la Biennale di Venezia /
71st Venice International Film Festival /
Biennale College Cinema – Prospects and Perspectives
International Panel
Entitled Biennale College Cinema - Prospects and Perspectives, the international panel organised by the
71st Venice International Film Festival and moderated by Peter Cowie, will be held on the Lido
Wednesday 3 September 2014 at 3:00 pm in the Press Conference Room, on the third floor of the
Palazzo del Casinò.
“Last year at this time we were startled to find that the first three features commissioned by the
Biennale College Cinema committee had proved to be extremely
interesting,” notes moderator Peter Cowie (film historian and former
Int'l Publishing Director of
Variety). “Each film had its fans, travelled to film festivals,
and earned excellent critics. The Biennale College Cinema scheme is
exciting chiefly because it is in essence a workshop – a workshop that
places the focus squarely on
two essential themes: the making of low-budget films in a period
of global recession, and the need to find youthful auteurs if the cinema
is to be reinvigorated.”
Panellists will include the
directors and/or producers of the three films, and also:
Peter Cowie
In 1963, Peter Cowie launched the annual
International Film Guide, which appeared under his editorship for
40 years. He has written more than 30 books about film, including
biographies of Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman and Francis Ford Coppola,
studies of Scandinavian film and, more recently,
Akira Kurosawa. Among the publications he has written articles for are
The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times,
the London Sunday Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Expressen, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, The Nation, and
Sight and Sound. He was International Publishing Director of Variety
from 1993 to 2000, and Regents’ Lecturer in Film Studies at the
University of California Santa Barbara. Cowie has contributed more than
a dozen commentaries for Criterion DVD’s.
Richard Corliss, author and chief film reviewer
at Time Magazine (New York)
Richard Corliss achieved renown as the editor of the influential magazine
Film Comment, before being named as film critic for Time magazine,
a role he continues to fill. He is especially admired for his
single-minded efforts to give proper credit to the screenwriter in
Hollywood history, first in his anthology,
Hollywood Screenwriters, and then in an even more brilliant book, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema 1927-1973.
Ann Hornaday,
chief movie critic at
The Washington Post (Washington D.C.)
She grew up in Des Moines, Iowa and graduated cum laude with a degree in Government from Smith College. After working at
Ms. magazine as a researcher and editorial assistant, she became a
freelance writer in New York City, where she eventually began to write
about movies for the
New York Times Arts & Leisure section and other publications. In 1995 she became the movie critic at the
Austin American-Statesman in Austin, Texas, where she stayed for two years before moving to Baltimore to be the movie critic at the
Baltimore Sun. She left the Sun in 2000 and began working at the
Washington Post in 2002. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2008.
Mick LaSalle, chief film reviewer
Hearst Newspapers
(San Francisco)
Mick LaSalle is film critic for
The San Francisco Chronicle and the author of two excellent and
well-received books on pre-Hays Code Hollywood, as well as the recent
study of French actresses, The Beauty of the Real. He serves as film critic for the Hearst Newspaper chain. Mick
LaSalle wrote and co-produced the Turner Classic Movies documentary, Complicated Women, based on his book.
For
several years he taught a film course at the University of California
in Berkeley and now teaches film at Stanford University.
Savina Neirotti, Director of the TorinoFilmLab
and the Head of Program for the Biennale College Cinema
Born
in Genova, she graduated in Philosophy and completed the first year of
Master in Aesthetics at the University of Pennsylvania. After returning
to Italy, she became Head of the Press and Communication
Office of the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, where she was
also in charge of the Educational Department. In the same years she
founded Scuola Holden in Torino together with Alessandro Baricco. She is
Director of Scuola Holden’s Master in Narration
Techniques, and she supervises all the school activities, focusing on
the international contacts. In the last ten years Savina has written
articles and interviews on narration and classical music, book reviews
and film reviews for Italian and international
newspapers. She has been in charge of Script&Pitch Workshops since 2005, and
TorinoFilmLab since 2008.
Stephanie Zacharek, principal film writer
at The Village Voice in New York
An American film and music critic, her writing on books and pop culture has also appeared in
The New York Times, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Book Review,
Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and Sight and Sound, among others. She is a member of the National Society of Film Critics. Her work was featured in the anthology,
American Movie Critics, edited by Philip Lopate in 2006, Prior to her appointment at the
Voice, she served as chief film critic at Movieline.com, and for several years contributed all manner of pieces to Salon.com.
***
The 3 films commissioned this year by Biennale College Cinema:
Blood Cells
Directed by
Joseph Bull and Luke Seomore. Produced by Samm Haillay and Ben Young.
A
decade after a catastrophe destroyed his family and their farm, an
eruption from the past compels an exiled young man to embark upon an
odyssey through the broken and beautiful margins of
contemporary Britain.
H.
Directed by
Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia. Produced by Shruti Ria Ganguly
and Pierce Varous.
A
tale of two women, both named Helen, whose lives and relationships
begin to unravel in the wake of a meteor explosion over their town of
Troy, NY. A modern and lyrical re-imagining of a classic
Greek tragedy.
Short Skin
Directed by
Duccio Chiarini. Produced by Babak Jalali.
Tagline: One has to grow hard but without ever losing tenderness.
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