MADRID - The 54th
San Sebastian film festival will this year comprise
of 18 films in its official section, while Danish
producer Lars Von Trier's "Direktoren for det Hele"
will feature out of competition in a largely
European selection, organisers said.
The festival, running from September 21 to 30, will
include a cycle devoted to the theme of "Emigrants",
which has inspired filmmakers such as Luchino
Visconti of "Rocco and His Brothers" fame for
decades.
Top directors with works up for the Golden Shell
award include Kurdish producer Bahman Ghobadi, Nick
Broomfield and Hirokazu Kore-eda. Broomfield weighs
in with "Ghosts," which features Ai Qin, who
survived the February 2004 tragedy in which 23
Chinese cockle pickers, illegal immigrants, were
swept away in northern England.
Organisers described the film as "based on real
events shot on the border between fiction and
documentary." Kore-eda offers a samurai tale, "Hana",
starring Junichi Okada, while Ghobadi's "Half Moon,"
a tale of Kurdish musicians hoping to give a concert
in post-Saddam Iraqi Kurdistan.
Ghobadi was a winner at San Sebastian in 2004 with
"Turtles Can Fly." Another Asian entry, from South
Korea, is Im Sang-Soo's "The Old Garden," a tale of
political repression and intrigue and starring Ji
Jin-Hee.
The festival, one of European independent cinema's
most important rendezvous, offers two retrospectives
- one on the work of French producer, actor and
director Barbet Schroeder and the other on
German-American filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch, presented
as "the master of sophisticated comedy." Von Trier's
film is a comedy, marking a break for the director
from his trilogy on America which began with "Dogville"
and continued with "Manderlay" as he returns to the
Dogma cinematographic movement which he created. |
Kurdish Director Bahman Ghubadi
Photo : Internet
The Turtles Can Fly on DVD may be obtained through Amazon online shop
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