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Stephen Frears
Not unlike Mike Hodges, the British director honoured in the fourth edition of the Morelia Film Festival, Stephen Frears is a marvellously modest filmmaker -not in his achievements (he’s undoubtedly one of the most successful and most highly regarded directors to have emerged from Britain in the last few decades), but in his attitude to his own particular role in the filmmaking process. It’s unlikely that Frears would ever claim the lofty title of auteur; indeed, he frequently alludes to his dependence on good writers, and has an engaging tendency, when asked what he himself brings to a movie, to shrug as if faintly bewildered and embarrassed by the question, and offer a smiling but somewhat helpless ‘I’m not really sure.’
Actually, of course, he knows exactly what he brings to any given movie, and he can be very eloquent about it; it’s not only the students he has taught at Britain’s National Film and Television School who testify to his inspirational skills. But the truth is that Frears is in many ways a profoundly pragmatic filmmaker, and prefers not to wax too artily about what he does, which for him seems to consist mainly of finding solutions to certain fundamental problems to do with telling a story, understanding characters, and getting to know a place, an era, a community.
And that’s why his best films ring so true. It matters little whether they were made for television (and a great deal of his work was originally made for the BBC or Channel Four) or specifically for the movie palaces. What counts for Frears is not some grand overriding vision of Life or The World or The Cosmos; it’s about getting things right in terms of characters’ actions, thoughts, emotions and their relationship to the world around them. That of course is one reason why The Queen is such a fine achievement. No one outside of Her Majesty’s immediate circle has a clue what Elizabeth Windsor and her family are really like – we haven’t, writer Peter Morgan hasn’t an Stephen Frears certainly hasn’t. Nevertheless, working from Morgan’s script with the help of some very talented actors, the director manages to convey very plausibly indeed not only what various royals might be like as human individuals but also – and this is probably more difficult and definitely more important in terms of artistic achievement – what life might be like for them; after all, these people are extremely remote from the experience of everyday existence as most of us know it.
But there’s actually more to The Queen than that. Without ever underlining the point, Frears turns a small, very specific story about a brief period in the lives of some very famous, very rich Brits into a subtle meditation on certain worrying developments in the modern world: not just our obsession with celebrity, but the social, political and ethical consequences of our ever-increasing dependence on television images and tabloid-style stories. Among many other things, The Queen hints that some people – prominent politicians included, perhaps – no longer distinguish too clearly between appearance and reality; some of us even seem to believe that we ‘know’ and ‘love’ total strangers, like Diana. There’s an increasingly widespread inability or reluctance to discern the reality or falsehood not only of what’s out there in front of us – what we can see and hear – but also of what’s inside us: what we feel. Should we still put faith in our own emotions, when they can so easily fall prey to media manipulation? That’s quite a complex, thorny topic for a modest little movie to deal with.
I’m not claiming that Frears is proffering some heavyduty philosophical statement or moral message; rather that his film provides us with a great deal to think about even as we’re laughing at jokes and gaining a few insights into what it might mean to have been an outsider ever since one’s royal birth. The Queen finds Frears on peak form, but its many virtues are also characteristic of his ability to take a simple subject and develop it into something that’s thematically rich and resonant – at the same time as telling a truly engrossing story.
The films in this small tribute are the product of a rare and special talent –for doing something that’s actually very complicated, and making it look easy.
GEOFF ANDREW
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Born in Philadelphia (1922), he grew up in New York and Philadelphia. He first appeared on stage in high school, and also worked as a radio announcer. He became a soldier in 1943/44 and served as an infantryman during the battle of Ardennes. In 1945/46 he became a member of an army theatre troupe performing in Wiesbaden and Paris. He took up studies in philosophy and psychology at the avant-garde Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1947, later continuing his studies in Perugia and Florence. He was a television intern in 1951, and made his debut as a television director in 1953. He married the actress Peggy Maurer in 1955 and in 1958 he made his cinematic debut with the Gore Vidal adaptation The Left-Handed Gun. He was an advisor to John F. Kennedy prior to his television debates with Richard Nixon. He received his first Oscar nomination for Best Director in 1963 for The Miracle Worker. Further nominations for Bonnie and Clyde (1968) and Alice’s Restaurant (1970) followed. These two works and Little Big Man are among some of Penn’s most successful films. Since his Broadway debut in 1959, Penn has often worked as a stage director. He was involved in the Actor’s Studio in the 1970s becoming its president in the early 90s. He lives in New York.
