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Cannes Selections Announced
19 April 2007 (StudioBriefing)
The Cannes Film Festival confirmed today (Thursday) that Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights, starring Jude Law, Ed Harris, Norah Jones and Natalie Portman, will open the 60th annual festival on May 16. In something of a surprise, the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez "double bill" Grindhouse, which was expected to compete for the top Palme d'Or prize, will only be represented by the Tarantino half of the feature, Death Proof, which is being expanded to one hour and 50 minutes. Among the other 21 films selected for the competition are the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, starring Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, and Javier Bardem; David Fincher's Zodiac, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.; James Gray's We Own the Night, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg; and Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, starring mostly first-time actors. Serbian director Emir Kusturica, a two-time winner at Cannes and the chairman of the jury in 2005, will again be represented in the competition with the comedy Promise Me This. Among films screening out of competition will be Michael Moore's documentary Sicko (about the U.S. health system); Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen; Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, starring Angelina Jolie as the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's wife Mariane; and Ken Burns's The War. The latter film will presumably be compiled from Burns's upcoming documentary series about World War II for PBS. It is the only film on the Cannes list whose length is not indicated.

Award-Winning Director Learns New Meaning of "Pigeon English"
4 March 2005 (StudioBriefing)
Sarajevo-born film director Emir Kusturica, who won the Palme d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985 for When Father Was Away on Business and in 1995 for Underground, has balked at demands by British censors that he cut a two-second scene in his latest film showing a cat pouncing on a dead pigeon. In an interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper, Kusturica railed, "I am not cutting my film for this jerk. Was he brought up by pigeons or something? ... I just don't get it. The pigeon was already dead, we found it in the road. And no other censor has objected. What is the problem with you English? You killed millions of Indians and Africans, and yet you go nuts about the circumstances of the death of a single Serbian pigeon. I am touched you hold the lives of Serbian birds so dear, but you are crazy. I will never understand how your minds work."

Kusturica To Head Cannes Jury
21 January 2005 (StudioBriefing)
Bosnian-born director Emir Kusturica, who has been honored with the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or award in 1985 and 1995 (he is the only director ever to have won the prize twice), will serve as president of the 2005 jury in May, the festival announced Thursday. In a statement, Kusturica, an outspoken critic of the U.S.-led intervention in Yugoslavia (as well as the invasion of Iraq), said, "I have given myself the mission, as president of the jury, to put aesthetics and art at the heart of the show." As the head of a jury looking at short films last year, Kusturica said that he was hoping to save world cinema from Hollywood and expressed the hope that young filmmakers would take a more intense look at the human condition. "At the moment, life is drastic, politically, historically, socially. Cinema does nothing about this," he said.

Venice Film Fest Eyes Kubrick
2 September 1999 (StudioBriefing)
Praise was lavished on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) as it opened the Venice Film Festival Wednesday night, with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman attending. (The original, uncensored version was screened.) In an interview with the Associated Press, Yugoslavian director Emir Kusturica (Time of the Gypsies (1989), Arizona Dream (1993), Underground (1995)), who heads the Venice jury, remarked: "Kubrick's movie showed us the way to go. ... He showed us that cinema is still art." Said Cruise: "When we're 70 or 80 years old, we'll look back on this century and say: 'I was there with Stanley Kubrick. ... His movies have life beyond the opening week. ... It's like a great novel: you're always going to go back and look at it." Analysts have predicted that if Eyes Wide Shut (1999) follows the pattern of previous Kubrick films, it will do better abroad than it did in the U.S.