News

Festival runs October 12-23.

Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, and Sergei Loznitsa’s The Natural History Of Destruction are among the international competitions line-up at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival next month.

This year’s competitions include 10 films receiving their North American premiere and 17 getting their US premiere as the entries vie for the festival’s Gold Hugo award in the categories of international feature, international documentary, and new directors.

The festival runs October 12-23. The full international competition line-ups are below.

Playing in International Feature Competition are: The Beasts (Sp-Fr), Rodrigo Sorogoyen, US premiere; Before,...

Thanks in part to a strong co-production drive, 13 Mexican-nationality movies play at San Sebastian this year, a major presence.

Perlak frames Alejandro G. Iñarritu Venice player “Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.” Much of the heat, in industry terms at least, will come from the the premieres and sneak peeks.

In one highlight, Natalia Beristáin will world premiere “Noise” (“Ruido”), before its Netflix November bow. In possibly another, Mexico’s Laura Pancarte (“Non-Western”) unveils “Sueño Mexicano” as a pic-in-post.

Eyes will also be turned to Mexico’s latest generation of auteurs. One director is suddenly very well known: Longtime editor Natalia López Gallardo, a Berlin Jury Prize winner for “Robe of Gems.”

Others are bubbling under: Juan Pablo González whose “Dos Estaciones” impressed at Sundance, Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson, director of “Summer White,” another Sundance title, and Bruno Santamaría, a Gold Hugo best doc winner at the 2020 Chicago Festival...

Eight of the 10 directors in the Morelia Festival’s main Mexican competition are women, led by two of the biggest Mexican fest hits of the year,“Robe of Gems,” Natalia López Gallardo’s Berlin Special Jury laureate, and “Huesera,” from Michelle Garza Cervera, a double Tribeca winner.

Features with Indigenous or Black Mexican protagonists have shot up in Mexico, from 14 in 2019 to 31 in 2019, according to Imcine’s Mexican Cinema Yearbook.

In 2017, Mexico’s biggest homegrown hit was Nicolas López’s “Do It Like an Hombre,” a merciless taunt of a Mexican macho’s helpless homophobia, which grossed 11.0 million in the country.

For centuries an entrenched bastion of machismo, in film terms, the dial is finally moving on diversity.

“When I started out, like 20 years ago, I could count with my fingers the female directors I knew in Mexico; and today, there are almost 100,” says Natalia Beristáin, director of 2017’s Morelia...

Fresh from his Netflix success with “Ride or Die”, a film that everyone seems to have seen for different reasons, Ryuichi Hiroki continues his exploration of the concept of crime and punishment in a completely different setting, the closed community of a small fictional island.

Noise is screening at Asian Pop Up Cinema

The story is adapted from the homonymous manga by Tetsuya Tsutsui and begins with a middle-aged local driving a stranger around the island, before the latter strangles him for no apparent reason. A bit later, the stranger ends up in the property of Keita Izumi, the “star of the island”, since his black figs are about to feature on a TV program that also comes with a big government grant that will help the declining economy of the area. The first interaction ends up without any happenings, but soon Keita’s daughter disappears. The aggravated father seeks...