*Taken from the 57 Berlinale Catalog
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Filmography:
100 Centre Street TV-Series, (2001)
Inside TV-Film (1996)
Lumiere et Compagnie (1995)
The Portrait TV-Film (1993)
Penn and Teller Get Killed (1989)
Dead of Winter (1987)
Target (1985)
Four Friends (1981)
The Missouri Breaks (1976)
Night Moves (1975)
Visions of Eight (1973)
Little Big Man (1970)
Alice’s Restaurant (1969)
Flesh and Blood TV-Film (1968)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The Chase (1966)
Mickey One (1965)
The Miracle Worker (1962)
The left-Handed Gun (1958)
Playhouse 90 (1957)
Goodyear Television Play House TV-Series (1955)
Producers Showcase TV-Series (1954),
Philco Television Play House TV-Series (1953)
Gulf Playhouse TV-Series (1953)
Philco Television Play House TV-Series (1948)
Arthur Penn
During the 60’s and 70’s Arthur Penn was a key figure in American cinema. This was a time when those in favor of the medium were beginning to leave the beaten track in search of new subjects and ways of portraying them. Penn was one of the protagonists of this new cinematic departure; his films were to become a chronicle of another America. Penn was interested in alternatives to middle-class existence: gangs of youthful criminals in The Left-Handed Gun and Bonnie and Clyde, but also the hippy commune of Alice’s Restaurant all represented communities that offered a haven for adolescent heroes who were no longer able to find their place in the world at large. This search for identity, and the use of violence as a means of garnering attention, was to become a central theme in Penn’s work. His films also demonstrate the way ideals and dreams are corrupted by reality.
Penn used historical objects to look at the political and social realities of contemporary America. The massacre of Indians by General Custer’s cavalry in Little Big Man reminded film critics of the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians at the hands of American marines; the prisoner who is shot dead beside the sheriff in The Chase reminded them of the murder of Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald; in the gangster couple Bonnie and Clyde they saw not so much the historical desperados of the 1930s as members of a younger generation in the sixties who were desperate to rid themselves of paternalism – both at state level and within their own families. Penn had a consummate seismographic ability to gauge the political, social and cultural mood of the time; he possessed an almost juvenile sensibility enabling him to capture societal change and upheaval in his films.
ROBERT MULLER
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Bertrand Tavernier has graced the cinematic landscape with a singular vision, a style marked by poetic vigor and elegant subversiveness, and a keen understanding of the nuances of the human character. His trajectory as a writer, producer, and director, reveals a profound exploration of the ethical implications of filmmaking, a sustained commitment to politically engaged storytelling, and a conviction to revive the forgotten and repressed chapters of French history.
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Bertrand Tavernier
Bertrand Tavernier has graced the cinematic landscape with a singular vision, a style marked by poetic vigor and elegant subversiveness, and a keen understanding of the nuances of the human character. His trajectory as a writer, producer, and director, reveals a profound exploration of the ethical implications of filmmaking, a sustained commitment to politically engaged storytelling, and a conviction to revive the forgotten and repressed chapters of French history.
An avowed cinephile who began his career as a press agent for the legendary producer Georges de Beauregard, Tavernier worked extensively behin the scenes: interviewing est blished masters of world cinema, endorsing t e work of an emerging generation of film akers, salvaging now consecrated film classic from oblivion, and regularly publishing critical essays on the subject, before stepping in the director’s chair in 1964 with Le Baiser de Judas.
His filmography, which spans nearly five decades, takes on historical and contemporary subjects with the same unwavering intensity —navigating and redefining the contours of genre, defying conventional narrative and revering often imperfect, yet passionate characters. Whether it is a glimpse into the life of a narcotics cop in the Parisian underground in L.627 (1992), a record of the struggle of a school teacher to rehabilitate poverty-stricken schools of the post-industrial landscape in It All Starts Today (1999), a timely meditation on reality television in Deathwatch (1980), or a revisionist take on to the repressive environment reigning over the cinema of occupation with Safe Conduct (2002), Tavernier’s cinema unfolds from seemingly isolated, intimate dramas into an insightful commentary on the greater ills that haunt our society. Through what has become his trademark use of cinemascope, he procures a dialectic relation between the internal struggle of his subjects and the larger socio-political panorama. Under his direction, cinema becomes a genuine technology of memory —inaugurating a new relationship to the past to develop a critical consciousness of the present, prying open the big parentheses of human existence: the unsaid, th overstated and the disavowed.
