Film Festivals & Awards

Directors Vincent Paronnaud and Marianne Satrapi won the Sutherland Trophy for their feature Persepolis at the 51st annual London Film Festival, which closed yesterday after a two-week run. Based on a graphic novel by Satrapi, the animated film offers a young girl’s perspective of life during the Islamic revolution in Iran. The famous names who lent their voices for the feature include Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Sean Penn, Gena Rowlands and Iggy Pop. The FIPRESCI International [Read more...]

The Pusan International Film Festival, held in Busan, South Korea annually, closed yesterday. The winners in the competitive category New Currents are Life Track, a Chinese and South Korean co-production directed by Jin Guanghao, the Malaysian film Flowers in the Pocket, directed by Liew Seng-tat, and Wonderful Town by Aditya Assarat from Thailand. Flowers in the Pocket has also won the audience award at the festival, while the international film critics jury presented the FIPRESCI Award to the [Read more...]

Canadian director David Cronenberg's new film Eastern Promises won the main prize, the Cadillac People's Choice Award, on the last day of the Toronto Film Festival. It is a suspenseful, bloody drama about the Russian mob, set in London, with several big names in the leading roles. Viggo Mortensen, who previously worked with Cronenberg on A History of Violence, plays a Russian-born driver who works for a family of mobsters with Armin Mueller-Stahl's character at the helm. French star Vincent [Read more...]