TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15 2011


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Herzog exits Cave, goes to jail Asghar Farhadi


Farhadi offers Panahi tribute


BY ANDREAS WISEMAN Yesterday, as demonstrations gripped Iran, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi arrived in Berlin for today’s competition entry Nader And Simin, A Separation, which was creating buzz at buyer screenings. Speaking to Screen, in between checking online for updates from his country, Farhadi said he had spoken to his friend Jafar Panahi on Sunday. The detained jury member Panahi was in good spirits and gave his friend and the festival his best wishes. “I share the same feelings all


fi lm-makers do about this,” said a moved Farhadi. “Freedom for art- ists is like water for fi sh.” » Screen’s full Farhadi interview will run in tomorrow’s daily.


Fandango Portobello has sold Australia/New Zealand rights to Madman Entertainment for competition title The Forgiveness Of Blood by Joshua Marston. Fandango Portobello has other territories in play on the film, which screens on Friday. Marston’s follow-up to Maria Full Of Grace is about teenage siblings caught up in an Albanian blood feud. Wendy Mitchell


Revolver spins with Creation


BY GEOFFREY MACNAB UK distributor Revolver Entertain- ment has snapped up UK rights to Upside Down: The Creation Records Story.


Danny O’Connor’s feature doc


tells the story of music impresario Alan McGee and his record label, which worked with the likes of Oasis and My Bloody Valentine. “Creation Records sold millions


of records during its heyday and we’re excited to be able to unfurl this fully authorised on-screen biography of its journey from a Glasgow bedroom into the hands of almost every teenager in Britain by 1990,” said Revolver Entertain- ment CEO Justin Marciano. The film is set to hit screens


across the UK in April and May with a DVD launch also on May 9.


BY GEOFFREY MACNAB Maverick German director Werner Herzog is unable to attend the Ber- linale screenings of his 3D film Cave Of Forgotten Dreams this year because he is in a “tense” period of shooting for a new documentary about death row in the US. “I am doing a fi lm on death-row


inmates who are waiting for execu- tion,” Herzog explained to Screen in a phone interview on Sunday from Houston, Texas. “Of course, it fascinates me to look into deep abysses of the human soul. Left


Werner Herzog


and right, wherever you look, there is an abyss.” Herzog was president of the


Berlinale international jury last year, and he had been due in town this year for the out-of-competi- tion special screening of the highly


acclaimed Cave, which is being sold here by Visit Films. The 3D feature doc, shot inside the Chau- vet caves of Southern France, explores the oldest known pictorial representations of humankind. He says the 3D technology was


» CONTINUED ON PAGE 4


integral to the project. “It was imperative,” he declares. “Since my film in the cave may be the only one ever permitted to be shot there because the climate is so delicate, you had to bring the audience into the cave itself.”


MEDIA to fight for ongoing financial support


BY MARTIN BLANEY The MEDIA Programme will be fighting its case for continuing support to the European audiovis- ual industry in the forthcoming debate about the European Union’s future fi nances. Speaking to a packed MEDIA


day in Berlin yesterday, Aviva Sil- ver, head of the MEDIA Unit at the European Commission, declared: “All I can say is we are working on a new [MEDIA] programme.”


As previously reported, industry


watchers are concerned the pro- gramme could be curtailed or even cancelled when the current edition runs out in 2013. Silver said the response to last autumn’s online consultation on the future of the MEDIA Programme had been unprecedented, with around 2,600 online contributions sent by pro- fessionals from all over Europe. “We are trying our best to turn this into a new programme which


Van Sant joins EIFF curators


BY SARAH COOPER Isabella Rossellini, Gus Van Sant and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are to guest curate their own sec- tions of the coming edition of the Edinburgh International Film Fes- tival (EIFF), as part of a radical overhaul of the event. The first guest curators to be announced also included UK song writer/musician Mike Skinner, independent film-makers Sara Driver and Jim Jarmusch, Scottish author Alan Warner, Black Swan composer Clint Mansell and music writer Greil Marcus. They will curate their own sections of the EIFF, which will run June 15-26. Festival producer James Mul-


lighan said the curators are now “in dialogue with Mark [Cousins] and Lynda [Myles] about what they might bring. Films, music, art, writ- ing, mood. Nothing is off the table.”


will meet the needs [expressed in the contributions],” Silver noted. There will be three major meet-


ings in the coming months to dis- cuss the programme’s future, on March 18 and March 21/22 in Brussels and May 16 in Cannes. Meanwhile, the MEDIA Unit’s


Costas Daskalakis unveiled plans for a cinema digitisation pilot project this year with a budget of $2.7m (¤2m), which would enable digitisation of up to 100 screens.


The Mill And The Cross NEWS


Run of The Mill Wide Management has hot sales for Rutger Hauer’s Bruegel story » PAGE 4


DIARY Future proof Miranda July’s work gets darker and more surreal » PAGE 6


REVIEW Fiennes work Coriolanus is brimming with contemporary relevance » PAGE 8


SCREENINGS » START PAGE 17


BERLIN HOT DEALS


Sony Pictures Classics has taken North America, Australia and New Zealand rights to Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut, Higher Ground, which premiered at Sundance. SPC did the deal with CAA.


In another post-Sundance pickup, Magnolia Pictures has acquired North American rights to Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s Ken Kesey documentary Magic Trip.


King’s Speech to get sequel?


Screen hears a sequel is being mooted for The King’s Speech which would pick up where the first film left off at the beginning of the Second World War. Tentatively titled The Windsors


At War, the project is being hatched by Harvey Weinstein, though it is way too early to say


whether any of the actors from the first film would return. When asked about the project at


the Baftas on Sunday, screenwriter David Seidler merely hushed Screen’s reporter and said: “Ask Harvey.” The Weinstein Company had no comment in Berlin yesterday.


Vanessa Redgrave and Ralph Fiennes at a photocall ahead of the screening of competition title Coriolanus yesterday.


DAY 6


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