The New Zealand International Film Festival has given us a good lead on what films will be hitting the big screens over the next 12 months. Already scheduled to return to our theatres are I Wish, Moonrise Kingdom, The Angel’s Share, The Sapphires, Your Sister’s Sister, How Far is Heaven, Where Do We Go Now and On the Road.
The New Zealand International Film Festival has given us a good lead on what films will be hitting the big screens over the next 12 months. Already scheduled to return to our theatres are I Wish, Moonrise Kingdom, The Angel’s Share, The Sapphires, Your Sister’s Sister, How Far is Heaven, Where Do We Go Now and On the Road.
It’s good news for those of us who didn’t get to as many films as we’d hoped during the Festival. Although by the time we catch them this time round they’ve already had their world premieres and we’ve had a chance to get familiar with these releases for some time.
This all changes in September, when the next wave of the year’s most important international film festivals gets underway. The Toronto International Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival and the New York Film Festival will give us our first peak at some of the most anticipated films of the coming year, many of which will be vying for an Oscar nomination.
It begins in Italy in a couple of weeks with the Venice Film Festival, and a lineup that includes new films from the likes of Terrence Malick (To the Wonder, staring Rachel McAdams, Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and Javier Bardem), Brian De Palma (Passion, staring Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace) and Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master, staring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams and Laura Dern). Opening the festival is be Indian director Mira Nair’s adaptation of author Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
One of the most prestigious festivals on the circuit is in Toronto. Following Venice, the Toronto International Film Festival likes to boast that it knows an Oscar winner when it sees one - The Hurt Locker, The Kings Speech, and The Artist all began their Oscar campaigns there. Opening the Festival is director Rian Johnsons’s futuristic thriller Looper, starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
The festival is also screening world premieres of Ben Affleck's Argo, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, Mike Newell’s Great Expectations, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight's Children, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, Neil Jordan’s Byzantium, and our very own Andrew Adamson’s Mister Pip, based on the novel by Lloyd Jones.
The New York Film Festival is the last of the three to kick and is opening with Ang Lee’s highly anticipated adaption of the Life of Pi – a novel by Yann Martel that’s regarded by many as un-filmable. Well just have to wait and see how well Lee manages this tricky material, but if the trailer is anything to go by, it will be visually impressive. You can check out the trailer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9Hjrs6WQ8M.
If you’re looking for a way to kill a few hours, take a look at the festival programmes on the websites below. Now, all I have to do is work out how to wrangle myself a trip to Toronto…
Venice Film Festival 29th August – 8th September
http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/festival/
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 6th September – 16th September
http://tiff.net/thefestival
New York Film Festival 28th September – 14th October
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2012/