All the News.
All the News.
After announcing that the 8th Beijing Independent Documentary Film Festival has been cancelled, the festival’s artistic director, Zhu Rikun, has reportedly resigned from the festival’s foundation, closed his production house, Fanhall Studio, and fled the Chinese capital.
The 84th Academy Awards will be presented on Sunday, February 26, 2012, Academy President Tom Sherak announced yesterday.
Rio was the the box office winner last weekend – both domestically and internationally; with Tyler Perry, Madea’s Big Happy Family coming in at second place. Holdouts including the documentary African Cats, Soul Surfer, and Insidious performed well enough to remain in the top 10.
Five finalists, selected from 52 entries from 32 countries, will advance in the Foreign Student Film category in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 38th Annual Student Academy Awards competition. Up to three winners, to be selected from this group, will be brought to Los Angeles to join U.S.-based Student Academy Award® winners for a week of industry-related activities and social events that will culminate in the awards ceremony on Saturday, June 11, at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.
“Underwater Love,” a Japanese film directed by Shinji Imaoka, is the most obscurely sweet and original soft-core porn musical I have ever seen. Actually, come to think of it, this would be my first soft-core porn musical, and for what it was intended to be, I appreciated this film from beginning to end. The story itself merges Japanese fantasy with reality. It centers around Asuka, who is a thirty-something fish factory worker in a small Japanese village outside of Tokyo. She is engaged to her boss Taki, and seems to live a more than ordinary lifestyle with little variance or excitement. One day she sees a Kappa, a mythological water creature that is part human. It is her friend Aoki, who long ago drowned at the age of 17. He has mysteriously come back into her life as a tortoiseshell, beak faced creature. It is amusing to see this Kappa so accepted and integrated into normal human life. We also travel with him and Asuka to the fantastical world he inhabits as a mythological Kappa.
Mark Cuban is reportedly exploring a possible sale of his movie theater group Landmark Theatres and independent film distributor Magnolia Pictures by putting them up for auction. In an email to The Hollywood Reporter, he emphasized that he still feels the companies are “a great business” and thatt he is “just testing the market.”
Tim Hetherington, the director and producer of the Oscar-nominated Afghan war documentary “Restrepo,” was killed while covering the Libyan conflict in the city of Misurata on Wednesday, and three photographers working beside him were wounded, one fatally, when they came under fire. He was 40 years.
52 entries from 32 countries, along with 523 entries from students representing 136 U.S. colleges and universities, are in competition for the 2011 Student Academy Awards. The competition – now in its 38th year – will culminate in the awards presentation, which will include screenings of the winning films, on Saturday, June 11, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
The independent film Open Gate has secured a limited theatrical engagement and will run at the Grand 14 in Conroe, Texas starting April 29th, 2011. The film looks to the rodeo market for its fan base.
Rentrak announced the top ten DVD sales and rentals for last week. Black Swan is still riding its Oscar buzz as it made both the DVD sales and rentals list.
Six film projects, selected from this year’s pool of 121 applicants, will receive financial and creative support from the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) Sloan Filmmaker Fund. The projects will be awarded a total of $140,000 and will be recognized at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival (April 20- May 1, 2011).
