MWFF 2016: Tatara Samurai Reception

Tatara Samurai Special Event

August 29, 2016

The Executive Produce of the Japanese film Tatara Samurai EXALE HIRO and the LDH Inc. agency participated in the Montreal World Film Festival presentation of the film. There was a pre-screening of the film photo session at the Imperial Theatre with the film's director Yoshinari Nishikori and the two actors Sho Aoyagi and Naoki Kobayashi, and the onstage film presentation and discussion before and after the screening of the film.

After the screening, a special reception was organized by the film's Producer where the production team celebrated and interacted with those present. The two actors were exceptionally friendly and ready to answer any questions and listen to the comments, as well as to grant all the picture taking requests. It was a great evening!

You can read more about the Tatara Samurai  film here. The film won the Best Artistic Contribution prize at the Montreal World Film Festival 2016.

MWFF 2016: Tatara Samurai

TATARA SAMURAI

WORLD COMPETITION

DIRECTOR: Yoshinari Nishikori

SCRIPT: Yoshinari Nishikori

LEAD ACTOR: Sho Aoyagi

COUNTRY: Japon; 135 min.
LANGUAGE: Japanese, English subtitles

Official Synopses:

"When the Amago samurai withdraw their protection of the village of Tatara, famous for their manufacture of the legendary swords, the younger generation - erroneously - believe that guns will suffice."

The film's story line is set in the 16 century, during the Japan's Age of Wars, a time of social upheaval and constant military conflict. The guns are introduced to Japan, and the era of the Lord Oda's supremacy comes to the end. The Samirai lords begin to covet the guns and battle over the numbers of guns they posses.

There is a small village in the mountains making steel from ancient times. Their steel is made by Tatara-buki, a secret ancient method known as supreme steel. Tatara does not rust for a thousand years. Since the best Japanese swards cannot be made without Tatara steel, everybody, not only swordsmiths, but also traders associated with Samurais, strive to get this steel. With the introduction of the guns, the traders further attempt to usurp the steel production into their hands.

Gosuke, the leading character in the film, is the eldest son of the Murage Family, the only person in the village to inherit the Tatara steel making production. He has the obligation to guard the Tatara-buki steel making method inherited from his ancestors. In order to guard the village, he concentrates on martial arts training. He also decides to become a samurai to advance his fighting and defence skills, but gets disillusioned when he sees the power of the guns. The young village men then decide to protect their village with the guns, which leads to tragic results.

The film has a complex story line which weaves through the Japanese realities and shows the horrors and devastation caused by the embattling social strata. The film's director, who is also its script writer, stated that he drew a parallel in this film between the old era fighting to control the steel production and the issues behind the global oil demand in our days. The fighting will never solve the problems we face today. The peace has to be achieved without drawing out the sword.

The film shows beautiful and very peaceful Japanese sceneries which contrast with the aggression of the warring men. The cast is superb, and the film touches on some core issues of our collective existence.

This film won the Best Artistic Contribution prize at the Montreal World Film Festival 2016.

MWFF 2016: Contribution

CONTRIBUTION

WORLD COMPETITION

DIRECTOR: Sergey Snezhkin
COUNTRY: Russia; 100 min
LANGUAGE: Russian, English subtitles

Loosely based on the story by Leonid Yuzefovich "Contribution".


Official Synopses:

"In Siberia, in 1918, an investigator of the Red Army sentenced to death must find a precious diamond that has mysteriously disappeared for a chance to be pardoned by the White Army."

This is a suspense film set in a historical period of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War. It takes place in 1918 in the city of Perm as it had just been captured from the Reds by the Central Siberian White Guard Corps under the command of a young General Anatoly Pepelyaev. His army is exhausted, it has no supplies, ammunition, uniforms, or food. To resolve the problem, the General invites the Perm merchants to ask them for the money for his army. Each is ordered to provide a specific sum in gold, refereed to (in a psychological twist of the meaning) as a contribution rather than an expropriation.

A rich widow Chagin brings her "contribution", an expensive 140 carats diamond. The next day, the diamond mysteriously disappears. In order to solve this mystery, the Red Army investigator Andrei Murzin, condemned to death by a firing squad, is asked to find the precious stone by a certain hour in exchange for a pardon. 

The film's suspense line, and the type of an arrangement where all the suspects are kept together at the same location for questioning, resemble Agatha Crystie stories, this likeness further intensified by the lavish palace-like setting and some similar period costumes. But then the similarities part. This film's plot also shows some horrors and excesses of the Russian Civil war and the senseless ideas-based imprisonment and executions.

