Twenty-four films have been short-listed for the European Film of the Year prize at this year's European Film Awards (EFA) - and despite the boom in Irish film production, not one of the nominees is Irish. Neil Jordan's Michael Collins made the final EFA short-list last year.
As many as seven of this year's short-list are wholly or partly French productions, including, inexplicably, Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, and Mathieu Kassovitz's Assassin(s), which was critically reviled at Cannes this year. There are five British nominees: Michael Winterbottom's Welcome To Sarajevo, Mike Leigh's Career Girls, Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book, Gary Oldman's Nil By Mouth and Anthony Minghella's awards-laden The English Patient. The EFA ceremony will be held in Berlin on December 6th.
New movies from John Woo, Wim Wenders and Sally Potter are included in the first raft of titles confirmed by the 42nd Murphy's Cork Film Festival, which runs from October 12th to 19th. The Woo movie is the dazzling action picture Face/Off, while the Wenders is the disappointing The End Of Violence with Bill Pullman, Andie McDowell and Gabriel Byrne.
Sally Potter, who made Orlando, directs and stars in The Tango Lesson, in which she plays a film-maker falling in love with her dance teacher. It will be part of the festival's Kinematic Dance programme in association with the Firkin Dance Centre in Cork. The festival's special programmes will also include a tribute to Orson Welles and the work of the audacious Canadian director Mike Hoolbom.
Among the other new features confirmed by Cork are Richard Kwietniowski's film of Gilbert Adair's Love And Death On Long Island, with John Hurt as a reclusive English writer who becomes infatuated with a teen heart-throb (Jason Priestley); Bill Bennett's well-regarded new Australian movie Kiss Or Kill; Neil Labute's In The Company Of Men, which has become a prominent talking point in the US; Carine Adler's low-budget drama Under The Skin, which won the Michael Powell Award for best British feature at Edinburgh last month; and the French movie selected to open Edinburgh, Alain Berliner's Ma Vie En Rose, dealing with a seven-year-old boy convinced he should be a girl.
One notable feature about the super-patriotic US blockbusters Independence Day and Air Force One is they are both directed by Germans - Roland Emmerich and Wolfgang Petersen respectively. When I met Petersen recently, I asked him if this was mere coincidence. "To an extent, it is," he said. "We in Germany were not allowed to have anything like that kind of American patriotism after the war. There was no such thing as flag-waving or being patriotic or being proud of anything. In America it's very different. I don't know if that's the whole explanation, but maybe we have some fascination with it because we were never allowed to do it for ourselves."
Petersen, who studied film in Berlin and was nominated for an Oscar for Das Boot (The Boat) in 1981, has been working in the US in recent years, on action movies such as Outbreak and In The Line Of Fire. "In the old days it was the Hollywood studios who controlled everything," he observed. "Now it's the stars who are in control and they're not tied to studio contracts anymore, so they can do whatever they like. The studios are downgraded now to the point of just coming up with the money. And if Tom Cruise said he wanted to make a film of the San Diego phone book, they would back it because he likes it."
Petersen said he was developing two projects to follow Air Force One. One, Labour Of Love, he described as "an intimate love story in which a widower copes in an unusual way with the loss of his wife who dies in a car crash - it deals directly with the theme of life after death." The other, Endurance, spans the years 1914 to 1916 and deals with the explorer Ernest Shackelton.
"It's going to be big," says Petersen. "An epic - like Lawrence Of Arabia with ice."
The film nominees for this year's Kilkenny Irish Beer Cream of Irish Awards are the actors Liam Neeson and Brendan Gleeson, and director Donald Tayolor Black. The awards - which also cover photography, sculpture, multimedia, craft and design, fashion and contemporary music - will be presented at a lunch in Dublin next Thursday.
Having been portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis in an Oscar-nominated performance in In The Name Of The Father, Gerry Conlon turns actor in the new Antonia Bird movie Face, due here on September 26th. A Cockney gangster thriller written by Ronan Bennett, it stars the ubiquitous Robert Carlyle with Ray Winstone, Steven Waddington and, in a minor role, Blur singer Damon Albarn. The Variety review of the film states that it also features "Irish politician Gerry Conlon, cameoing". Just fancy that.
Ruth Maher, who recently graduated from Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design, is the only Irish representative in competition at next week's International Student Animation Festival in Ottawa. She will be travelling to Canada with her graduation film, The Chip On My Shoulder, which took the runner-up prize in the international animation showcase at this year's Galway Film Fleadh. The Chip On My Shoulder will be screened by RTE this autumn.
The autumn season of movies at Triskel-Odeon in Cork kicked off last weekend with Antonia's Line. The season promises two Iranian films, Gabbeh and The White Balloon, and a selection of Indian cinema including Pather Panchali, Shakespeare Wallah and Salaam Bombay! Look out, too, for Al Pacino's Looking For Richard, Todd Solondz's Welcome To The Dollhouse and Terrence Malick's Badlands and Days Of Heaven. Screenings will be from Saturdays to Tuesdays at Triskel-Odeon this season.
Perish the thought. Restaurant reviewer Michael Winner returns to film-making with Parting Shots, a comedy about a wedding photographer who has six weeks to live. Now shooting on location in London, it features Chris Rea, Felicity Kendal, John Cleese, Bob Hoskins, Ben Kingsley, Joanna Lumley, Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg. Beware of imminent reports from Winner on the quality of film-set catering.
Michael Dwyer begins his reports from the Toronto Film Festival on next Friday's Vision page.
