SPECIAL PROGRAMME TIFF 2006

M O N T X O A R M E N D A R I Z

One of Spain's hottest directors of the 1990s, Montxo Armendáriz directed the internationally acclaimed Secretos del Corazon, Silencio rotto, Obaba. Born in Navarra on 1949, before becoming a filmmaker, Armendáriz studied electronics in Pamplona. He started out making three short Basque films, and in 1984, made his feature film debut with Tasio (1984). Ranked among New Spanish cinema's more liberal filmmakers, Armendáriz's films frequently


Synopses OBABA

Lurdes, scarcely 25 years old, begins on a trip towards Obaba’s territories.

She is carrying a small video camera in her luggage. She wants to catch Obaba reality, its world and its people. She wants to catch the present, and show it the way it is. But Obaba is not the place that Lurdes had imagined, and she discovers that the people who live there, like Merche, Ismael o Tomás, are trapped in a past that they can not –or they do not want to- escape from.


San Sebastian International Film Festival, Opening

SELECTED BY THE SPANISH ACADEMY TO PARTICIPATE IN THE BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM AWARD CATEGORY

Toronto International Film Festival, Masters Section

Ten nominations to the Annual Spanish Academy Film Awards (Goyas)

Best Film Award, ASSOCIATION OF ENTERTAINMENT CRITICS (ACE) of New York


SILENCIO ROTTO synopses

Autumn 1944, 21-year-old Lucia returns to the small mountain village where her parents live. The town is split between Franco’s fascist supporters and the Republicans. Lucia falls in love with Manuel, a young blacksmith who supports the Maquis, guerrilla warriors hidden in the mountains, who do not accept Franco’s triumph. Manuel flees the village to join them, and Lucia discovers the harsh reality as silence, horror and fear populate the village’s empty streets.


Butaca Awards: Butaca for Best Catalan Film Actress

Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain: CEC Award for Best Supporting Actress

Mons International Festival of Love Films: C.I.C.A.E. Award

Nantes Spanish Film Festival: Jules Verne Award

Toulouse Cinespaña: Prix du Jury des Lecteurs de 'La dépêche du midi' for Best Film, Best Film


SECRETS OF THE HEARTS synopses

Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, SECRETS OF THE HEART (SECRETOS DEL CORAZON) is an elegant and poignant tale of the mysterious and magical adult world as seen through the eyes of Javi, a nine-year-old child, growing up in a small provincial town in the 1960s.

Javi believes he can hear the voices of the dead and that they whisper to him their secrets, which were left unspoken in life. At his mother's house in the mountains, he is fascinated by the room in which his father died and which his mother carefully keeps locked. But, Javi also learns that the living have their secrets as well.


Nominated for the Academy Awards, USA: Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
Winner of Berlin International Film Festival: Blue Angel
Chicago International Film Festival: Audience Choice Award Goya Awards: Goya for Best Supporting Actress (Mejor Actriz de Reparto), Best Production Design (Mejor Dirección Artística), Best Sound (Mejor Sonido), Best New Actor (Mejor Actor Revelación)



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G O R A N P A S K A L J E V I C

Goran Paskaljevic studied at the well-known Prague school of cinema (FAMU). He has made 30 documentaries and 14 feature films, shown and acclaimed at the most prestigious international film festivals (Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto and San Sebastian…). The rise of nationalism in Yugoslavia forced him to leave his country in 1992. In 1998 he went back to make The Powder Keg (aka Cabaret Balkan in the USA) which won international critic's prizes at the Venice Film Festival and the European Film Awards. In 2001, the Variety International Film Guide marks him as one of the top five directors of the year. His latest film Midwinter Night's Dream (2004) exploring the post-war Serbia won the Grand Jury Prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

The Museum of Modern Art in New-York (MoMA) will present a full retrospective of his work at the end of next year.