The filmography uses brownish, at times black and white tones, especially at the beginning of the film, as to resemble old, faded photographs. This also helps to create the sense of the historical past, and a certain mood of the old-era memory reflections. The plot has a few intriguing twists and a keen sense of suspense that many spectators will find compelling to watch.

MWFF 2016: The Bear Skin

THE BEAR SKIN / LA PELLE DELL’ORSO
WORLD COMPETITION

DIRECTOR: Marco Segato
COUNTRY: Italy; 86 min.
LANGUAGE: Italian with French subtitles

Based on the book by Matteo Righetto  La pelle dell'orso.


Official Synopses:

"In a village in the Dolomites, a father and his young son have become near strangers, seldom talking to each other. It takes an excursion into the woods to hunt a bear, that erodes the wall of silence."

The spectacular landscape of the Italian Dolomite mountains makes a breathtaking backdrop in this film. The spirit of the mountains, their raggedness, power, and danger outline the main characters of this film and the drama they go through.

The main plot centres on the relationship between a father, who lives in a mountainous village, and his son Domenico, in his early teens. Their relationship is defined by the past and the present. Past circumstances led to Domenico's mother death when he was still a small child, and in the present, there is father's alcohol addiction and tensions between him and other villagers. The father-son relationship is silent, abrupt and cold on the father's side. And though Domenico faces the absence both of his mother and of father's love, the spectators are shown small but revealing of his concern and carrying for his rejecting father. 

One day, a bear known as "The Devil - El Diàol”, named so for the gigantic size, ferocity and aggression, attacks Domenico's uncle barn and kills a cow. Another villager looses a goat. This is when Domenico's father shows his true character, rises to the challenge, and states he will kill the bear. A bet is made, and a local entrepreneur promises a large sum of money if he brings him back the bear's skin.  

For Domenico's father, it is a way to gain the villagers' respect. For Domenico's uncle who hands Domenico a hunting rifle without attempting to dissuade his underage nephew from going alone into the ragged mountains, this represents a bigger assurance to get the promised replacement cow if the bet is won. The only person who acts from pure love for his father without any ulterior motives is Domenico.

This trip becomes for Domenico the rights of passage to become a man. This ritual, common to the indigenous people and those who live close to earth, is completely forgotten in the civilized world of the city dwellers. Yet Domenico's father understands this instinctively, and this is why he does sent his son back to the village when they finally meet.

This is a very powerful film, touching on the depths of the human nature. The mountain shots are spectacular, and the scenes are choreographed visually and played by the actors with the most of skill.
  

MWFF 2016: Jury

Montreal World Film Festival
40th Edition
August 25 - Septemeber 5, 2016

JURY

Members of two MWFFJury teams were revealed to the public today.

WORLD COMPETITION JURY

SERGEI BODROV

Born in Khabarovsk, Russia in 1948, Sergei Bodrov studied screenwriting before becoming a journalist. His work for the satirical magazine, Crocodile, won him numerous literary prizes. After a lengthy career as a screenwriter, he made his directorial debut in 1985 with Sweet Dreams in the Grass, which won a silver prize at the Moscow Festival. He has since directed I Hate You (1986), Non-Professionals (1987), Freedom is Paradise (Grand Prize of the Americas at the 1989 MWFF), The Gambler (1990), The Man in Red Square (1991), I Wanted to See Angels (1992), White King, Red Queen (1992), Prisoners of the Mountains (1996), which was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Nomad (2004), Mongol (2007), also nominated for an Oscar. His last film, The Seventh Son, with Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander,  was released in 2015. He is currently working on projects in Germany and China.

CLAUDE GAGNON

 Born in Sainte-Hyacinthe, Quebec, in 1949, Claude Gagnon spent a decade in Japan in the 1970s. With his first feature, Keiko (1978), he became the first and only foreigner to receive the Japanese Film Directors' Association best film award. Returning to Canada in the 1980s, Gagnon and his wife Yuri Yoshimura founded their own company, Aska Film. With The Kid Brother (1986), he won the MWFF's Grand Prize of the Americas as well as prizes at Berlin and other international festivals. Among his other films: Larose ,Pierrot et la Luce (1981), Pale Face (1985, winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the MWFF), The Pianist (1991), Pour l’amour de Thomas (1994), Revival Blues (2003),Kamataki (2005), winner of five prizes at the MWFF, and Karakara (2012), shown at the 36th MWFF and winner of the Prix de la Cinémathèque québécoise as  audience favourite and honoured for its window to the world.

