12/09/2008

Kicking off tonight and running until September 21, the 7th Milan Film Festival offers, as per usual, a selection of international shorts, documentaries, feature films, music videos and discussions from and on independent cinema and new language forms.

The most highly anticipated event of this year’s edition is the retrospective on Terry Gilliam, which he will attend. All of the work of the former writer and director for Monty Python will be screened (except for the upcoming The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) – from the short experiments of his early years (Storytime, 1968) to the cult movies of the 1980s (like his most famous, Brazil), through to the recent Tideland [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

There are four European films in competition (dedicated to first and second films), including the world premiere of Slow Mirror by Hungarian directors Igor and Ivan Buharov. The lugubrious comedy “speaks of dreams and reality, and the fine line that separates them,” say the brothers, making their feature debut after winning acclaim for their numerous shorts.

Miloslav Novák’s Italian/Czech Peace With Seals will instead have its European premiere – the poetic and mad journey from Prague to Sardinia on the heels of a monk seal. Also from Czech Republic, but co-produced with China and Sweden, is the “detective documentary” Lost Holiday by Lucie Králová.

From the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival comes Ruben Östlund’s Swedish title Involuntary [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Erik Hemmendorff
interview: Ruben Östlund
film profile], an ensemble film on the unpredictable effects of human behaviour.

In the section “Colpe di Stato: The strategy of terror in the name of democracy,” of note is Jean-Michel Carrè and Jill Emery’s The Putin System, a French/German/Lithuanian co-production that looks at the political life and character of Vladimir Putin.

(Translated from Italian)