Paul Leduc became known to a wider audience in 1984 through FRIDA, NATURALEZA VIVA, his de-dramatized biopic about Frida Kahlo. In its split up narrative it was the complete opposite of the noisy Hollywood-spectacle with which Julie Taymor transformed the Mexican painter into a blockbuster character. As far as those two films are from each other, equally as far is Paul Leduc's cinema from that „Mexican film miracle“ around the year 2000, with which directors such as Iñárritu, Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro caused a sensation. Paul Leduc, born 1942 in Mexico D.F., kept away from the cinema industry throughout his carrer.
Mehr...

Italian director Federico Fellini described Georgian cinema as such: "Georgian film is a completely unique phenomenon, vivid, philosophically inspiring, very wise, childlike. There is everything that can make me cry and I ought to say that it (my crying) is not an easy thing.
Georgia's film history dates back more than a hundred years - the first film festival in T'bilisi took place in 1896, the first film experiments were created in 1908. The 1920s were a time of comedies featuring the popular actress Vachnadze Nato and the first expressionist works of Nikolai Shengelaya.
More...

Théo Angelopoulos was born in Athens in 1935. He was sixteen when he published his first poems in a prestigious journal. A little later he fled to the cinema for the first time on a business day and entered a new world. He discovered Hollywood's black wave: James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. The awakening experience - he said years later - was Angels with dirty Faces (USA 1938, Michael Curtiz). Agitated by Godard playful questioning long-standing narrative forms in A bout de souffle (F, 1958, Jean-Luc Godard) Angelopoulos moved to Paris in the beginning of the 1960s . He studied at the Sorbonne, with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Mitry and Georges Sadoul, and was a regular at Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque.
Mehr...

The IFFI shows films from and about Cuba where a lot of things have changed since the transfer of power from Fidel to Raúl Castro. Small business is now permitted, cars and houses can be sold, dissidents get out of the prisons and travelling has been made easier. Who do filmmakers react to all this? The IFFI tries to answer this question with a film series. We show films by known masters, from expatriates and present young talents. Daniel Díaz Torres' new film LA PELÍCULA DE ANA is the first ever Cuban-Austrian coproduction, initiated at IFFI 20 by Austrian producer Josef Koschier and Daniel Díaz Torres.
Mehr...