THE OPTIMISTS
The five stories in THE OPTIMISTS are inspired by Voltaire’s famous satirical novel Candide and its motto: “Optimism is insisting everything is good, when everything is bad.” The setting is present day, post-Milosevic Serbia. Painted with black humour, these stories reflect a time filled with hope and despair, real optimism and false; a time when fiction and reality co-exist side by side, and when many people fish in the troubled waters of lost illusions.

The acclaimed actor Lazar Ristovski (“Underground”, “The Powder Keg” aka “Cabaret Balkan” in the USA, “Midwinter Night’s Dream”) takes a role in each of the five stories.


Best Film Valladolid Film Festival
Best actor winner Lazar Ristovski
Audience Award for the best film
Geneva Film Festival - Best Director
FIPRESCI Award for the best film
Toronto – Masters – World Premiere


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C A V E H Z A H E D I

Caveh Zahedi was born in 1960 in Washington D.C. Zahedi is the director of the American independent features A LITTLE STIFF and I DON'T HATE LAS VEGAS ANYMORE . Zahedi appears in all of his own films, and has also acted in other directors' films. He is familiar to film fans as "Peter" in CITIZEN RUTH, and as "Caveh" in the 2000 Sundance Film Festival hit romantic comedy A SIGN FROM GOD, (which he also co-wrote and edited).


Synopses of I am a sex addict
Winner of the Gotham Award for “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You,” I AM A SEX ADDICT is the transgressive new comedy from autobiographical filmmaker Caveh Zahedi On the eve of his third marriage, Caveh tells the story of how his attraction to prostitutes and his compulsive honesty combined to destroy each of his past relationships. The genre-bending mix of camera address, re-enactment, and home movie footage make for a strikingly funny and original film.


A sign from god
Greg Watkins' romantic black comedy A Sign from God depicts a semi-fictionalized day in the life of independent filmmaker Caveh Zahedi and his girlfriend Laura as they struggle with a series of challenges and accidents while desperately seeking a sign from God about the future of their troubled relationship. Laura's increasingly pessimistic attitude - she perceives that the cascading negative events of their lives portend a negative "sign" about the relationship - is offset by Caveh's serene and abiding faith that everything happens for a reason...

"By turns sweet, quirky, comical, and exhausting, A Sign from God stretches the tired conventions of the romantic comedy like few films I've seen."

Merle Bertrand, FILM THREAT

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Special Program



A l e k s a n d a r M a n i c

THE SHUTKA BOOK OF RECORDS

After studying at the Philosophical Faculty of the Cologne University, he moved to Prague to attend FAMU, the renowned film and TV academy. There he directed a short called Astropolitan, which premiered at the International Belgrade Film Festival and earned Mani success early in his career. While working as a translator for Emir Kusturica's Underground, he agreed to shoot a documentary on Kusturica called Shooting Days, which has won critical acclaim and has been distributed in many countries.

Synopses
In the Balkan town of Shutka, the Romani (Gypsy) population is thriving and everyone is considered a champion at something, be it boxing or grave robbing. Aleksander Manic's The Shutka Book of Records gives us a walking tour of this vibrant community, and along the way, we meet some of the colorful ""champions."", champion vampire hunter and champion love maker ""When a child is born in Roma, it cries in melody."" Adults are liable to do the same after meeting all the strange and endearing characters in

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WOODY ALLEN

Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg on December 1, 1935) is a three-time Academy Award-winning American film director, writer, actor, musician, and comedian.
His large body of work and cerebral film style have made him one of the most widely respected and prolific filmmakers in the modern era. Allen writes and directs his movies and has also acted in the majority of them. For inspiration, Allen draws heavily on literature, philosophy, psychology, European cinema and, most important, New York City, where he was born and in which he has lived all his life.


Synopses
Romantic adventures of neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer and his equally neurotic girlfriend Annie Hall. The film traces the course of their relationship from their first meeting, and serves as an interesting historical document about love in the 1970s.
“Even as a kid I always went for the wrong women, when we went to see Snow White, everyone fell in love with Snow White, I immediately fell for the wicked queen.”


