Last month, I wrote that, despite Madison’s many great qualities, its status as a secondary movie market wasn’t one of them. And let’s face it: besides Sundance Cinemas’s Screening Room Calendar and the occasional (but much appreciated) limited engagement from WUD Film or the Cinematheque, Madison doesn’t see a whole lot of international releases.
That’s a big reason why the Wisconsin Film Festival is such a heavily anticipated event each and every year. It brings an undeniable international flavor, and among this year’s 140+ titles, Madison moviegoers are champing at the bit for foreign cinema. Seriously. One of the festival’s first two sellouts this year was The Champagne Murders, a 1967 French murder mystery starring Anthony Perkins. That’s impressive, given that the other sellout show was for Joe, a higher profile film starring Nicolas Cage and from established director David Gordon Green. Other French titles this year include Yann Gonzalez’s hypersexual You and the Night, the “French Girls” Macaroni & Cheese, the political-family drama Age of Panic, and François Ozon’s sexual coming of age story, Young & Beautiful. “Restorations and Rediscoveries” also includes plenty of Jacque Demy with the likes of A Room in Town and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
The United Kingdom offers Le Week-End, Roger Michell’s sharp romance featuring Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan, and the Jude Law vehicle Dom Hemingway. 20,000 Days on this Earth, one of the fest’s more musically-inclined entries, tries to catalog the renaissance qualities of musician Nick Cave, while Sarah McCarthy’s documentary, The Dark Matter of Love, blends international fare with “Wisconsin’s Own” as it follows an Oregon family’s attempts to adopt three Russian children. Even super early Hitchcock (1929’s Blackmail) gets special treatment as the director’s early silent work is accompanied by David Drazin’s organ in the Overture Center’s Capitol Theater.
The festival’s “New Mexican Cinema” includes Claudia Sainte-Lucia’s highly-regarded debut The Amazing Catfish, Heli’s Mexican drug war, and Mariana Rodriguez’s Club Sandwich, which tells its coming-of-age story primarily from the perspective of its subject’s mother. Chile’s The Dance of Reality comes by way of none other than Alejandro Jodorowsky, returning behind the camera as well as appearing in front of it, in a pseudo-biographical picture. And if those titles seem too “down to earth,” Costa Rica’s Spanish-language All About the Feathers is a buddy comedy between a rooster and his security guard owner, a man who can’t bring himself to enter his beloved bird into cock fights.
Past Wisconsin Film Festivals have also treated Madison audiences to rarer Asian titles like Nameless Gangster or Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins. Japan offers a litany of genres this year with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s devastating Like Father, Like Son, the uberviolent Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (an undoubted future midnight classic), and R100, where director Hitoshi Matsuomoto pits one man in a battle against a gang of feisty dominatrices. In Intruders, South Korea’s Young-seok Noh introduces uninvited visitors to a screenwriter’s would-be cabin retreat, while Sang-soo Hong’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon follows several distressing days in the life of a young woman via diary entries. Taiwan’s Ming-liang Tsai chronicles a homeless family’s struggles to survive in Stray Dogs, while Singaporean director Anthony Chen takes a similar tact in Ilo Ilo, the story of a family’s financial crisis in the late 1990s.
These are but a taste of this year’s international offerings. Other “stops” include Italy (see: Dino Risi’s sold out Il Sorpasso, slated for an introduction from Nebraska director Alexander Payne); Australia’s The Rocket and an arid procedural in Mystery Road; and Denmark’s Rent a Family, Inc. and its gangster drama Northwest. There’s even a Bollywood title in Dilip Ghosh’s action musical, Commando: A One Man Army.
As if a country-by-country classification weren’t enough, a handful of feature-length films lay claim to multiple homes: The Congress (France, Israel, Poland, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg), The German Doctor (Argentina, France, Norway, Spain), In Bloom (Georgia, Germany, France), Sepideh (Denmark, Iran, Germany, Norway), A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (France, Estonia), Tanta Agua (Uruguay, Mexico, Netherlands, Germany), and Village at the End of the World (United Kingdom, Denmark, Greenland). It’s another veritable world tour at this year’s festival. As always: no boarding pass required.
- As always, you can find much more information on the Wisconsin Film Festival’s international titles in their online guide or in a copy of last week’s Isthmus