Food Alert

Last week I made a couple of passing references to the Chicago International Film Festival’s lack of clout in acquiring what many of my colleagues and I believe are the most important foreign movies to have appeared this year, including Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta, Raul Ruiz’s Time Regained, and Claire Denis’ Le beau travail. Of course some colleagues–in particular ones who favor strong, easy to follow story lines over form, style, even vision–don’t consider these pictures important, but my excitement about them is shared by many people in the mainstream: Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum singled out the Kiarostami and Denis movies as major Toronto events, in print and on Roger Ebert’s TV show; Rosetta won the top prize at Cannes; and the New Yorker devoted a small spread to the star-studded Time Regained three months back.

Rosetta and Le beau travail have acquired U.S. distributors. So far The Wind Will Carry Us and Time Regained haven’t–yet their producers are every bit as resistant to Chicago festival screenings as the distributor of Rosetta. Why? Because if a distributor or potential distributor is already worried about how many viewers a movie will attract, it won’t help to siphon off a few hundred of them at festival screenings. Read more