Santa Fe Fest packed with Oscar hopefuls

THE SANTA FE FILM FESTIVAL 2004
December 1 – December 5


The Santa Fe Film Festival, which opens Wednesday, is preserving its reputation as an Oscar bellwether.

Seven titles that played in last year’s Santa Fe Film Festival subsequently netted Oscar honors, collecting a grand total of 16 nominations among them.

This season’s Oscar finalists won’t be announced until Jan. 25, 2005, with the awards ceremony following on Feb. 27.

But two documentary features in this week’s Santa Fe Film Festival have made the short-list of 12 hopefuls from which the five finalists will be drawn. In addition, the short-list – announced Nov. 17 by the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- encompasses two other documentary features presented earlier by the festival.

Screening in the festival will be Jessica Yu’s In the Realms of the Unreal, a look at the life of outsider artist and janitor Henry Darger, and Tell Them Who You Are, filmmaker Mark Wexler’s examination of his relationship with his father, Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Bound for Glory).

In prior benefit galas, the Santa Fe Film Festival showcased a pair of other documentaries from among the dozen hopefuls -- Paola di Florio’s Home of the Brave, about slain civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, and Born Into Brothels, Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s look into the harsh lives of children of Calcutta prostitutes.

In addition to these standout documentaries, the 2004 edition of the festival has landed three foreign-language titles officially submitted by their respective nations for Oscar consideration. Those hopefuls include:

Christophe Barratier’s Les Choristes, relating a teacher’s inspirational efforts to form a boys’ choir at an oppressive boarding school, the official foreign-language entry from France.
Nimrod Antal’s Kontroll, a boldly stylized thriller set entirely underground in an East European subway system, the official selection from Hungary.
And, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows, the story of four children banding together after being abandoned by their mother, the official selection from Japan.
Oscar buzz also is building for several of the blockbusters that headline the 2004 Santa Fe Film Festival slate. Booked into the festival’s anchor venue, the historic Lensic Performing Arts Center, are Michael Radford’s expertly crafted rendition of the Shakespeare classic The Merchant of Venice and Kevin Spacey’s homage to Bobby Darin Beyond the Sea.

The festival also offers an advance glimpse of Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon, reuniting Sean Penn and Naomi Watts from last year’s favorite 21 Grams, and the French import A Very Long Engagement, bringing together the writer/director (Jean-Pierre Jeunet) and star (Audrey Tautou) from Amelie.

Among its 88 offerings, the festival has secured the U.S. premieres of new works by Alfonso Arau (Like Water for Chocolate) and Thomas Riedelsheimer (Rivers and Tides). Arau, who will receive the festival’s Luminaria Award for lifetime achievement, will unveil his epic Zapata, while Riedelsheimer will be represented by Touch the Sound, a documentary profile of percussionist Evelyn Glennie.

Other festival highlights include screenings of the past two winners of the Un Certain Regard award from the Cannes Film Festival – Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaade, this year’s winner from Senegal, and Marco Tullio Giordana’s stunning, 400-minute epic, Best of Youth, from Italy, the 2003 winner.

Now celebrating its fifth season, the Santa Fe Film Festival runs Dec. 1-5. Joining Arau as a Luminaria winner for 2004 will be the versatile, ever-imaginative actor Alan Arkin.