Docu brings action, suspense to nature genre ‘Virunga’, film on besieged African park, bids for Oscar Film JOHANNESBURG, Feb 14, (AP): “They are my life,” a ranger in Central Africa says of endangered mountain gorillas in his care. This bond of love infuses “Virunga”, an Oscar-contending documentary whose director describes it as a “David and Goliath” struggle pitting wildlife park rangers and other conservationists with few resources against poachers, armed groups and a company exploring for oil. The film about Virunga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site in eastern Congo, brings action and suspense to the nature genre. Its real-life cast includes Andre Bauma, an endearing ranger who tends orphan gorillas; chief warden Emmanuel de Merode, an urbane Belgian descended from nobility; and Melanie Gouby, a French freelance journalist who records shadowy figures on a hidden camera in scenes that make for tense viewing. The dramatic events unfold in the visually rich landscape of Virunga, a jewel of biodiversity that has forests, swamps, savannah and active volcanoes, and is home to about a quarter of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas and to various armed groups. “I probably could have filmed it on a mobile phone and people would have still said, ‘Oh, it looks beautiful,’” director Orlando von Einsiedel said in an interview with The Associated Press. And yet, he said of the park: “Very few people have heard of it.” The nominee for best documentary feature, whose executive producer is Leonardo DiCaprio, is getting high-profile attention ahead of the Feb 22 Oscar awards in Hollywood. Former US president Bill Clinton attended a recent screening of “Virunga” in New York. Primatologist Jane Goodall described it as a “wake-up call.” Documentary The documentary was released on Netflix in hopes of reaching the widest possible audience, and positive publicity has seemingly helped to tilt the conservation battle, and a broader effort to create a sustainable economy, in Virunga’s favor for now. Tourism is up, donations have surged and hydropower projects and other job creation schemes are pro- gressing, von Einsiedel said. But Virunga remains vulnerable, the park’s backers warned. Over 140 park rangers have been killed in the last 15 years, according to von Einsiedel. Issues There are still a great many very serious security issues,” de Merode, the warden, said in an interview. “These are all problems that relate to illegal extraction of natural resources.” De Merode, who was seriously injured by gunmen in Congo last year, said armed factions still operate in the park despite the 2013 military offensive that scattered the M23 rebel group. Another rebel group, the FDLR, has been active in the area for two decades and is active in the charcoal industry blamed for destroying gorilla habitat. De Merode said there is also concern about possible efforts by a London-based company, SOCO International PLC, to drill for oil in the park. Last year, SOCO International agreed that there will be no exploratory drilling in Virunga unless Congo and the UN cultural agency UNESCO agree it would not threaten the park’s world heritage status. However, de Merode and the documentary director, von Einsiedel, fear the company could illegally try to extract oil from the park at a later stage. The Church of England, an investor in SOCO International, has said it is troubled by the firm’s alleged conduct in Virunga and that it could consider withdrawing its holdings. SOCO International has said its “area of interest” has been limited to Lake Edward and adjacent lowland savannah within Virunga, and not in mountain gorilla habitats, the park’s volcanoes and equatorial rainforest. It has criticized the documentary as one-sided and said it does not adequately reflect the company’s stated commitment to ethical conduct. Robert Richter, an American documentary producer who has been a judge at international film festivals, said “Virunga” depicts a threat to “at least one part” of the park but it was not clear that the mountain gorilla sanctuaries would be directly threatened by the activities of the oil company. