Media or no, I have to spend my time perusing the festival guide like anyone else -- so I'm getting started now. Thought I'd mention what look to be a few highlights. Renaissance, pictured above, is an animated, black and white cyberpunk film noir; that's enough right there for me to want to see it. Into Great Silence -- many stills from which are at that last link -- sounds like it will be this year's equivalent to James Benning's 13 Lakes, by the far the most profound experience of last year's festival; meditative cinema for those athletes of perception out there... See here for showtimes... Though it sounds like it's more commercial fare, I'm told by my Korean students that The King and the Clown is a must-see, though I have not seen it yet myself (the Korean title actually is closer to "The King's Man" and it was a huge hit over there); certainly there is some very exciting cinema coming out of Korea of late, so I'm in. In terms of epic-scale cinema, two other films sound like they're going to stand out -- Alan Franey, at the press conference, drew attention to the controversial Egyptian film The Yacoubian Building, which does sound fascinating... and then there's the Jacques Rivette study of the '60's, Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, which, in its longest version -- which will screen here, introduced by the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum -- runs something like 12 hours. There are many, many more films to choose from (there's even a new adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story, "So Much Water So Close to Home," which was also treated in Altman's Short Cuts, tho' not entirely successfully, I thought. That film is called Jindabyne and stars Gabriel Byrne...). I cannot do anything like justice to the variety of films to screen. More of my writing on upcoming films can be found in the September and October issues of Discorder, of course, under the Cinema Aspirant byline. Meantime... the catalogues are on sale, or if you'd rather do it on the cheap, all the films are now listed online!
See you at the festival!
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