The latest film of Italo-Turkish director Ferzan Ozpetek, the astrologically-themed Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition), continues the director’s exploration of friendship and the miracles and meaning of life that typifies his earlier work. It is most strongly connected to his Le fate ignoranti (Ignorant Fairies / His Secret Life), using many of the same actors in something that might seem like a reconnection with many of the themes if not the characters from that 2001 drama. The editor of european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij, spoke with the director at the 2007 Karlovy Vary Film Festival where the film played in competition. Saturno contro is currently on German screens and will be released in France on July 9.

A small-time crook with a Europol officer on his tail runs into some bigwig colleagues, which may or may not have been premeditated by any one side in the convoluted caper comedy Cash. The second effort as a writer-director of the busy French screenwriter Eric Besnard (Travaux…, Babylon A.D.) certainly looks the part, but the battery of stars (Jean Dujardin, Valeria Golino, Jean Reno, Alice Taglioni), exotic locales and flashy filmmaking cannot throw up enough of a smoke screen to hide the film’s problematic screenplay that seems more in love with the abstract idea of countless plot twists than the actual plot twists themselves. French audiences plunked down the hard-earned titular goods over a million times during its home run, but more discerning foreign audiences will unlikely fall for this con so easily. 

Three female detectives rummage around in their own lives as much as in the lives of others in Icíar Bollaín’s Mataharis, the director's first film since her laurelled domestic abuse drama Te doy mis ojos (Take My Eyes). While a female perspective is still a welcome change in Spain’s cinematic landscape, having three different female protagonists is perhaps too much, as Bollain and Tatiana Rodríguez’ screenplay only succeeds in reducing each woman’s story to its soap-opera essentials, with the detective bureau-setting adding to the TV-series feel. Acting from the three leads is far above the average TV series from Spain (or elsewhere), but is not enough to disguise the basic small-screen appeal of Mataharis. The film did middling business in Spain upon its release in September. It opens today in Belgium and will open in August in the Netherlands.

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) might have found a European acolyte in the surprising person of UK director Thomas Clay, who shot his second film Soi Cowboy on location in Thailand. The story of a portly European (Denmark’s Nicolas Bro, Offscreen) and his local girlfriend "saved" from the red-light bars is also a bifurcated drama with two only loosely connected stories, but rather than reaching the heights of the Thai Boy Wonder’s films, Clay’s follow-up to the promising if extreme The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael only proves that it requires more than just pointing a camera somewhere to create mystery and meaning. The fact that the first twenty minutes are without dialogue and that more than half of it is in black-and-white will mean the death knell for this film in any commercial ventures. The film is part of the Un certain regard section at the recent Cannes Film Festival.

After a long and muddled pre-production history with several changes of director and lead actress, a start date has finally been set for Die Päpstin (Pope Joan), the big-screen adaptation of the bestselling Donna Cross novel of the same name. German director and former professional football player Sönke Wortmann (Das Wunder von Bern / The Miracle of Bern) is now at the helm of medieval epic, with rising German star Johanna Wokalek (Barfuss / Barefoot) taking on the title role.

 

The project had initially been in the hands of director Volker Schlöndorff (Der neunte Tag / The Ninth Day) with star actress Franka Potente (Elementarteilchen / Atomised) cast in the lead role. The story recounts how the young German-English girl Johanna von Ingelheim rises through the ecclesiastical ranks disguised as a male scholar. She is finally crowned successor of Saint Peter in 853. The Vatican has always maintained that the story is a fabrication.

 

Shooting on the film is now scheduled to start in August for a release sometime in 2009. 

 

 

2008 French Shooting Star Nicolas Cazalé is not the latest pretty-boy actor to be catapulted from obscurity to fame by a single box-office success. Instead, in the space of a couple of years, the 30-year-old actor has quietly built an impressive résumé of starring or co-starring roles in smaller films. His latest project, the schizophrenic love story Caótica Ana (Chaotic Ana) from Spanish auteur Julio Medem, is again unlikely to top the cinema charts when it will be released in the Netherlands on June 5 and in Belgium on August 6. But at least it is something of which Cazalé can be proud, as he told Boyd van Hoeij during the most recent Berlinale.

The details of the exotic trappings on display maybe relatively new but the rites-of-passage story is as old as civilisation itself in Kazakh filmmaker Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan, a timeless and endearing coming-of-age tale for the Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel (The Story of the Weeping Camel) crowd. The director’s comfortable background in non-fiction films is clearly on display here, with the story of a herdsman-in-learning looking for a bride offering opportunities for real-life livestock birthing and other scenes in which the fictional story takes the backseat to what is simply part of daily life on the Kazakh Betpak Dala or Hunger Steppe. The film took the top prize in the Cannes Un certain regard section and could light up screens in arthouses across Europe in limited engagements.