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2015 Features Variety Actress Lily James poses for photographers during the photo call for the film ‘Cinderella’ at the 2015 Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin, on Feb 13. (AP) Film Films on Charlie Hebdo, terrorism draw interest at Berlin fest LOS ANGELES: The Berlin Intl Film Festival’s youth jury, Generation 14plus, announced its selections for 2015’s Crystal Bear recipients. Sweden’s “Flocken” (Flocking) by Beata Gardeler, was honored with the Crystal Bear for best film, with a special mention going to the Netherlands’ Sam de Jong’s “Prins” (Prince). Two short films were also singled out, with the UK’s Petros Silvestros’ “A Confession” winning the Crystal Bear for best short film and Austrian Chris Raiber’s “Nelly” earning a special mention. Generation 14plus’ international jury also bestowed prizes, including the Grand Prix, along with its EUR 7,500 ($8,500) endowment, for best feature-length film to Marielle Heller’s “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” and the special prize for best short film to Ben Adler’s “Coach.” (RTRS) ❑ ❑ ❑ LOS ANGELES: Marion Cotillard will star with Michael Fassbender in “Assassin’s Creed,” New Regency’s live-action adaptation of the Ubisoft video game. Justin Kurzel is directing, with production set to begin in the early fall for a Dec 21, 2016, release through Fox. The studio decided last September to move the project out of the 2015 summer window. “Assassin’s Creed” is cofinanced by RatPac and Alpha Pictures. Producers are Frank Marshall, Arnon Milchan, Jean-Julien Baronnet, Conor McCaughan, Fassbender and Pat Crowley. Ubisoft Motion Pictures developed the project and is producing with New Regency. (RTRS) ❑ ❑ ❑ LOS ANGELES: Gina Carano will star opposite Ryan Reynolds in FoxMarvel’s action-adventure “Deadpool,” with Tim Miller directing. Lauren Shuler Donner is producing “Deadpool,” set for a March start in Vancouver. Upstarts set to outshine vets BERLIN, Feb 14, (AFP): The race for the Golden Bear top prize at the 65th Berlin film festival shaped up as a dead heat Saturday, with break-out talents looking well placed to pip cinema heavyweights. Ahead of a gala awards ceremony in the German capital for the Berlinale, as the 11-day event is known, a slow-burn British drama about a foundering marriage and a banned Iranian picture emerged as favourites. Britain’s Charlotte Rampling, a hot pick for best actress, starred in “45 Years” as a woman whose husband learns the body of his longdead first love has resurfaced. The movie by Andrew Haigh led a critics’ poll in Berlin’s daily Tagesspiegel and industry magazine Screen, with Britain’s Daily Telegraph giving it five out of five stars. Rampling has “rarely been better than she is here, in the role of a placid, dog-walking, teadrinking middle-class Brit, who finds the floor abruptly falling out beneath her,” its reviewer Tim Robey wrote from the festival. Audiences also cheered Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s “Taxi”, the third picture he’s made in defiance of an official ban. Panahi, who is outlawed from travelling abroad and was absent from the Berlin premiere, appears on-screen as a Tehran cab driver, swapping stories with the denizens of his city. A mounted dashboard camera allowed him to film in secret, away — at first — from the prying eyes of the Islamic state’s authorities. Film industry bible Variety called it a “terrific road movie” that offered “a provocative discussion of Iranian social mores and the art of cinematic storytelling”. Latin American movies were also out in force, with Chilean director Pablo Larrain making a splash with “The Club” about defrocked paedophile priests given refuge from justice by the Roman Catholic Church. Reynolds portrays the title character, a talkative assassin who winds up with superpowers while seeking a cure for his cancer. Carano will play the role of Angel Dust, part of the Morlocks group of mutants in the Marvel universe. Miller is directing the superhero film from a script by Trade magazine The Hollywood Reporter called it a “grippingly sinister portrait” and pronounced Larrain, who garnered an Oscar nomination for his 2012 black comedy “No”, to be “one of the more genuine talents working in cinema today”. Guatemalan drama “Ixcanul Volcano” by Jayro Bustamante, about a teenage girl living with her family on a coffee plantation who plots to run away to the United States with her boyfriend, also drew warm applause. While the latest releases by veterans such as Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog divided critics, Britain’s Peter Greenaway fared better with his audacious biopic “Eisenstein in Guanajuato”. Explicit The sexually explicit film imagines an episode in the life of Sergei Eisenstein, the lionised Russian director of “Battleship Potemkin”, who tried to relaunch his career in Mexico in 1931. During his self-imposed exile, he starts a torrid affair with his local male guide. Critics said Finland’s Elmer Baeck, who portrayed Eisenstein as an exuberant intellectual and a charming clown, had strong odds to capture a gong as best actor. Audiences also embraced inventive German heist movie “Victoria” by Sebastian Schipper, shot in a single take on the streets of Berlin. The festival got off to a shaky start on February 5 with the premiere of Isabel Coixet’s “Nobody Wants the Night”, featuring Juliette Binoche as the early 20th century Arctic explorer Josephine Peary. