12/11/2010

The 59th Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival opened yesterday with The Life of Fish, by former prize-winner Matías Bize.

Running until November 21, the event will as usual showcase films by young directors, most of them unreleased, chosen over the course of the year from among about a thousand submissions. They will be presented before around 1,000 professionals, media and about 60,000 viewers.

Among the 15 titles in International Competition are nine European productions: Brit flicks Just Inès by Marcel Grant and Kandahar Break by David Whitney; Claudio Giovannesi’s The House in the Clouds [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Italy); Juana Macías’s Plans for Tomorrow [+see also:
trailer
making of
film profile] (Spain); Jaap van Heusden’s Win/Win [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Netherlands); Tomas Donela’s Farewell –The Ballad of a Lucky Man (Lithuania); Maiju Ingman’s When the Day is Done (Estonia); Kaspar Munk’s Hold Me Tight [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Denmark); and Lisa Langseth’s Pure [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Sweden).

The festival’s other main section International Discoveries, which is non-competitive, is showing ten titles. These include Italian director Michela Occhipinti’s Letters From the Desert (Eulogy to Slowness); Sophie Schoukens’s Belgian film Marieke, Marieke [+see also:
trailer
film profile]; Motel Nana by Serbia’s Predrag Velinović; Czech title Men in Rut by Robert Sedlácek; and collective film Some Other Stories [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], co-produced by Ireland and all the countries of the former Yugoslavia.

Other festival sections include the documentary sidebar "Pretty Real" (which will present Cannes laureate Armadillo [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Janus Metz, director of Arm…
film profile] by Danish director Janus Metz); the children’s film section; the classics selection; and free-of-charge midnight screenings, focusing on short films.

(Translated from French)