Un Certain Regard runs parallel to the main competition for the Palme d’Or, the top prize at Cannes, and is intended to showcase work by young and innovative directors. Actor Tim Roth will head this year’s Un Certain Regard jury.

Dolan is no stranger to success at Cannes. In 2009, J’ai tué ma mère – his first feature film, which he wrote, directed and co-starred in with Anne Dorval – won three prizes at the Director’s Fortnight, the independent film program at the festival.

In 2010, his second film, Les Amours imaginaires, also premiered at Cannes as part of Un Certain Regard.

Laurence Anyways is set in 1989, and is about a man who decides on his 30th birthday that he wants to become a woman.

The film stars Nathalie Baye, Melvil Poupaud and Dolan regular Monia Chokri, and is scheduled for release in May.

Among the films joining Laurence Anyways as part of this year’s Un Certain Regard is Antiviral, the first feature by Brandon Cronenberg, son of acclaimed Canadian director David Cronenberg.

At the Cannes festival’s main event, movies starring Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman will premiere and works by U.S. director Wes Anderson and David Cronenberg will be among 22 films vying for the coveted “Palme d’Or”, the top prize at the glitzy cinema showcase which can significantly boost a picture’s box office and awards potential.

Famous director/father David-Cronenberg with son Brandon-Cronenberg on his heel

Officials will be hoping that the blend of Hollywood star power and auteurs from around the globe will help the festival recover from last year’s controversy when Danish director Lars Von Trier was expelled for making Nazi jokes during a press conference.

“Killing Me Softly,” from New Zealand-born director Andrew Dominik, and co-starring “The Sopranos” James Gandolfini, sees Pitt investigating a heist during a mob-protected poker game.

Anderson’s 1960s drama “Moonrise Kingdom,” starring Ed Norton and Bill Murray, is set to kick off the May 16-27 festival, while Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis,” starring “Twilight” hearthrob Robert Pattison, is also in the main running.

And Twilight fans will also be keen to get their teeth into “On the Road,” the adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic novel from Brazilian director Walter Salles. Its cast includes Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart as well as Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst.

Contenders from host country France include “Vous N’Avez Encore Rien Vu,” from veteran European festival favorite Alain Resnais, 89, and Jacques Audiard’s “De Rouille et D’Os” (“Rust and Bone”) starring Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard.

Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, a former Palme d’Or winner, is also competing with his French film “Amour” starring Isabelle Huppert.

At a press conference held in the grand salon of a Paris hotel flanked by this year’s festival poster of Marilyn Monroe, organizers saluted great filmmakers from around the world.

This is a partial Article from The Montreal Gazette…

Continue reading at this link. http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Xavier+Dolan+heading+back+Cannes+film+festival/6484114/story.html

MOONRISE KINGDOM was filmed on an island in New England. It recounts a tormented and surprising story of children and adults during the stormy days of the summer of 1965.

Born in 1969, Wes Anderson is the director of Bottle Rocket (1996), Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2011), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).

Thierry Frémaux, the Festival’s General Delegate, commented: “Wes Anderson is one of the rising powers of American cinema, to which he brings a highly personal touch, particularly in MOONRISE KINGDOM, which once again is a testimony to the creative freedom in which he continues to evolve. Sensitive and independent, this admirer of Fellini and Renoir is also in his own right a brilliant and inventive filmmaker.”

Gilles Jacob, President of the Festival, is glad to proclaim: “With Wes Anderson opening the 65^th Festival de Cannes, young American cinema will be celebrated on the Croisette.”

Distributed in France by Studio Canal, the film will be released in cinemas on 16 May, the same day as its screening in Cannes. For the second consecutive year, with the agreement of its partner Canal+ and the support of the Fédération Nationale des Cinémas Français, the Festival de Cannes will make the Opening Ceremony available to all the cinemas that request it, so that spectators can experience “live” the full programme of the opening night of the Festival. In the USA, the film will be released on 25 May

I will have the reviewed list of official selection (Competition, Un Certain Regard, Out of Competition) on Thursday, 19 April.

Happy 65 Cannes - your one and only Marilyn Monroe.

The black and white picture shows Monroe in an intimate moment, seductively blowing a kiss.  The image conveys an exhilarating flash of myth meeting reality.

Monroe was just 36 when she was found dead in bed. Officially, she had overdosed herself with sleeping pills, but 50 years after this tragic end in 1962, nobody is sure whether it was an accident or a suicide or a murder.

But Marilyn Monroe remains after all these decades as sexily captivating as she was on screen, the innocence of her pout (matched today only by Angelina Jolie’s), and  the allure of her frock flying in the breeze still a source of  titillation.

