(MENAFN - Arab Times) The Toronto International Film Festival announced more than 70 additions to its programming on Tuesday, including new documentaries from Ken Burns, Julien Temple and Alex Gibney, a black comedy from Oscar-winner Martin McDonagh and a number of films from Mumbai.
The new additions to the Sept. 6-16 festival comprise its TIFF Docs, City to City, Midnight Madness, Vanguard, TIFF Cinematheque and TIFF Kids programs.
They join the 60 premieres, gala screenings and special presentations that were announced last week.
The TIFF documentary lineup, typically a strong part of the festival program, will include "The Central Park Five," an examination of the case in which five black and Latino teens were wrongly convicted of raping a jogger in New York's Central Park, from Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns; "London " The Modern Babylon," which TIFF describes as an "epic time-traveling voyage" to the heart of the city, from "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" director Julien Temple; and "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God," Oscar-winner Alex Gibney's look at abuse and cover-ups in the Catholic Church.
Other documentaries will cover death squads ("The Act of Killing"), Israel's secret service ("The Gatekeepers"), disco music ("The Secret Disco Revolution") and the war on drugs ("How to Make Money Selling Drugs").
Focuses
The Midnight Madness program, which focuses on action films, horror movies and black comedies, will feature 10 films, including new work from playwright and "In Bruges" director Martin McDonagh ("Seven Psychopaths"), "Rain Man" director Barry Levinson ("The Bay") and rocker/director Rob Zombie ("The Lords of Salem").
Vanguard, 14 films curated by one of the Midnight Madness programmers, includes Michel Gondry's "The We and the I," Ben Wheatley's "Sightseers," British musician Ben Drew's directorial debut "iLL Manors" and Rodney Ascher's "Room 237," which delves into theories that have sprung up around Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining."
The City to City program, which spotlights films from a different foreign city each year, will feature 10 films from Mumbai. The selection, which includes Anurag Kashyap's two-part gangster epic "Gangs of Wasseypur," focuses on independent films that contrast with the bright commercialism of India's Bollywood movies, according to TIFF Artistic Director Cameron Bailey.
"Mumbai's cinema today is entirely different from what it was even a few years ago," said Bailey in a release announcing the lineup. "The rise of independent cinema has shifted the terrain, probing into previously taboo subjects and adopted styles that were earlier unpalatable to the Indian audience."
TIFF Cinematheque is a program that screens both Canadian and international cinema; the section is screening as part of the festival for the first time, though TIFF has been mounting it at other times for 22 years.
This year's lineup includes Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder," Roman Polanski's "Tess" and the little-seen anthology film "Loin du Vietnam," an "agit-prop classic" featuring sequences from such acclaimed directors as Claude Lelouch, Agnes Varda, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais.
The TIFF Kids section, which consists of four films, will include world premieres of Sony Pictures Animation's "Hotel Transylvania" and the new 3D version of Andrew Stanton's and Lee Unkrich's Pixar classic "Finding Nemo."
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NEW YORK: YouTube's inaugural film festival has selected 10 short films that it will send to the Venice Film Festival.
The Google video site announced Wednesday the finalists of its Your Film Festival. The contest was overseen by director Ridley Scott, whose production company helped winnow the 15,000 submissions down to 10.
All 10 films will be screened at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 2. A winner will then be chosen by a jury including Scott and Michael Fassbender and awarded a grant of 500,000.
The finalists hail from around the globe, with entries from the US, Australia, Brazil, Bolivia, Spain, the UK, Lebanon and Egypt.
TAIPEI: Leading Hollywood movie production company FilmEngine Entertainment set up a joint venture in Taiwan Tuesday, aiming to churn out 12 films in five years as it looks to dynamic Asian markets.
FilmEngine Entertainment, responsible for Hollywood Blockbusters including The Butterfly Effect and The Rum Diary, formally launched the 50-50 venture with FilmEngine Orient during a ceremony in Taipei.
The newly-created firm, FilmEngine Holdings, LLC., has an initial paid-in capital of 50 million, company officials said.
It plans to start shooting its first motion picture some time between late this year and early 2013, and "Formosa, Koxinga" is likely to be top of its production agenda, according to FilmEngine Entertainment's Taiwan partner.
Koxinga was a legendary Chinese military general in China's late Ming Dynasty, who in 1661-62 crushed the Dutch naval power who had colonised Taiwan, allowing him to turn the island into a base to resist the Qing Dynasty in the Chinese mainland.
Koxinga, better known as Zheng Chenggong to the Chinese communities, is also well known in Japan, where he was born in 1624, the son of a Chinese merchant and pirate and a Japanese woman.
"Formosa, Koxinga will be a story not only about himself, but a piece to be made from a broader historical perspective that may allow it to review the history of the world's marine power development in the 17th century," said Hsu Po-yun, president of Film Engine Orient.
Since it was founded in 2001 by Anthony Rhulen, FilmEngine Entertainment has produced 14 films including The Butterfly Effect, Sleepwalking and The Rum Diary, generating more than 1 billion in profit.
