Those who remember the 45-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Béart as the artist’s model in Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991) or as the lovely shepherdess in Manon des Sources (1986) will surely be startled by the figure she casts at the end of her new film Vinyan, caked in mud, surrounded by feral, monstrous children, and close to insanity. She plays a traumatised mother whose son has gone missing in the Asian tsunami. Desperate to get him back, she embarks on a reckless mission into the heart of the Burmese jungle.

Some critics at the Venice Festival were uncomfortable with the way that Vinyan (the title means “evil spirit”) deals with subjects as emotive as the tsunami and the disappearance of a child, and with its portrayal of present-day Burma. However, Béart clearly doesn’t see the movie as either a drama about political repression or about the grim legacy of the tsunami.

(The Independent UK)

The New Zealand Film Commission is putting millions of taxpayer dollars into a movie set in Edwardian England and says it will boost Kiwi talent, especially up-and-coming director Toa Fraser.

The commission says its stake in the movie Dean Spanley - believed to be $3 million to $4 million - will be good for New Zealand film.

But even assuming the $15 million movie is successful, it marks a shift in the old calculations about the value of the movie business.

(NZ Herald)

Now it can be told. For the last three weeks, some of Hollywood’s more impressive agents, executives, and power brokers have been slipping off to the University of California, Los Angeles, to provide China’s next wave of film and television moguls with a private tutorial in the tao of show business.

Though not exactly a state secret, the sessions were conducted without media exposure because of what Robert Rosen — dean of the university’s school of theater, film and television — called “security concerns.” Those applied to the well-being of the several dozen Chinese executives, most in their 20s and 30s, not the power players, who are familiar in these parts.

Attendees were selected by China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, and arrived under the watchful eye of Jiao Hongfen, a vice chairman of the China Film Group Corporation.

They included at least some whose reach would be envied by HBO. “He’s got 800 million viewers,” Mr. Rosen said during a final seminar that was open to visitors last Thursday. Mr. Rosen was pointing toward a young man who operates a Chinese movie channel.

(New York Times)

Celebrated French-Swiss “New Wave” film director Jean-Luc Godard was persuaded out of retirement to direct a publicity trailer for Vienna’s international film festival, the event’s director said.

In an interview with the Austrian magazine Profile to be published on Monday, Hans Hurch said he had been “trying hard for 10 years” to get the 78-year-old to contribute to the festival.

Godard’s first film “Breathless,” starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, is considered a groundbreaking work of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Godard now lives in semi-retirement in Switzerland.

“A Catastrophe” lasts 63 seconds and includes excerpts from Russian director Sergei Eisentein’s film “The Battleship Potemkin,” a traditional German love song and a piano piece by Schumann.

Hurch said it would be shown in Austrian cinemas from mid-September. The festival, the Viennale, runs from October 17-29.

After the success of his first film, Godard cemented his reputation with “Contempt,” “Pierrot le Fou” and “Two or Three Things I Know About Her.”

An avid moviegoer, Lindsay Bern takes in a flick at her local multiplex about twice a week. But Bern, the co-owner of a Los Angeles recording studio, has recently become irritated by what she sees as a disturbing trend on the big screen: the obliteration of New York City.

In particular, she has been annoyed by “I Am Legend,” the Warner Brothers hit that stars Will Smith in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, and “Cloverfield,” the Paramount film about a monster that implodes the Empire State Building, tears down the Brooklyn Bridge and generally reduces the city to a smoking pile of rubble and despair.

“Can’t they destroy another city for once?” Bern said in an interview at a local movie theater. “It’s despicable that the studios are using the destruction of New York to sell movies to me.”

Hollywood uses the stunt to sell movies all right - but not primarily to Bern or anyone else in the United States, for that matter. If Americans go to see the Statue of Liberty’s head ripped off, as they have in droves for “Cloverfield,” all the better. But the fans the studios are really trying to attract with such imagery are in Eastern Europe, South Korea and Latin America.

(San Francisco Chronicle)

Twentieth Century Fox has set up an Asian unit specialising in local production, starting with India, becoming the latest Hollywood studio to venture into Asian movies.

The new studio will take the form of a joint venture with the Asian satellite broadcaster STAR called Fox STAR Studios.

Both companies are units of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Fox Star Studios will start out making Bollywood, or Hindi-language movies, and films in other regional Indian dialects, with STAR India president for strategy and corporate development Vijay Singh heading up the Indian operation.

Mr Singh said the studio is in talks to produce traditional Bollywood films as well as become involved in emerging genres.

Abu Dhabi will today lay out plans to become one of the biggest movie producers in the world, with $1 billion to invest in productions from Hollywood to Bollywood, the Financial Times reported.

Abu Dhabi’s government will provide enough funding to support up to eight films a year over the next five years, Edward Borgerding, chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi Media Company, told the newspaper.

The media company will announce its first co-production partnerships within weeks, the FT said. Borgerding, a former Walt Disney Co. executive, declined to comment on which movie studios the company would work with, the newspaper said.

Abu Dhabi is attempting to overtake Dubai as the Gulf region’s leading media hub, the FT said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Browning in London  jbrowning9@bloomberg.net

Film buyers will be able to access hundreds of new films at the touch of a button, just one aspect of the Dubai Film Market, an initiative of the fifth Dubai International Film Festival. 

Cinetech will make its Middle East debut later this year, enabling industry buyers to watch and shortlist films, contact filmmakers and producers.

The system is a digital, closed network, film library that will  include feature films, documentaries, shorts and TV content. Users will be able to browse and search through more than 200 films by logging into the  screens at private booths located at the festival. 

The Dubai Film Market will run concurrently to the fest, which will take place Dec. 11-18. 

(Hollywood Reporter)

Will Steven Spielberg soon be directing a Bollywood extravanganza? A few years ago this might have seemed like a ridiculous question but with the news that Indian entertainment giant Reliance may invest $500m in Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio, it suddenly doesn’t sound so unlikely after all. And Spielberg isn’t the only major Hollywood player that Reliance are courting, having also recently announced development deals with the production companies of A-listers such as George Clooney, Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey and Tom Hanks.

And Indian co-productions have already made it to the screen, including M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, partly financed by Indian company UTV. So, with this increasing economic power in Hollywood, the question is whether this financial collaboration will result in a creative crossover as well?

(The Guardian UK)

How to get rid of the ghost that you want to keep close? It’s been more than twenty-five years now since Ingmar Bergman was regularly making feature films, but the master’s mammoth shadow looms over the national cinema with undiminished dominance, and indeed most of European art cinema in general; meanwhile it’s just one year after his death, at age 89, and Swedish cinema is still struggling with the legacy of this fearsomely popular and canonized auteur.

(Indie Wire)