The festival says – She enchants us with this promising gesture: a seductively blown kiss. The Festival is a temple of glamour and Marilyn is its perfect incarnation. Their coming together symbolises the ideal of simplicity and elegance.

What do you think of the official Cannes Poster…lets us know

Italian Director Nanni Moretti

Accepting the invitation, the Italian actor and director said: “This is a real joy, an honour and a tremendous responsibility to preside over the jury of the most prestigious festival of cinematography in the world, a festival that is held in a country where film has always been treated with interest and respect.
As a director, I was always very moved when my films were presented at the Festival de Cannes. I also have very happy memories of my experience as a jury member during the fiftieth anniversary season, and of the attentiveness and passion that went into the jury’s viewing and discussion of all the films.
As a spectator, fortunately I still have the same curiosity that I had in my youth and so it is a great privilege for me to embark on this voyage into the world of contemporary international film.”

Nanni Moretti  has presented six films at the Festival de Cannes, including last year’s highly praised Habemus Papam(We Have a Pope).

To read more on Moretti’s films credits: www.festival-cannes.fr/en/article/58800.html

Given this sobering reality, producers — members of the 99% — are embracing a post-distributor marketplace. But understanding how to navigate this alternate landscape is essential.

This means recognizing the sound of a reshuffling deck. In the old game, producers relied on key factors beyond their control: top-tier film festival invites, prestigious jury prizes, audience awards and, all too frequently, the particular tastes and needs of distribution executives.

From this new shuffle, producers will deal their own cards, managing risk and seeking out rewards that include some combination of maximum exposure, return on investment and recognition.

Of course, traditional distributors will continue to service independent films. However, I believe most producers will market and distribute their projects on their own by incorporating old and new media, within and outside the traditional marketplace. Benefits include greater control, reduced costs, increased financial rewards and transparent accounting. However, this also means assuming full responsibility from the onset and taking all measures required to achieve their objectives.

With that in mind, here’s seven key practices producers must embrace to succeed in the post-distributor marketplace.
Embrace the Role of Entrepreneur.
Understand the odds: Whether by design or default, you probably won’t have a conventional distributor. Research best practices; collaborate with other successful producers and industry professionals. Create and adhere to success plans grounded in hard numbers.

Mix Old and New Distribution.
Assume responsibility for building an integrated media platform; successful marketing and distribution plans are a mix of old and new media. While you may sidestep turnkey arrangements, you’ll still leverage traditional platforms where appropriate. Specialty theatrical releases, DVD, VOD, television broadcasts, digital streaming and downloads, whether for sale or subscription, all figure in. Like recording artists who release content through their own labels, producers can establish their own branded distribution companies. Thanks to an emerging class of service providers and content aggregators, there’s a number of distribution options that act as facilitators rather than gatekeepers and render essential delivery services (digital encoding, quality control) for relatively modest fees.

Create Key Marketing Elements, and Then Create Some More.
Constantly create content. Take an abundance of photographs and videos that capture each step of production, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes; they will be vital for marketing. Images are the connective tissue between the production and its fanbase.

Integrate Social Media.
Your project’s success depends on your ability to incorporate social media as an essential marketing platform. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are indispensable for developing an audience and generating a robust and substantive dialogue with their fans.

Forge Partnerships with Friends, Family and Fans.
Musicians have understood this for years: Success depends on establishing a personal relationship with fans. Create a network of digital hubs (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, your own websites) to share project-related content; partner with support groups that will mobilize for both fundraising and distribution. Over the past year, we’ve witnessed a slew of producers who cultivated and partnered with rabid fanbases to achieve their goals.
David Dinerstein, now president of LD Entertainment, helped manage Kevin Smith’s “Red State” marketing strategy. “Every project comes with its own brand of drama,” he says. “With entertaining and informative posts, empowered producers can create positive value even from production setbacks.” While following the production’s own dramatic narrative, audiences vest in the film’s outcome and can become a service for financial and marketing support.

Collaborate with Experts.
You will need a team of specialists to replace the people who manage publicity, marketing and distribution in the traditional model. Key is a digital marketer to design and manage unique strategies; author and industry consultant Jonathan Reiss says these individuals are important enough to deserve producer status — Producers of Marketing and Distribution, aka PMDs.

Incorporate Crowdfunding.
It’s not just production money; crowdfunding is an invaluable tool for financing marketing and distribution. It also increases audience awareness and can motivate an army of loyal supporters. 

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a powerful blueprint: Members of the 99 percent hold the power to change the course of independent film.

Indiewire.com – writing credit Steven C. Beer

Steven C. Beer is a shareholder in the international entertainment practice of Greenberg Traurig’s New York office. Steven has served as counsel to numerous award-winning writers, directors and producers, as well as industry-leading film production, film finance and film distribution companies.

