Your favourite European film website will be undergoing some site maintenance and several technical updates for the rest of this week and through the weekend, in preparation for a brand-new redesign that will be launched in time for the 2008 Cannes Film Festival that starts on Wednesday, May 14.
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While French cinema reflects the experience of the country’s immigrant population with dramas that range from hard-hitting (Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine) to sweetly dysfunctional (Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’esquive, La Graine et le mulet) and the Germans have the poignant dramas of Fatih Akin, Dutch cinema has taken the opposite route in recent years by talking to and about its immigrant population in all-inclusive blockbuster comedies. The genre also spawned several recognisable stars, including Mimoun Oaïssa and Maryam Hassouni, the Dutch Shooting Stars of 2006 and this year, respectively. The editor of european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij, spoke with Maryam Hassouni before the premiere of Dunya & Desie at the Berlin Film Festival.
The Competition titles of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival were announced today, with a Belgian, two French and two Italian films making the cut, as well as Mondruczo's Hungarian Delta and Wim Wenders' European co-production The Palermo Shooting. Two French film will run in Competition this year, both from veteran directors: Arnaud Desplechin's Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Story) and Philippe Garrel's La Frontière de L'aube. The French-language La silence de Lorna from the Belgian Dardenne brothers will also play in Competition, as will the Italian films Il Divo from Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone's Gomorra. The festival will open on May 14 and will run through May 25. UPDATE: Several new titles had been added to the list below.
The David di Donatello Awards, Italy's national film prizes, were handed out on Friday, with the mystery La ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake) winning a staggering ten awards, including Best Picture. The film from first-time director Andrea Molaioili beat two films by veteran directors and with bona fide Italian stars: Antonello Grimaldi's bereavement drama Caos Calmo (Quiet Chaos) with Nanni Moretti and Silvio Soldini's marital drama Giorni e nuvole (Days and Clouds) with Margherita Buy and Antonio Albanese. The latter film did win Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress honours for Buy and Alba Rohrwacher respectively, while Caos Calmo won in the categories Best Supporting Actor (Alessandro Gassman), Best Song and Best Score.
A favourite of francophone children everywhere and the first experience of French literature for many French students abroad, writer René Goscinny and illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempe's classic Le petit Nicolas(Nicholas) will finally get the big screen treatment. The film project will be directed by Laurent Tirard (Molière) and will star Kad Merad (Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis / Welcome to the Sticks) and Valérie Lemercier (Les fauteuils d'orchestre / Avenue Montagne) as Nicolas's parents. The title role of the mischievous little pupil -- who tells the story from his unique point of view -- still remains to be cast. (source: allocine)
Antichrist, the much-anticipated return to the horror genre of director Lars von Trier (Manderlay) will be filmed over 25 to 35 days at the tail end of the summer in Germany. It tells the story of a wedded couple who retreat to an isolated forest cabin after the woman starts suffering from an anxiety neurosis following the death of their 3-year-old son. Her husband, who is an experienced psychologist and seems to suffer less from the loss, hopes his isolation experiment will help his wife. The screenplay of Antichrist, a co-production involving Denmark, Germany, France and Italy, was co-written by the prolific Anders Thomas Jensen. (source: Filmstiftung NRW)
After his 1980s-set pansexual drama Les témoins (The Witnesses), French veteran director André Téchiné returns to the present for his latest project, tentatively titled La fille du RER ("The Girl on the Train"). The film will start shooting next month and is based on a true story of a mythomaniac young woman who told the French media in 2004 that she had been the victim of an anti-semitic attack on one of the Paris-area urban trains (the "RER" of the French title). The star of the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta, Émilie Dequenne, will play the young woman (called Alice in the film), while veteran actress Catherine Deneuve will play Alice's overbearing mother Louise. It will mark Deneuve's 6th collaboration with Téchiné; more than any other director in history.
Javier Cámara in Nacho G. Velilla's 'Fuera de carta' (Chef's Special). Photo by José Haro, (c) Antena 3 Films.
Comedies can be subdivided into all sorts of niches, including straightforward romantic comedies (Ensemble c'est tout / Hunting and Gathering), gay comedies (20 centímetros / 20 Centimetres, Reinas / Queens) and cooking comedies (Eden, Bella Martha / Mostly Martha). But rarely, if ever, have these three elements been brought together -- at least, not until Nacho G. Velilla's Fuera de carta (Chef's Special). The romantic gay cooking comedy premiered in Spain on Friday and walked away with the Audience Award and a Best Actor Award at the Málaga Film Festival on Saturday.
Your favourite European film website will be undergoing some site maintenance and several technical updates for the rest of this week and through the weekend, in preparation for a brand-new redesign that will be launched in time for the 2008 Cannes Film Festival that starts on Wednesday, May 14. 