 GORAN MARKOVIC

Belgrade-born Goran Marcovic studied film directing in Prague at FAMU and then started working for television, directing documentaries and over fifty TV movies. His first theatrical feature was the critically acclaimed and financially successful Special Education (1976). Most of his following features have been screened in various Yugoslavian and international festivals. One of the best known of the “Czech School” of Yugoslav directors, he has been teaching in the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade since 1979. Besides making movies, Markovic staged two plays and wrote three more and he also directs for the theatre. His films have screened in festivals around the world and won numerous prizes. Selected filmography: Special Education (1976), National Class (1978), Jack of All Trades (1980), Variola Vera(1981), Taiwan Canasta (1985), Déjà Vu (1987), Meeting Point (1989), Tito and Me (1992), Burlesque Tragedy (1995), Serbia Year Zero (2001), The Cordon (2003), winner of MWFF’s Grand Prize, andFalsifier (2013).

Donald Ranvaud

Anglo-Italian with a French name and a marked tendency toward the Brazilian, Donald Ranvaud taught at universities ofWarwickand East Anglia, where he became chairman of the film department. He founded the independent film magazine Frameworkin 1975, which he edited until 1988 and freelanced for MFB, Sight and Sound, The Guardian, La Repubblica, Les Cahiers du Cinéma,American Film as well published books on Italian cinema. During this period he directed documentary items for Channel Four and RAI Uno, including portraits of Paul Schrader, Raul Ruiz, Cui Jian, Laurie Anderson and David Mamet as well as co-directed a feature, Visioni Private. In 1989 he helped start the European SCRIPTFund. Since then he embarked on production full time, with directors and in countries before they become fashionable, particularly China: 1989-1993(especially Life on a Stringand including Farewell my Concubine); and Latin America, 1994 - today(Central do Brasil, Familia Rodante, Xango, Lavoura Arcaica, Babilonia 2000, Madame Sata, Cidade de Deus, nominated for four Oscars in 2004). Most recently he was executive producer on The Constant Gardener by Fernando Meirelles.

ELISEO SUBIELA

Born in Buenos Aires in 1944, Eliseo Subiela graduated in philosophy and literature and studied film at La Plata. He made his first short in 1963, Un largo silencio, apprenticed with several established Argentinian directors and worked for many years in commercials before making his debut in features with La conquista del Paradiso (1981). His 1986 feature, Man Facing Southeast brought him to international attention and he followed that with Last Images of the Shipwreck (1989), which won best script at the MWFF,  and The Dark Side of the Heart  (1992, Grand Prize of the Americas at the MWFF). Among his other films: Don’t Die Without Telling Me Where You’re Going (1995, People’s Choice at the MWFF), Wake Up Love (1996), Little Miracles (1997), The Adventures of God (2000),The Dark Side of the Heart 2 (2001), Lifting de corazon (2005), El Resultado del amor (2007). He is was named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1990.

LEE TAMAHORI

Born to a Maori father and a European mother, Lee Tamahori began his career as a commercial artist and photographer, then joined the New Zealand film industry in the late 1970s as a boom operator. Tamahori had directed a number of shorter dramas for television before he made his feature film debut in 1994 with Once Were Warriors, a gritty depiction of a violent Maori family. The film had had problems finding funding, but it won the Grand Prize of the Americas at the Montreal World Film Festival, went on to break box office records in New Zealand. Overseas it sold to many countries and won rave reviews. Tamahori moved to Hollywood and directed the period thriller Mulholland Falls(1996), followed by the successful wilderness film The Edge (1997), Along Came a Spider (2001) and the Bond thriller Die Another Day (2002). Among his subsequent films:  XXX: State of the Union  (2005) starring Ice Cube and Willem Dafoe, Next (2007) and The Devil's Double (2011). In 2015 Tamahori directed Mahana, his first feature made in New Zealand since Once Were Warriors.

JURY OF THE FIRST FEATURE PRIZE

MARIANGIOLA CASTROVILLI

 Mariangiola Castrovilli was born in Rome where she attended the International University of Journalism Pro Deo, now Luiss. She worked for RAI as a journalist and programmer- director, and for the newspaper Il Giornale, then contributed to leading European newspapers. A member of FIPRESCI, she served on numerous juries including  those at Karlovy Vary and San Sebastian. She is a member of the National Union of Italian Film Journalists, which each year awards the Nastri D'Argento, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar. In the 1980s she was the first woman in the world to fly at twice the speed of sound for direct radio and television on the Aermacchi MB-339PAN and she did all the stunts of the Frecce Tricolori, the Italian Air Force aerobatic team. Auto legend Enzo Ferrari invited her to ride in his new Ferrari 40 and she reached 324 km/hr on the track in Maranello, always live on air. These exploits earned her the title: “The butterfly with iron wings”.