Annie Hall won the Oscar for being the best movie 1977. Allen also won the Oscar for the best direction. At the ceremony, he didn’t show up to accept the statue. The media found out that he was playing the clarinet at the Michels’ that evening, as on all Monday evenings for decades. The explanation he gave in an interview, was that he felt competing in arts, rediculous. Annie Hall (1977)


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SCANDINAVIAN SHORT PANORAMA

Selected by Karolina Lidin


NORWAY Eivind Tolås
Love is the law

Eivind Tolås The short film 'Love is the Law' by Eivind Tolås has been selected for Semaine Internationale de la Critique in Cannes. The film is based on a poem by Ole Mads Vevle and produced by Lars Løge for Flimmer Film AS. Short Film, 6min

Love is the law


DANMARK Max Kestner
Max by Chance

This is the story of Max, the director's own story, playfully animated within the realms of documentary. Max's story traces back several generations to sailers, industrialists and Summer of Love hippies - everyone depicted with whole-hearted love and equal amounts of irony. But there is something more at stake here, something larger than the biographical filmic note of a single man. The film embraces with vulnerable playfulness life's many coincidences and grapples with questions such as genetics, destiny and family patterns.

Max by Chance


SWEDEN Lisa Munthe
The parasite

Niklas is a truck driver in a chipboard factory in a small community in northern Sweden

The parasite


DANMARK Kassandra Wellendorf
Close

Close examines a series of situations between bodies that reach out for each other. How close can you get? And can you ever get close enough? The form is experimental and depicts the meeting of bodies in unusual close-ups that bypass the typical pornographic exhibition of naked bodies. The result is a picture ballet that accommodates beauty as well as claustrophobic terror in its presentation of feelings like fear, intimacy and distance.

Close


SWEDEN Johan Brisinger
Passing heart

Awards
Berlin Film Festival, Audience award Panorama section
Aspen Film Festival, Audience award & best cinematography
The poignant meeting between a young man and the family whose late son saved his life.
Passing heart


DANMARK Jacob Tschernia
2 Minutes

The best way to find out who you are is to test your own limits - to do the utmost of your ability. That is the theme of this short psychological thriller. A boy lies in a bathtub, holding his breath. He is trying to break his personal record - 2 minutes.

2 Minutes


NORWAY Frederikke Aspöck
Happy Now

"Happy Now" is a bittersweet story about wanting to be seen as an individual. A typical American family goes to the beach. Their seemingly perfect life is turned upside-down when the mother Carol, who has long felt overlooked in her marriage, kisses a lifeguard and is caught by her husband.

Happy Now


NORWAY Pioter Sapegin
Aria

Sapegin films has won more than 20 national and international awards.
Don't cry for me, I'm already dead (Non piangete per me, sono già morto.)

Aria


NORWAY Therese Jacobsen
FearLESS

compete for the prestigious awards in Toronto. 2003 • 4’30
Film Critics' Award Norwegian Short Film Festival in Grimstad ,Jameson Short Film Award 2003.


FearLESS



CADILLAC MAN
(Documentary Film)

Michael Regan

Cadillac Man: Life Under The Viaduct is a documentary about a homeless veteran who has lived on the streets of New York for the past eleven years.
With interviews from friends, neighbors and passers-by we get an idea of what life on the streets of New York is like for him.
As his story unfolds we learn that Cadillac Man has a hidden talent that may help to propel him out of his homeless situation and into the mainstream of society. Michael Regan studied acting at the famed Lee Strasberg Theater Institute for several years. He also studied at the Stella Adler Conservatory.
He began his acting career in the mid nineties and has appeared in several films including Revolution, El Septimo Cielo and Molotov Samba.
Michael is making his directorial debut with "Cadillac Man: Life Under The Viaduct with the producer Luan Bexheti.