by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
HUNGER, multiple-award-winning film debut of the famous visual artist Steve McQueen, has won the Grand Prix (20 000 €) of NEW HORIZONS International Competition. The festival's highest honour was awarded by the international jury.
HUNGER also took home the Film Critics Award (10 000 €). The film, which won the Camera D'Or prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, tells the chilling tale of Irish Republic...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
When the film history of our era is written for future scholars to examine, one of the interesting aspects will be the flowering of non-fiction film. Documentaries, once relegated to television or educational settings, have broken through to the theatrical box office. While not every film can be “Fahrenheit 911” (which topped $200 million at the box office) documentaries have been faring we...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
“Night And The City” (1950) is a neglected film noir masterpiece by the American-born director Jules Dassin. The film, a cult favorite among cinephiles but largely unknown by the public, has taken on renewed currency as the inspiration for “Broken Embraces”, the latest film from Spanish superstar director Pedro Almodóvar, which screened at the ERA New Horizons International Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. Almodovar himself...
Sebastian Lelio (Chilean director)
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
The hardest working band of professionals at this year’s ERA New Horizons International Film Festival, which closes today in Wroclaw, Poland, are undoubtedly the juries that have been viewing films from all over the world in the main Festival competitions. As the Festival headed into its final days, the juries moved from viewing and evaluating the films into the rigors of that favorite bl...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
Wroclaw, Poland-----Canada’s reputation often is overwhelmed by the sheer size and influence of its neighbor to the south. While Canadians may seem interchangeable with Americans to outsiders, the differences are particularly clear in the Canadian film industry, where active governmental subsidy systems have nurtured the careers of such film artists as David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Norman Jewison, Robert Lepage, and Guy Maddin,...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
The Swedish master filmmaker Jan Troell is the subject of a major retrospective tribute at this year’s ERA New Horizons International Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. The 78-year-old film auteur has amassed a string of film jewels over a career that stretches back five decades. Many of these gems, including his latest masterpiece “Everlasting Moments”, nominated this past year for the Oscar, will be screened.
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by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor One cannot contemplate the accomplishments of Polish cinema without acknowledging the singular contribution of Krzysztof Zanussi, who is the subject of a retrospective tribute at the ERA New Horizons International Film Festival, taking place in Wroclaw, Poland this week. Not only will the master director’s best-known films be screened, but the Festival programmers have unearthed early short films and television works that have not been seen i...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
This year’s crop of contenders in the New Polish Films competition at the ERA New Horizons International Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland continue the unbroken chain of film artists who are acknowledged as world-class masters of their craft. This year’s program is especially strong, with a forceful representation of emerging women talents. Malgorzala Szumowska brings a masterful directorial hand and an intellectual discipline ...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
The Polish-Swedish Film Meetings introduced a number of exciting new projects from both Polish and Swedish producers. In networking meetings with producers, sales agents and financiers, these projects in development will undoubtedly profit from the atmosphere of cooperation that has been initiated between the Era New Horizons International Film Festival and the Swedish Film Institute.
“Callgirl“ is a ...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
First, a little history……..In the 17th century, Sweden waged a series of invasions against Poland which included a five year occupation known in Polish as Potop Szwedzki, "the Swedish Deluge”. The Poles successfully drove back the Swedish invaders in 1656 and celebrate with a holiday to commemorate their victory. Well, the Swedish are back, albeit under more friendly circumstances, for the l...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
The ERA New Horizons International Film Festival is shining the spotlight on contemporary Swedish cinema in the program Kino Szwecji: Cinema of Sweden, which is introducing Polish audiences to a new generation of film talents.
“Darling” is a survey of the empty consumerist lives of a group of young women in contemporary Stockholm, that won the Nordic Film Prize at the Goteborg Film Festival for its writer/director/cinem...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
The ERA New Horizons International Film Festival has a reverence for “film as art”. This is indeed the focus of the FILMS ABOUT ART International Competition, which will present 14 feature documentaries from around the world. An international jury will award a prize of 10,000 euros, with a guarantee of distribution in Poland.
Peter Greenaway, who will be at the Festival tomorrow to deliver a lecture on film and...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
Peter Greenaway, one of the most important contemporary film stylists, arrived today as a guest of the ERA New Horizons International Film Festival. The director will attend the Polish premiere of his latest film REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE!, presented within the FILMS ABOUT ART International Competition on 26 and 27 July. The documentary meditation on the influences of Rembrandt on modern-day filmmaking had its world premiere at ...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE, an award-winning French Canadian film, opened the outdoor screening series on the central Market Square in Wroclaw for the 9th edition of the Era New Horizons International Film Festival.
The film is the touching tale of an Inuit man who is relocated to Quebec City in the 1950s to cure his tuberculosis, provoking a culture clash between the native sensibilities and the Anglo-Saxon world view....
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
Guy Maddin, the Canadian filmmaker who is the subject of a Festival Retrospective at the 9th edition of the ERA New Horizons International Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. His magnum opus BRAIN UPON THE BRAIN was presented last evening at the Wroclaw Opera House, with a chamber orchestra, foley sound artists and a narrator. Living and working in his beloved Winnipeg, an industrial city in the Canadian heartlan...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
It takes a filmmaker of great daring to successfully combine genres and create a hybrid that is unique and exhilarating. Such is the case with Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, the 47-year-old Thai film director and screenwriter, who is part of a Thai new wave that includes such auteur names Wisit Sasanatieng and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His singular films have made him one of the more intriguing film stylists of the moment. Pen-Ek beg...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
Michael Haneke relishes his reputation as one of the controversial directors working in the film arts. He is a provocateur with a mission to shock audiences out of their complacency and contemplate the good, bad and ugly of modern society. “My films are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false answers……for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus”, he stated in a recent inter...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
The avant-gardist Lydia Lunch, whose varied career has ranged from punk music to indie film acting, will kick off the music events of the Festival at a special concert following the Opening Night Gala screening of THE WHITE RIBBON, the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner by Austrian auteur Michael Haneke.
Lunch has been called “one of the most influential performers of the age” by the Boston Phoenix newspaper....
by Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor
To the untrained ear, Wroclaw, Poland, the site of the ERA NEW HORIZONS International Film Festival, is generally mispronounced as "ro-claw". I've been learning to offer the correct pronunciation, which is more like "rotz-vav". The former German city known as Breslau has been on-again and off-again part of the Polish empire for centuries. It is now a major economic and cultural center for the modern state of Polan...
HELEN (UK)
by Sandy Mandelberger, Festival Dailies Editor
The heart of the 9th edition of the ERA NEW HORIZONS International Film Festival, which begins its 12 day marathon of film premieres, special events and music concerts on July 23, is the NEW HORIZONS International Competition. This year’s program includes a selection of 14 premieres of a truly international roster of filmmakers, covering a mix of genres and styles to offer a survey of the best in international c...
by Sandy Mandelberger, Festival Dailies Editor
THE WHITE RIBBON, the celebrated Austrian film by auteur Michael Haneke, which recently won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, will open the 9th edition of the ERA NEW HORIZONS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, to be held in the city of Wroclaw, Poland from 23 July to 2 August. The film, which also won the prestigious FIPRESCI International Critics Prize in Cannes, is set in a small town in northern Germany just before World War...
