Also in Wednesday evening’s round-up of news briefs, Toronto winner Silver Linings Playbook makes its U.S. move. Christopher Lloyd, Robert Vaughn, and Jerry Stiller set for a fete. And Focus Features unveils its winners for an African film program.
Friar’s Club to Fete Christopher Lloyd, Robert Vaughn, and Jerry Stiller
Christopher Lloyd, Robert Vaughn, and Jerry Stiller will be honored with the “Best Ensemble Cast of Yesterday and Today” award for their new film, Excuse Me for Living October 9th. The comedy written and directed by Wayne Knight, centers on a “charming, suicidal druggie must obey his rehab-clinic’s demand to lead a seniors men’s group or face incarceration and lose the love of his psychiatrist’s daughter.”
Silver Linings Playbook to Open Film Independent Forum
The film by David O Russell, which won the People’s Choice Award at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival, will open Film Independent’s Forum, taking place October 19 – 21. The event helps indie filmmakers bring their projects to the screen.
Focus Features Names Winners of its Africa First Program
For a fifth consecutive year, five filmmakers have been selected for Focus Features’ Africa First Program. The worldwide film company’s initiative earmarked exclusively for emerging filmmakers of African nationality and residence, will award the filmmakers $10,000 apiece. The winning filmmakers for 2012 are Mr. Vincent Moloi (from South Africa); Mr. Jeremiah Mosese (from Lesotho); Ms. Ekwa Msangi-Omari (from Tanzania); Ms. Samantha Nell (from South Africa); and Mr. William Nicholson (from South Africa).
Around the ‘net…
Gael Garcia Bernal Joins Matthew McConaughey in the Dallas Buyer’s Club
The drama from Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee (The Young Victoria) initially had Hilary Swank attached, but has since dropped out. In the film Garcia Bernal will play an effeminate member of the club, a fellow AIDS patient who meets Woodroof in the…
Rising filmmaker Julia Loktev won the Prix Regards Jeune at Cannes in her first feature, 2006’s Day Night Day Night, and nabbed the AFI Grand Jury Prize with her sophomore follow-up, the thriller The Loneliest Planet (in theaters October 26 via Sundance Selects). After the jump, check out Movieline’s exclusive debut of the poster for The Loneliest Planet, about a couple (Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg) touring the wilds of the former Soviet Union who find their relationship tested by a random, irrevocable incident.
Official synopsis:
Alex and Nica are young, in love and engaged to be married. The summer before their wedding, they are backpacking in the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. The couple hire a local guide to lead them on a camping trek, and the three set off into a stunning wilderness, a landscape that is both overwhelmingly open and frighteningly closed. Walking for hours, they trade anecdotes, play games to pass the time of moving through space. And then, a momentary misstep, a gesture that takes only two or three seconds, a gesture that’s over almost as soon as it begins. But once it is done, it can’t be undone. Once it is done, it threatens to undo everything the couple believed about each other and about themselves. All the while, they are not alone. They are always with the guide, who witnesses their every move. The film plays off the relationship between young travelers and the places they travel to, between guide and guided. But at heart, it is a love story — a tale about betrayal, both accidental and deliberate, about masculinity, failure and the ambiguities of forgiveness.
Loktev wrote The Loneliest Planet based on Tom Bissell’s short story “Expensive Trips Nowhere,” and if…
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He’s made dozens of films since his 2001 breakout Y Tu Mamá También charmed audiences not only at home in Mexico, but also north of the border. Since then he played a priest in The Crime of Father Amaro, acted with the likes of Brad Pitt and Cate Blachett in Babel, a footballer (soccer player) in Rudo Y Cursi and even the revolutionary Ernest “Ché” Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries. But now Gael García Bernal, the Mexican actor/director/producer and even festival founder (he and fellow actor Diego Luna co-founded Mexico’s Ambulante Documentary Festival), is playing a more conventional revolutionary of sorts in Pablo Larraín’s No, which debuted last May in Cannes and will screen at the Locarno Film Festival, which opens Wednesday.
In No, he plays an advertising executive who creates an ad campaign to defeat Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988. The publicity campaign by ad bigwig Rene Saavedra helped topple the brutal dictator who is still reviled and praised at home. The TV campaign urged Chileans to vote “No” to another eight-year term for Pinochet. The campaign worked and Pinochet was ousted with 55 per cent voting against his return and paved the way for a resurgence of Chilean democracy. García Bernal told the A.P. that he often met Latin American exiles while growing up in Mexico, but didn’t understand their plight until he began shooting No.
“This made me realize the profound pain caused by the dictatorship and it hit me hard,” he told A.P. (http://news.yahoo.com/garcia-bernal-feels-chiles-pain-latest-film-033203261.html) before No’s premiere in the South American country’s capital Santiago on Monday. “The director wanted to make a movie about the history of what went on in 1988, as well as an introspection and…
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