Summer festival in Ostend

by Aurore Engelen

18/08/2009 - Surfing the recent waves of hot weather, the Ostend Film Festival (August 19-25) is an ideal and entertaining summer festival, set in a seaside location.

The ten-day event will host a series of prestigious avant-premières. Besides a few medium-budget US titles, the festival gives pride of place to major European productions and Flemish Belgian cinema, whilst guaranteeing a minimum quota of auteur films.

In Flemish première, summer audiences will have the chance to discover young Swiss director Lionel Baier’s Another Man [trailer, film focus], previously shown at Namur and Mons.

The festival will also unveil Juraj Jakubisko’s Bathory [trailer], which was a box office hit in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This Slovakian/Czech/UK/Hungarian co-production tells the unusual story of the cruel, 16th-century Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory.

Other impressive premières straight from Cannes include Robert Guédigian’s The Army of Crime [trailer] (to be released on September 23 by Cinéart), and previous Palme d’Or favourite A Prophet [trailer, film focus] by Jacques Audiard (to be launched next week by ABC Distribution).

Meanwhile, Kinepolis Film Distribution is presenting part of its auteur line-up for the autumn. This includes two UK films: prolific director Michael Winterbottom’s Italian-set Genova [trailer], about the rebirth of a father and his two daughters who are shattered by the sudden death of their mother (to be released mid-September); and Stephen Elliott’s Easy Virtue [trailer], an English-style comedy of manners set in the 1930s (to be released at the start of September).

KFD will also present Dutch director Alex Van Warmerdam’s The Last Days of Emma Blank, to be released at the start of September.

Finally, KFD will also unveil two highly-anticipated Flemish features: Dorothée van den Berghe’s My Queen Karo [trailer] and Geoffrey Enthoven’s The Over the Hill Band [trailer], which hits Belgian screens tomorrow.

(Translated from French)