But his devotion to the cinematic medium does not end at the screen. His encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, reproduced in the film bible 50 years of American Cinema (with Jean-Pierre Coursodon), along with his longstanding support of young directors, his active participation in writers guilds to defend filmmakers’ vision and the integrity of cinematic works, reveal a commitment to preserve and promote film culture— a function he continues to exercise as president of the Lumière Institute in Lyon.
Let us pay tribute to the generosity of his spirit and to the breadth of his work—unparalleled in its eclecticism and vitality, as in its capacity to astound.
MARA FORTES
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Filmmaker Hector Babenco has always felt an affinity for the marginalized: the abandoned, dispossessed, criminals, vagabonds and inmates. Before he began directing films, he spent 7 years traveling around the world and working as an extra on a number of productions. In 1969 he settled in Brazil. He has since directed more than ten award-winning features, making him perhaps the most successful and versatile filmmaker of the post-cinema novo generation. Heavily vested in the power of cinema to represent reality and to open up an ethical dimension from which to examine contemporary ills, Babenco has produced poignant works which speak to the truth of human suffering and perseverance.
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Filmography:
El Pasado (2007)
Carandiru (2003)
Corazón iluminado (1998)
Brincando en los campos del Señor (1991)
Ironweed (1987)
El beso de la mujer araña (1985)
Pixote (1980)
Lucio Flavio (1977)
El rey de la noche (1975)
Héctor Babenco
Filmmaker Hector Babenco has always felt an affinity for the marginalized: the abandoned, dispossessed, criminals, vagabonds and inmates. Before he began directing films, he spent 7 years traveling around the world and working as an extra on a number of productions. In 1969 he settled in Brazil. He has since directed more than ten award-winning features, making him perhaps the most successful and versatile filmmaker of the post-cinema novo generation. Heavily vested in the power of cinema to represent reality and to open up an ethical dimension from which to examine contemporary ills, Babenco has produced poignant works which speak to the truth of human suffering and perseverance. Without flaunting a political agenda or appealing to the sentimental, he has turned his camera on the problems that devastate Latin American societies –corruption, violence and inequality– and created unforgettable characters who defy a Manichaean understanding of the world; products, very much of a society that allows them no way to live, that denies their existence and shoves them into the grimmest corners of the country. Regardless of whether he is working within a documentary mode, or in classic narrative cinema, he manages to infuse his images with a testimonial quality. In the film Lucio Flavio (1977), he was the first filmmaker to shed light on the death squads in Brazil. Four years later, he released Pixote, considered one of the best films of the 1980s and the film that earned him international recognition. Shot ina documentary style, the film portrays the brutality and violence that assails the children of Sao Paulo. Next, Babenco produced the widely successful Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), an extraordinary adaptation of the homonymous novel by Manuel Puig, about the intimate and complicated relationship that develops between two inmates in a South American prison. In 2003, he again explored prison life with the epic Carandiru, which recreates the tense conditions in a Sao Paulo penitentiary during the 1990s. With his most recent film, The Past, Babenco brings us the story of a young man who divorces his wife after 12 years of marriage. The protagonist attempts to put his life back together but finds himself constantly harassed by his ex-wife. Featuring the multifaceted Gael Garcia Bernal, the film marks yet another exciting new direction for this talented filmmaker.
MARA FORTES
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He blew audiences away with his performance in the widely successful Amores perros, directed by his compatriot Alejandro González Iñárritu, became an international star with Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries, Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education, and more recently Babel with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Gael García Bernal is an eclectic actor who just as easily switches genders, accents, registers and countries.
