The 26th Haifa filmfestival
Happy new year to all my fellow Jews! ♥ :D
here's a list of all of the films I am going to see in this year Haifa international film festival. I do this every year, but this year I did it a bit early and I was of the first ones if not the first to order tickets to every film..
1. Naomi, Israel/France 2010.
Ilan Ben Natan, a 58-year-old Professor, is married to a young woman, Naomi. He is obsessively in love with her. Ilan discovers that his deepest fears have come true - Naomi has a lover. He seeks the advice of his elderly German-born mother, who suggests he leave the matter alone. But Ilan is unable to control himself. He follows his wife and is tortured by what he sees. Ilan confronts the lover and commits a horrible act, the consequences of which will weigh heavily on his conscience.
2. Polytechniche, Canada 2009.
On 6th December 1989, 25-year-old Marc Lepine carried a shotgun into a classroom at Montreal's engineering school, ordered out the male students and opened fire on the remaining nine female students, before going on a shooting spree around the school, finally turning the gun on himself. In sum he killed 14 women and injured ten more, along with four men. His motive, found in the suicide note he left behind, was his anger at 'feminists'
3. Next Floor, Canada 2008 (short film)
During an opulent and luxurious banquet, complete with cavalier servers and valets, eleven pampered guests participate in what appears to be a ritualistic gastronomic carnage. In this absurd and grotesque universe, an unexpected sequence of events undermines the endless symphony of abundance.
4. Hitler in Hollywood, Belgium/France/Italy 2010
If you can't blame Hitler for a twentieth century tragedy - the decline of the European film industry - blame Hollywood, or blame both. If you don't have the facts to prove a conspiracy, make them up. If you can't make your audience angry, at least you can make them laugh.
Hitler in Hollywood reminds us that documentaries are not limited to works of non-fiction. Frederic Sojcher's "inquiry" is a fictional documentary, a mock-umentary. The madcap story follows the trail of an international conspiracy to exterminate the European film industry, and the plotters are the Nazis and Hollywood. "Archival" footage documents studio execs meeting the Fuhrer. The secret agenda, planned in the White House and promoted by a "pro-Nazi clan," is put in the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "Send them our productions, and they'll soon be buying our products." It seems to have worked. The evidence is at your local mall - on the screens and on the shelves. Investigating the global crime is none other than Maria de Medeiros, the Portuguese actress known to most Americans from her role in Pulp Fiction. She's even campier here.
5. Tamara Drewe - Opening film, UK 2010
It is the contemporary tale of a Londoner returning home to the country - and to her past. Tamara, once a shy, ugly teenager, has reinvented herself as a smoldering femme fatale. When she returns to her old village to sell her late mother's house, she is barely recognizable to the locals - or to her old flame Andy - and she kick-starts a trail of envy, lust, scandal and gossip wherever she goes.
(cast includes: Gemma Arterton, Roger Allam, Bill Camp, Dominic Cooper, Luke Evans, Tamsin Greig)
6. Little Rose, Poland 2010
The year 1967. Young and attractive Kamila, a secretary in the Dean's Office at the university, is madly in love with the handsome Roman. What she does not know is that her lover is in fact an officer of the dreaded Security Service and his real line of work is surveillance of dissident intellectuals, considered potential enemies of the communist state. One of his marks is the well-known Jewish writer Adam Warczewski, suspected of clandestine contacts with the Western anti-communist centers. Pressed by his superiors demanding from him immediate results, Roman decides to use his beautiful fiancé as the secret weapon against Warczewski. Moreover, he asks Kamila to become Warczewski's lover...
7. Barney's Version, Canada 2010
Based on Mordecai Richler's prize-winning comic novel, Barney's Version is the warm, wise, and witty story of Barney Panofsky, (Paul Giamatti), a seemingly ordinary man who lives an extraordinary life. Barney's candid confessional spans four decades and two continents, and includes three wives (Rosamund Pike, Minnie Driver, and Rachelle Lefevre), one outrageous father (Dustin Hoffman), and a charmingly dissolute best friend (Scott Speedman). Barney's Version takes us through the many highs - and a few too many lows - of a long and colorful life with an unlikely hero at its center - the unforgettable Barney Panofsky.
8. Moulin Rouge, UK 1952
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has become synonymous with Montmartre - at least the Montmartre around the turn of the 20th century when it was at its apex. Toulouse-Lautrec frequented its circuses, dance halls, nightclubs, and brothels and used them as subject matter. Most notable are his lithographs of the Moulin Rouge and other cabarets that were plastered all over Paris.
John Huston's Moulin Rouge is a color-soaked tale of Toulouse-Lautrec (Jose Ferrer), based on a romanticized novel about the artist's life. Huston explores the discrepancy between the creation of exquisite art and the messy business of living - especially messy for the growth-stunted, alcoholic painter, whose affairs revolve around prostitutes. Traumatized by the scorn and abuse of streetwalker Marie Charlet, he is later too cynical to recognize the true love of another, Myriamme Hayam. As Henri's fame grows, so does his alcoholism
9. Nacidas para sufrir, Spain 2010
Flora lives in a small rural town where she looks after her older relatives: something she has devoted a large part of her life to doing. She has also looked after her three nieces when her own sister died while still young. Now 72 years old, Flora worries that the three women - who left the village many years earlier - will put her in an old folks' home when she can no longer take care of herself. She heads off, accompanied by her simple but well-meaning housekeeper Purita, to change her will - stipulating that the nieces can only have her house if Purita can stay with her until her death.
10. The Light Thief, Kyrgyzstan/Germany/France/Netherlands 2010
They call him Svet-Ake (Mr. Light). The electrician is responsible for bringing more than just light to the people around him. Like moths, everybody is drawn to his kindness: those with short circuits in their electricity, and those with short circuits in their marriage, those who have taken all the power in the city, and those who have given up the will to live. He helps everyone and is everywhere. He is the last link in a huge energetic system and he becomes the binding bridge between the geopolitical problems of post-soviet space and the common people.
11. The Scouting Book for Boys, UK 2009
Having grown up together on a caravan park on the Norfolk coast where their respective parents work, young teenagers David and Emily have become close friends, deeply reliant on each other for distractions and mischief. It's a shock to them both when it's decided that Emily is to be sent away to live with her father, and there's even greater alarm throughout the park community when Emily disappears. David struggles to cope as the situation grows ever more complex.
The original Baden-Powell The Scouting Book for Boys extols the jolly campfire virtues of running, jumping, hidden dens, stalking, detection and concealment. Tom Harper's directorial debut of the same name takes all of the above and subverts them with a series of shocking jolts in this grim tale of unarticulated and unrequited love. The young actor Thomas Turgoose continues to build on the reputation he's gained appearing in Shane Meadows' This Is England and Somerstown.