia Zhangke, Marco Bellocchio, Olivier Assayas, Amir Naderi, Pedro Costa, Aleksej German Jr., Julio Bressane, Carlos Reygadas, Laurent Cantet, Franco Maresco, Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, Mario Martone, Ken Loach, Miguel Gomes, Stéphane Brizé, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

UNESCO Launches New Cinema Heritage Film Festival

UN culture agency UNESCO is launching a new film festival, bannered Cinema Heritage, which will unfold at the Mac-Mahon and Lincoln cinemas in Paris from November 28 to December 2. Nine films will compete in the inaugural edition: Aamir Bashir’s The Winter Within, Tatiana Huezo’s The Echo, Asimina Proedrou’s Behind The Haystacks, Nikolaj Arcel’s The Promised Land, Giorgo Diritti’s Lubo, Ardak Amirkulov’s The Land Where Winds Stood Still, Aktan Arym Kubat’s This Is What I Remember and Anthony Shim’s Riceboy Sleeps. The event has been co-created by UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay; Sadyk SherNiyaz, Ambassador of the Kyrgyz Republic to France, and producer Kuban Toichubayev. The aim is to preserve the world’s cinematic heritage in line with the values supported by UNESCO. The line-up also features the National Film Day and Heritage sidebars, highlighting works that are considered part of the world’s cinematic heritage, such as Semih Kaplanoglu’s Honey, Siddiq Barmak’s Osama, Asif Rustamov’s Cold as Marble and CUI Zhe’s Dark Forest. Costa-Gavras, Cristian Mungiu and Zhang Yimou will also receive lifetime achievement awards at the closing ceremony.

Clermont-Ferrand Int’l Short Film Fest Confirms Reduced 2024 Edition

France’s Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, the world’s biggest festival devoted to short films, has confirmed it will hold a reduced 2024 edition from February 2 to 10, in the face of a controversial 50% cut in its regional funding earlier this year.  The event said “uncertainty’ around its financial situation had forced it to cut two of its competitions as well as increase ticket prices. “We had to make some choices. They were not easy; and we hope they are not permanent. We’ve been working on them since the spring, thinking about ways to make the 2024 edition possible while maintaining both its meaning and its essence,” the festival said in a statement.  In other Clermont-Ferrand news, rather than a single territory, the festival’s geographical focus in 2024 will be European women, with a showcase of 22 films from 24 female directors representing 25 countries, including the U.K. and Switzerland.

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