The Google Inc.-owned video site announced Thursday Jan 19th that Your Film Festival will take submissions of short films up to 15 minutes in length between Feb. 2 and March 31. Fifty semi-finalists will be selected by Scott Free Productions, Ridley and Tony Scott’s production company.

Those 50 films will form a channel on YouTube: www.YouTube.com/yourfilmfestival. There, users will be able to view the films and vote for their favorites.

The 10 finalists will be flown to the 69th annual Venice Film Festival, where their films will be screened in August. Ridley Scott will lead a jury in selecting a winner, who will receive a $500,000 grant from YouTube to produce a work with Scott Free.

 See video below and more details at http://www.youtube.com/user/yourfilmfestival

“I think that modern technology is playing a very positive role for low-budget filmmaking,” notes Slamdance prexy and co-founder Peter Baxter. “Cameras are more affordable and filmmakers can spend a lot more time in the editing room. You’ll really see it in the strength of performances in the narrative section this year.”

Baxter said the new crop of narrative films has accelerated in quality this year. “We’ve had very strong documentaries in recent years but this year we are seeing very strong directing voices in the narrative entries,” he added.

The Slamdance competition lineup has 10 narrative films and eight docs — including 13 world premieres — culled from nearly 5,000 submissions and reserved for first time feature directors working with budgets under $1 million. Slamdance will run through Thursday at Park City’s Treasure Mountain Inn.

Narrative titles already generating buzz are “Bindlestiffs,” directed by Andrew Edison; “Heavy Girls,” directed by Axel Ranisch, and “OK, Good,” directed by Daniel Martinico. Documentaries that have gained pre-festival notice include “We Are Legion: The Story of Hacktivists,” directed and written by Brian Knappenberger;”Getting Up,” directed by Caskey Ebeling; and “Kelly,” directed by James Stenson;

Breakout hits from previous fests have included “Mad Hot Ballroom” in 2005, Seth Gordon’s “The King of Kong” in 2007 and Oren Peli’s “Paranormal Activity” in 2008. Some of the filmmakers first discovered at Slamdance include Chris Nolan (“Following,” 1998), Marc Forster (“Loungers,” 1996), Jared Hess via a short version of “Napoleon Dynamite,” and Lynne Shelton (“We Go Way Back,” 2006).

Peli, who’s on a promo tour of his upcoming ABC series “The River,” told Variety that his Slamdance experience — when “Paranormal Activity” screened in January 2008 — was unforgettable.

“It was kind of overwhelming for someone with no real connections to Hollywood,” Peli noted. “To get that kind of recognition from people who are really interested in films was just so exciting. What I’d like to do sometime is just go back to Slamdance and enjoy it as a fan, which is obviously not going to happen this year.

Writer Dave McNary

Director Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore received 13 nominations and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method received 11 nominations—both films are nominated for Best Motion Picture and Achievement in Direction.

Rounding out the Best Motion Picture category are the awardwinning Monsieur Lazhar; the suspenseful The Whistleblower and the crowd-pleaser Starbuck.

BEST MOTION PICTURE
A DANGEROUS METHOD – Martin Katz, Marco Mehlitz, Jeremy Thomas
CAFÉ DE FLORE – Pierre Even, Marie-Claude Poulin, Jean-Marc Vallée
MONSIEUR LAZHAR РLuc D̩ry, Kim McCraw
STARBUCK РAndr̩ Rouleau
THE WHISTLEBLOWER – Christina Piovesan, Celine Rattray

ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTION 
DAVID CRONENBERG – A Dangerous Method
STEVEN SILVER – The Bang Bang Club
JEAN-MARC VALLÉE – Café de Flore
PHILIPPE FALARDEAU – Monsieur Lazhar
LARYSA KONDRACKI – The Whistleblower

The full list of nominees are locate at Hye’s Musings Blog   http://hyemusings.blogspot.com/2012/01/32nd-genie-awards-nominees.html

I know it’s wrongheaded, but I’m beginning to be anti-anti-piracy.

Wherever you turn these days, the anti-piracy mafia has become ever more shrill. There’s a new White House initiative, there are new bills in the House and Senate — and then, of course, there are Hollywood’s awards-season screeners. The DVDs sent to voters do not begin with a cheerful invitation to enjoy the film, but rather with a litany of legal threats that each year grow longer and more dire.

Talk to the anti-piracy professionals, of course, and they’ll acknowledge these admonitions consist of useless legal rhetoric. Each year, essentially the same percentage of vids end up getting pirated anyway.

There are growing signs that the copyright-protection lobby is pissing people off rather than converting them to the cause. Political leaders and the Silicon Valley elite all seem alarmed by new bills with virtuous-sounding titles like the Protect Intellectual Property Act — bills that, as the Wall Street Journal observed, could “strangle the Internet with regulation.”