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian called the picture “a pretty flimsy piece of work... which comes near to being broken on the wheel of its own ponderousness”. Smaller pictures from Romania and Russia later in the festival won fans, however. “Sworn Virgin”, the debut feature by Italy’s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Carano, a former MMA star, broke into movies with 2011’s “Haywire” and 2013’s “Fast and Furious 6. (RTRS) ❑ ❑ ❑ Cottillard Reynolds LOS ANGELES: It’s not often that Hollywood releases two Laura Bispuri, about a woman in the Albanian mountains who opts to pass as a man rather than live her life in marital subjugation, featured a much-praised turn by its star, Alba Rohrwacher. And a rare Russian-Ukrainian-Polish coproduction, Alexei German Jr’s dystopian vision of 2017 Russia, “Under Electric Skies”, also found admirers. “Nasty Baby”, Chilean director Sebastian Silva’s tale of a gay New York couple who want to have a child, scooped the “Teddy Award” on Friday night for the festival’s best LGBT film. A seven-member jury led by Hollywood director Darren Aronofsky will hand out the prestigious Golden and Silver Bear statuettes, which can propel a film to global box office success and bigger prizes. Among award winners last year were “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Boyhood”, both nominated for Oscars later this month, and the gritty Chinese thriller that won the Golden Bear, “Black Coal, Thin Ice”. ❑ ❑ ❑ Like several of the Oscar best-picture nominees, the highest-profile — and among the bestselling — projects at this year’s Berlin European Film Market were based on real-life events: IM Global’s Mel Gibsondirected “Hacksaw Ridge”; FilmNation’s Nicolas Cage starrer “Army of One”; and “Gold,” with Matthew McConaughey, from Sierra/Affinity. One all-too-real event, however, may be creating a niche market of its own: January’s Charlie Hebdo slaughter. It will take months for serious movie projects about the event to hit the pre-sales market. But, compounded by the decapitation of two Japanese citizens, one a journalist, by Islamic State militants days before the EFM’s Feb 5 kickoff, the murders gave a suddenly tragic relevance to titles major theatrical bombs on the same weekend. But that’s exactly what happened when “Jupiter Ascending” and “Seventh Son” both crashed in US theaters on Friday. Warner Bros’ “Jupiter Ascending,” starring Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis, is quickly falling in already made or just coming onto the market. In early trading, Kino Lorber closed US rights to Daniel Leconte’s 2008 docu-feature “It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks,” offered to distributors for a second time by Pyramide Intl. Two pubcasters, Germany’s Phoenix and Denmark’s DR, have requested the film. There is also UK acquisition interest. A chronicle of Charlie Hebdo’s passionate defense of freedom of speech in 2007 as it fought a legal battle in a French court with Islamic organizations over its publishing cartoons portraying Muhammad, in retrospect “It’s Hard...” also explains why Charlie Hebdo became a fundamentalist target. Also at the EFM, BAC Films announced pre-sales to Italy (Rai Cinema) and Japan (Nikkatsu) on Nicolas Saada’s “Taj Mahal,” a thriller set against the backdrop of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, focusing on the true case of young woman (Stacy Martin, “Nymphomaniac”) trapped in a suite during the assault. Germany and the UK are now under negotiations. “If the Charlie Hebdo drama hadn’t happened, we would never have re-issued ‘It’s Hard...’ or sold it abroad. It would have stayed in our library,” said Pyramide’s Eric Lagesse. Films Distribution is selling Assad Fouladkar’s “Halal Love,” now in post, presenting four stories about Muslims juggling their love life and desire with religious rules. “I had a conversation with a Japanese buyer about ‘Halal Love,’” said FD’s Nicolas Brigaud Robert. “They said there’s a curiosity about understanding the Muslim world, to see if these types of movies could interest in their country.” Nobody’s trying to make a quick buck out of Charlie Hebdo. Grosses from the French rerelease of “It’s Hard...,” which sold 40,000 admissions by early February, will be donated to Charlie Hebdo, per Lagesse. box office estimates to a skimpy $18 million opening. With a budget of $175 million, the Wachowskis’ sci-fi tentpole could lose tens of millions barring a dramatic turnaround overseas, in what could be the biggest flop of the year. The forecast for Universal and Legendary’s long-delayed “Seventh Son,” starring Jeff Bridges, is just as gloomy. The pricey fantasy tentpole has a projected loss of $85 million, as Variety exclusively reported this week, despite earning $82 million at the international box office. It’s on track for just $6 million in its US debut. (RTRS)
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