MAURIE ALIOFF

Montreal film critic Maurie Alioff writes about movies for publications off and online. He is also a screenwriter collaborating on a documentary featuring Bob Marley’s granddaughter that is now filming.  A longtime faculty member of the English Department at Vanier College, Alioff is researching and developing other Jamaica-related projects, including a magical-realist crime film drawing on stories he hears on the island. He has written for radio and television, programmed films for the Just for Laughs comedy festival, taught screenwriting, and been a contributing editor for various magazines. Alioff’s articles have appeared in POV Magazine, Canadian Cinematographer, Take One, Salon l.l,CTVM.Info, northernstars.ca, The New York Times, and many other publications.

Pierre-Henri Deleau

Pierre-Henri Deleau began his career as an assistant director to Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Pierre Kast and then as a director in educational television. He directed a short, Virginie ou la double rupture, in 1969.  He is the co-founder of the FILMOBLIC production house which produced or co-produced films by Hugo Santiago, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean-François Dion, Claude Miller, Edouardo de Gregorio and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. In 1969, he co-founded the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival and was its director for three decades. In 1996, he co-founded the Forum of European Cinema in Strasbourg, and in 1987 co-founded FIPA  and directed the event in Cannes, Nice and Biarritz until 2009. That year he became member of the selection committee for first works at the European Film Academy. As director of the Cinéma and Littérature collection of Les Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, he has published books on Michelangelo Antonioni, Groucho Marx, Andrezj Zulawski and Yilmäz Güney, among others.

Visit the Montreal World Film Festival's website for more information, program and film scheduling.

Festival information courtesy of  MWFF.

Montreal First Peoples Film Festival 2016

100 TIKIs film still

Présence autochtone

Montreal First Peoples Film Festival
26th Edition

CELEBRATING FIRST NATIONS CULTURE
August 3 -10, 2016

Yesterday was the opening night of the Montreal's annual Présence autochtone festival. The festival comprises of several venues, one of which is the film festival.

The festival opened with the film 100 TIKIs (see a still from the film above). It was introduced by the creator of the film Dan Taulapapa McMullin, an artist based in Hudson, New York. He is a native Samoan, born and raised on American Samoa. As he told the audience, one day the American officials arrived on the island and started distributing television boxes to the local schools, including the one where he was a pupil. The TV sets were placed in classrooms as an “Education Tool” but the education proper did not last long, being replaced by Hollywood films. No other people on the island had a television set at the time.

100 TIKIs represents a collage based on mainly decades-old images, most of them created by Hollywood. It shows how ridiculous was the infringement of the Hollywood standards into the native cultural expression and values, and how disruptive. Beneath the rapidly changing imagery, one senses a rising wave of anger for the demeaning of the Pacific Island’s native culture and their ways of life.

100 TIKIs interrogates the colonialism of the Pacific islands' peoples from Hawaii to West Papua, through the examination of tiki kitsch, tourism, militarism, sexism and the subjugation of indigenous peoples and their culture. It reveals a vulgarization process that took place, where common values became mundane, trivial and even inhuman.

Incidentally, and it appears quite unintentionally, the film also exposes in a short clip how Hollywood managed to demean and sexualize a highly intelligent, actually a brilliant woman like Hedy Lamarr, who discovered and patented the cornstone physical principle of Frequency Hoping, used both for military and internet electronic signal guidance and encryption still to this day. She gifted her patent to the USA government. Had she not done so, and had she been renewing her patent, her descendants would have now possessed, I read in an article several years ago, a fortune larger than that of Bill Gates.

The film was conceived as a 45 min. loop. This is why it ends quite unexpectedly, without any proper cinematic ending and credits.

To find out more about the Montreal First Peoples Film Festival and to consult the film scheduling, visit the Présence autochtone festival website.

You can also read more about the festival here.

Animaze 2016

ANIMAZE - 3rd Edition

August 18 - 21, 2016

Animaze is an international film festival and conference exploring the world of animation in all its diversity. This August, film makers and animation professionals from over 40 countries will be gathering in Montreal for this annual event. 

ANIMAZE's Vision and Mission statement:

"To unite and converge animation film, gaming, digital arts and related industries in the vibrant international city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada."

ANIMAZE's festival major venues:

•Screenings of over 160 films at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,

• Free outdoor screenings on Boulevard St-Laurent August 19 and 20.

• An outdoor 360º dome courtesy of the Animaze partner Fulldome.pro and the Virtual Reality Cinema.

•The Animaze Industry Conference with panels, speakers, and the networking opportunities.

• An exhibition hall.

• A job fair, an event where students, schools and employers can connect and find each other, see here.

The film festival supports many genres, from children short animation films, to full length animation productions, as well as works from the gaming and the virtual reality creation community. The attending audience will for certain discover the works that will correspond to the individual tastes and interests.

For more information, program, and scheduling visit the Animaze website.