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Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Our Man in Cannes: Austin-area filmmaker sells his short
CANNES, France — Dana Glover of Round Rock-based Midian Films had an unexpected surprise at this year’s festival.
As he did last year, he came to Cannes with a short film, this one called “TKL,” which was intended to be a calling card for people interested in financing a full-length film. Instead, he sold the short — an almost unheard-of event.
Turns out that several European countries are starting to show shorts on cable networks, and the channels need content.
The buyer of “TKL” was the Mini Movie Channel, www.minimovie.com. The channel has outlets in France, Russia and Luxembourg.
Glover did not disclose the sales price but said he hopes the deal will lead to a full-length feature.
Press material for the short describe it this way: “Kristi is on a secret rendezvous to meet a friend at a local bar. The bar happens to be near the site of several unsolved murders. After her friend is a no-show, Kristi discovers she’s being hunted in a terrifying game of cat and mouse.”
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Our Man in Cannes: Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Che’ premieres
CANNES, France — Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” premiered Wednesday night in a five-hour marathon session, including an intermission, and it’s safe to say that it’s the most ambitious movie from an American director since the 1970s.
Benicio Del Toro stars as the Argentine revolutionary who helped overthrow the Batista regime in Cuba and helped install Fidel Castro as the longtime leader.
That’s the segment that originally made up the first part, called “The Argentine” and now called “Che Part 1.”
The second part deals with Che’s role as a guerrilla leader in Bolivia, 10 years after the Cuban revolution. That movie was originally to be called “The Guerrilla” but screened Wednesday night as “Che Part 2.”
It’s unclear how the epic tale will eventually be released in the States. After all, the long running time would prevent exhibitors from showing it more than once per evening, cutting into ticket sales and, thus, profitability.
Soderbergh is expected to address such questions at a news conference Thursday.
Whatever the case, the Wednesday night screening was a spectacle that is assured of getting both raves and pans from the international press. After the movie ended, there was a bit of competition from those who were booing and those who were cheering. The cheers predominated.
To film the movie, Soderbergh used a new digital process called RED. The body of the camera is designed for flexibility and weighs about 9 pounds.
Soderbergh says the RED process “sees the way I see … so beautifully attuned to that most natural of phenomena — light.”
During the intermission Wednesday night, the entryway to the theater was abuzz. The festival handed out brown bags filled with sandwiches, Kit Kats and bottled water to about a thousand journalists who stuck around for the second half. And that was the vast majority.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it in Cannes.
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Our Man in Cannes: More Texas connections in South of France
CANNES, France — I went over to the American Pavilion to check on high-speed phone access and ran into Michael Cain, the head of the American Film Institute Festival in Dallas. He and his team are over here to promote their festival and check out the new movies. Since returning to Dallas from L.A. in the past decade, Cain started, from scratch, the Deep Ellum Film Festival, which has morphed into the AFI fest, the biggest — and best — annual movie celebration in Dallas.
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