Film Festivals
October is prime time for film festivals around the globe. Austria's Viennale and the Chicago Film Festival are still on-going, while the BFI Film Festival in London, and Spain's popular Sitges Festival have just wrapped. The top prizes in these two festivals both went to female directors, for totally different types of films.
© Lukasz Bak
The Sitges Film Festival is one of the world's leading celebrations of fantasy, horror, and science fiction cinema. Founded in 1968, the festival has been attracting genre fans to the coastal Catalonian town for its eclectic mix of premieres, cult classics, and beachside screenings for decades. This year's top award went to Norway's The Ugly Stepsister, directed by Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt. This comedic horror is a different take on the story of Cinderella, told from the perspective of one of the heroin's less attractive sisters.
Courtesy Landmarks (Nuestra Tierra)
Meanwhile in London, the British Film Institute awarded their top prize to a documentary film out of Argentina. Lucrecia Martel's Landmarks investigates the murder of Javier Chocobar, an indigenous activist involved in a struggle for land rights. The jury praised the film by saying that, "in foregrounding present-day voices and neglected histories, Martel emerges with a portrait of — and for — an Indigenous community, and grants them a measure of the justice the courts have long denied them."
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After a brief and unexpected meeting meeting with Martin Scorsese, young film maker Colin Levy sent Mr Scorsese a thank you card with an admission that he didn't know much about film history or foreign films and asked if he had any suggestions. In response, Scorsese sent several books, DVDs and a list of 39 Foreign Films to watch. These are those 39 films. - http://www.colinlevy.com/blog/martin-scorseses-list
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