24th VIFF

[Johann]

Great!

Glad you got to see it.
I loved it.
It is a very fun "loopy" movie.

I loved the scene where the two women "duel" (the one with the silly string effect) and just the absurdity of the "theatre".

The singin' and dancin' was something, huh?

[Johann]

Here's a list of award winners from this year's VIFF
(which I didn't attend but got all of the press/media releases)


Audience/People's Choice award
THE LIVES OF OTHERS(Germany)
dir. Florian henckel von Donnesmarck


Federal Express Most Popular Canadian Feature
Mystic Ball (Ontario)
dir. Greg Hamilton



National Film Board award for Best Documentary
Have You Heard From Johannesburg?
(USA) dir. Connie Field


Special Jury Prize
Radiant City (Canada)
dir. Gary Burns

Women in Film & Video Vancouver Artistic Merit award
CARMEN MOORE (from Carl Bessai's Unnatural & Accidental)

Dragons & Tigers award for Young Cinema
Todo Todo Teros (Philippines)

CityTV Western Canada Feature Film award
EVERYTHING'S GONE GREEN (B.C.)
dir. Paul Fox

[oscar jubis]

Originally posted by Johann
When the Tide Comes In


I fell in love with the main character and I fell in love with this excellent movie from France.

Yolande Moreau is Irene, a talented actress who is starring in her one-woman show, a comedy about a fat masked female freak who killed for love and searches for love.

For every performance she brings a male audience member up on stage to be her beloved "chicken".

The crowd laughs like hyenas from the embarrasing situations she puts these poor guys in, holding their hands, telling them to give her money (even if they have to go back to their seat to get the cash from their jacket), pressing their heads to her large chest, her lovely magnificent chicken..

Well one guy keeps coming back to the shows after he's been the guinea pig for her show. They begin a relationship, and it gets pretty weird- I was waiting for him to rape or kill her- the guy is shady and wonky and I had no idea where the story was gonna go and it was a great surprise when we get to the end and you see where Moreau and Gilles Porte were taking us.


L'Amour par excellence.

Yolande Moreau is a respected French actor and her first film (co-directed with Gilles Porte) won the Cesar for Best First Film and Best Actress.

It gave me a warm fuzzy feeling in my guttiwuts

It seems like an appropriate time to rediscover this film (and unearth your review) on the occasion of the North American release of SERAPHINE, which feaures a tour-de-force, Cesar-winning performance by Yolande Moreau. Of course, most film buffs recognize Ms. Moreau from her appearance as AMELIE's long-suffering concierge.

After Vancouver, When The Tide Comes In got picked up by New Yorker Films, was re-titled WHEN THE SEA RISES and received a very limited release in January of 2006. The film was released on DVD in October 2006, but it didn't come to my attention until my admiration for SERAPHINE prompted me to rent it.

One thing I'd like to add to your review is that when you wrote that "Moreau is Irene", that is more true than you let on. During the 80s, she traveled from town to town in the border region between France and her native Belgium performing precisely the same one-woman show shown in the movie. For WHEN THE SEA RISES, she largely resuscitated the show and actually performed it on stage for a paying audience and, this time, also for the camera.

WHEN THE SEA RISES is charming and goofy, in the best way. I love the fact that the film never clarifies who is this Michel she calls on her phone to discuss home improvements. The film never makes an issue out of her relationship with Dries (the carnival worker who fixes her stalled car and becomes her permanent poussin). Their affair just progresses slowly and inexorably until both have to let go. The film leaves you with a good feeling. It warmed my "guttiwuts."

[Johann]

Many thanks for the supplemental info.
Yolande Moreau should be National Treasure for France.
I still remember "When the Tide Comes In" vividly.
(or "When the Sea Rises"- I actually like "Tide' better).
It left a good impression. A movie to remember for sure.
I recommend it highly.
I didn't know it was on DVD.
I'll have to look for it. That's one to buy.
Glad New Yorker films picked it up. But I heard that they are going out of business! I think I read that in Film Comment..

[oscar jubis]

Yes, New Yorker Films is kaput.

The DVD will only set you back a few bucks on Amazon.

One film from the 24th VIFF I wished to get a chance to watch (after reading your review) is the Chinese film SEASON OF THE HORSE. So far no luck.

[Chris Knipp]

"New Yorker films is kaput."

We discussed this news earlier, and it was being lamented at the FSLC when I was there for the Rendez-Vous French series in February and the news came and I gave a link to the NYTimes story, which points out the important role of the company and Talbot in introducing 'essential art house" films to the American public over a period of four decades.

New Yorker Films, the distributor that helped introduce American moviegoers to the works of Bernardo Bertolucci, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ousmane Sembene, announced on Monday that it was going out of business after 44 years.

One of the most influential distributors of foreign and independent films, New Yorker has amassed a library of more than 400 titles, including Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" and Claude Lanzmann's epic Holocaust documentary "Shoah," said Dan Talbot, who founded the company in 1965.

Mr. Talbot, 82, said in a telephone interview that the company was going out of business because its library was being sold. It had been pledged as collateral on a loan taken out by its former owner, Madstone Films, which bought New Yorker Films in 2002.

The library could be auctioned off as early as next week, he added.

New Yorker Films held rights to distribute movies to theaters and to institutions like colleges, and also to release DVDs.

Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the specialty-film multiplex on the Upper West Side that Mr. Talbot owns, is unaffected by the travails of New Yorker Films.

For more than four decades Mr. Talbot has been one of the most prominent figures in art-house cinema in New York and the United States, controlling not only New Yorker Films but also several theaters (including the New Yorker Theater, now defunct, an important revival house at Broadway and 88th Street).

"Without a doubt it was the pre-eminent distributor of foreign art films in the United States from the mid-1960s really into the '80s," J. Hoberman, the senior film critic of The Village Voice, said of New Yorker Films. "And for much of the time he was the only game in town."

The New Yorker Theater closed in the late Seventies. Before that there were various big old classic movie houses on the Upper West Side. I knew about the theater long before I heard of the film distribution company.