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Gael García
He blew audiences away with his performance in the widely successful Amores perros, directed by his compatriot Alejandro González Iñárritu, became an international star with Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries, Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education, and more recently Babel with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Gael García Bernal is an eclectic actor who just as easily switches genders, accents, registers and countries. He alternates between shooting in Latin America, Europe and Hollywood. But more recently, he’s stepped to the other side of the screen, founding a company (with his accomplice Diego Luna) that produces (Drama/Mex), distributes (El violín) and promotes social documentary in Mexico. Emblematic of the new Mexican generation, Gael once again proves his versatility and talent with his directorial debut Déficit.
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BERJON
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Romanian writer director Cristian Mungiu caused a stir in cinema worldwide when he obtained the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes Film Festival for his film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. The highest prize awarded by the most prestigious film festival in Europe represented a triumph not just for this prodigious filmmaker, but for his country. It proved —as the filmmaker remarked, that it is not necessary to have exorbitant amounts ofmoney or a cast of superstars to attract the public’s attention. Despite being only a second feature, 4 Months possesses a distinctive style and proves Mungiu is a master at directing his actors.
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Cristian Mungiu
Romanian writer director Cristian Mungiu caused a stir in cinema worldwide when he obtained the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes Film Festival for his film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. The highest prize awarded by the most prestigious film festival in Europe represented a triumph not just for this prodigious filmmaker, but for his country. It proved —as the filmmaker remarked, that it is not necessary to have exorbitant amounts ofmoney or a cast of superstars to attract the public’s attention. Despite being only a second feature, 4 Months possesses a distinctive style and proves Mungiu is a master at directing his actors.
A graduate of the University of Film in Bucharest, Mungiu began his career as an assistant director in a number of films, working for renowned directors like Bertrand Tavernier and Radu Mihaileanu. Since then, he’s directed and produced various short films and documentaries, always with the express desire to capture a fragment of reality— evoke a feeling, document an historical event, or reproduce the atmosphere of his immediate social environment. With his first feature West —a filmthat also garnered critical acclaim when it was screened at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes— he dealt with issues of migration and national identity. In 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Mungiu once again touches on the theme of national identity, but his time, from a much more intimate angle. The film, whose title references the pregnancy of its protagonist, deals with the difficult subject of abortion in Romania and it’s penalization during the communist regime of Ceaucescu. Without adopting a moralizing position or resorting to propaganda, Mungiu conjures the repressive environment of 1980s Romania, focusing on the trials and tribulations of two young women. The film is striking for its rigorous realism—its extensive use of long shots and natural lighting. Mungiu also prefers to shoot exclusively on location and exploits off-screen space as if to imply that life goes on regardless of the camera’s persistent recording. His is a cinema of intuition— where the film’s rhythm becomes the rhythm of its characters.
We are delighted to screen 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
MARA FORTES
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The boldest and most controversial figure of the new wave of Mexican Filmmakers, Carlos Reygadas has, with just three feature films to his name, established an entirely new direction in Mexican cinema. Characterized by a highly contemplative camera, and a deftly assembled soundtrack, his films evoke uncanny atmospheres and produce images that penetrate with visceral force.
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Carlos Reygadas
The boldest and most controversial figure of the new wave of Mexican Filmmakers, Carlos Reygadas has, with just three feature films to his name, established an entirely new direction in Mexican cinema. Characterized by a highly contemplative camera, and a deftly assembled soundtrack, his films evoke uncanny atmospheres and produce images that penetrate with visceral force. Stunning views of the Mexican countryside and urbanscape are interspersed with unsightly yet strangely aestheticized shots of unconventional bodies engaging in almost mechanical sex acts. Intimacy, distilled from the crude choreography of bodies, and the drama of human relationships, finds itself projected onto landscapes, which, through calculated camera movements, acquire a quasi-spiritual magnetism.
Reygadas eschews conventionality, narrative formulas, and instead crafts his features through a series of situations, ambiance and unanchored affect are the substance of his visual discourse, deployed to convey a state of mind rather than remaining faithful to a storyline. The result is a somewhat disparate, enigmatic work that draws its force from an apparent absence of motivation. One cannot sink too comfortably into the seat, but must remain at the mercy of the image. Seducing critics and audiences worldwide with his fiercely idiosyncratic style, Reygadas has become a guru of bravura filmmaking.
MARA FORTES
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