The fear is that, if these bills pass, a single infringing link on a single page of a website could result in the entire site being shut down.

In Hollywood, the release of screeners each year plays out like a ritual of ambivalence. The studios want voters to view the screeners — but not really. They’d prefer we go to theaters. So would filmmakers, who resent seeing their artistry squeezed onto a TV screen. Even the Academy’s furtive experiments with digital downloads make filmmakers edgy because streamed images look more like standard-def DVDs than like high-def Blu-rays (the same for iTunes streaming).

I’ve been an Oscar voter for many years and relish the annual avalanche of screeners, but I nonetheless find the threats and admonitions tiresome. Further, a substantial number of TV sets cannot recognize the “enter” instruction on the vids that certify your “acceptance” of the threats, so you never get to see the movie anyway.

Historically, screeners have always seemed to drive the Academy to distraction. One year voters were even sent a device that scanned the screeners, but many were defective and were soon discarded.

For the studios, dispatching screeners is an expensive exercise — the whole production and marketing process comes to as much as $400,000 a film. Voters may receive a DVD and a Blu-ray but distributors are not supposed to send more than one screener to a voter.

To save costs, a few studios have tried to develop exclusionary lists of “retired” Academy members — those who do not pay their $250 annual fee and thus cannot cast votes. No one knows what percentage of the 6,000 Academy members is “retired” but it could run into the thousands as a result of the bad economy and the Academy’s AARP-plus demographics.

As a voting member, I still find it gratifying to watch a screener in the quiet of my den to admire the individual components of the filmmaking process — art direction, cinematography, etc. With that in mind, it’s doubly jarring to be instructed at the outset that I must break the screener in half immediately upon viewing and feed it into the nearest inferno.

I don’t like destroying movies. I also don’t like breaking videos in half (there must be myriad lawsuits over cuts and bruises). Finally, what if the voter wants to rerun a DVD just before the final vote to reassess a performance or even a musical score?

The anti-piracy zealots aren’t interested in aesthetic considerations such as these. They want to protect their copyright even if they have to badger you and send you to jail to do so.

Telefilm’s old system failed to account for international box office and DVD sales, to say nothing of factoring in the acclaim films receive. Such accolades have led to well-established careers and numerous jobs for actors and technicians, even though this wasn’t being officially measured, says Carolle Brabant, executive director of Telefilm.

For instance, according to older ratings systems, the 2009 Quebec comedy De père en flic – with a home box office of close to $11-million – was a clear hit. But the 2010 film Incendies might not be considered much of a winner with a box office of only about $5-million – despite the fact that it was nominated for an Oscar and won eight Genie awards, including best picture.

In fact, most Canadian films seemed to fall below expectations under the old system.

A decade ago, former Heritage Minister Sheila Copps set a goal for films to aim for 5 per cent of domestic box office – an attempt to rally Canada’s then-faltering film industry. But given the number of Hollywood films clogging multiplexes across Canada, English-Canadian films typically gross only 1 per cent of the market or worse. Quebec films do only marginally better at around 3 per cent.

And while Canadian films such as 2008’s Blindness often do very well overseas or in DVD and video-on-demand sales, these indexes haven’t been factored into whether they’ve been a “success.”

So, on Wednesday, Telefilm announced a new Success Index. Now 60 per cent of a film’s score will be based on sales figures, 30 per cent on awards and film-festival appearances and 10 per cent on how much of a film’s funding was private as opposed to public.

“The fact that we’re combining the cultural and commercial aspect into an index is quite unique,” says Brabant.

“A good example is [director] Guy Maddin,” she says. “He’s a true international star. His work has been recognized around the world. But his films are not necessarily reaching huge box office in Canada.”

And for films with strong overseas and DVD sales, Brabant argues that the new index better reflects the current reality of the film business, and helps to define what a 5 per cent box-office target might really look like. The industry is now multinational. Most large films have some foreign backing and therefore have some expectations of box-office and DVD sales overseas.

“We see it as an important tool to actually achieve that 5 per cent,” Brabant says. “Just having box office as the most important measurement was not sufficient.”

The new Success Index not only changes how individual films are measured, but how Telefilm itself is measured. Are they doing a good job of allocating public funds for films?

“It has always struck me, and maybe it’s from my background as a chartered accountant, that it was pretty unique in this industry to measure our success mainly from what we’re doing in Canada,” Brabant says. “When you look at companies in other industries – Bombardier or Cirque du Soleil, for example – these companies are not only successful in Canada, but they’re successful all over the world. I thought this was something that was missing [in Telefilm’s measurement].”