The New Age
(Thursday, April 22, 2010, at 3pm)

MICHAEL TOLKIN (director) has been called "an LA Antonioni with a sense of humor" (The New Yorker, 1993). In Artforum he was called, "The only American filmmaker working near the level of Pasolini and Kiezlowski." As a writer/director, his two films, The Rapture and The New Age, were opening night selections at the Telluride Film Festival. As a writer/producer, he is best known for The Player, for which he won awards from the Writers Guild, The British Academy, and The Chicago Film Critics. His screenplay also won the PEN Center USA West Literary Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best crime screenplay and an Academy Award® nomination for Best Screenplay. As one of the film's producers he was awarded the Golden Globe®, the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Independent Feature Project Spirit Award for Best Picture.The Rapture (1991), starring Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, was nominated for three Spirit Awards. Tolkin has also co-written four films: the HBO movie, The Burning Season,starring the late Raul Julia and directed by the late John Frankenheimer, for which he shared the Humanitas Prize and an Emmy® Nomination; Deep Cover, starring Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum;  Deep Impact, a Dreamworks co-production with Paramount Pictures; and also for Paramount, Changing Lanes, which was named Best Picture of the Year by Catholics in Media. His most recent credit, which he shares with the late Anthony Minghella, is the screenplay for Nine,  which was nominated for four Academy Awards®.

His books, all published by Grove/Atlantic Books include The Player, Among The Dead, Under Radar, all of which have been translated around the world, and The Player, The Rapture, The New Age: Three Screenplays by Michael Tolkin. His fourth novel, The Return of The Player, was published in 2006.

Apocalypse Now/Redux
(Thursday, April 22, at 8pm)

WALTER MURCH (sound & film editor/sound designer) has been honored by both British and American Motion Picture Academies for his film editing and sound mixing. In 1997, Murch received an unprecedented double Oscar® for both film editing and sound mixing on The English Patient (directed by Anthony Minghella), as well as the British Academy Award for Best Editing. In 1980 he received the Oscar® for Best Sound for Apocalypse Now and a nomination for Best Editing. He’s received 3 other Oscar® nominations for Best Film Editing for Julia (1977), Ghost (1991) and The Godfather Part III (1991) and Cold Mountain (2004). His Oscar® nominations for Best Sound also include The Conversation (1974).

His most recent work is Tetro for director Francis Coppola (2009), and Wolfman for Joe Johnston (2010). Among Murch’s other credits are picture editing for The Unbearable  Lightness of Being,  Romeo is Bleeding, The Talented Mr. Ripley, K-19: The  Widowmaker and Jarhead. Murch also directed and co-wrote with Gill Dennis the film Return to Oz, released in 1985.

He has also been involved in film restoration, notably Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1998), Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), and the Edison-Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894). Murch was also sound effects supervisor for The Godfather and was responsible for sound montage and re-recording on THX-1138, American Graffiti, and The Godfather Part II, as well as being re-recording mixer on all of the films for which he has also been picture editor.

Between films, he pursues interests in the science of human perception, cosmology and the history of science. Since 1995, he has been working on a reinterpretation of the Titius-Bode Law of planetary spacing, based on data from the Voyager Probe, the Hubble telescope, and recent discoveries of exoplanets orbiting distant stars. He has also published a number of previously untranslated works by the Italian poet and novelist Curzio Malaparte (1899-1956). Murch has written on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye (2001), and his work has been the subject of two other books, The Conversations by Michael Ondaatje (2002) and Behind the Seen by Charles Koppelman (2004).

Murch is the son of the painter Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967). He graduated Johns Hopkins University with a BA in Liberal Arts in 1965, and was awarded an Oakley Fellowship to study Cinema at the Graduate Program of the USC. In 2006 Murch was made an Honorary Doctor of Letters by The Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC. He married Muriel (Aggie) Slater in 1965. They have four children, Walter, Beatrice, Carrie and Connie. Walter and Aggie live in California just north of San Francisco.

Departures
(Friday, April 23, 2010, at 4pm)

YÔJIRÔ TAKITA (director) was born in 1955 and joined Hiroshi Mukai’s Shishi Productions as an assistant director in 1976, making is directorial debut in 1981 with Chican Onna Kyoshi and going on to helm some twenty feature films. His first commercial feature, Komikku Zasshi Nanka Iranai! (1986) was enthusiastically received at the New York Film Festival, and his subsequent filmography includes The Yen Family (1988), We Are Not Alone (1993), and The Exam (Daddy’s Last Run) and Secret (both 1999). In 2001, his special-effects fantasy Onmyoji (The Ying-Yang Master) was a box office bonanza and led to a sequel, Ohmyoji 2, in 2003. This was followed by the critically acclaimed historical drama When The Last Sword Is Drawn (2003), which garnered many awards, culminating in the Best Picture prize at the 2004 Japan Academy Awards. Since then he has released Ashura (2005), The Battery (2007) and Departures (2008), which won the prestigious Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film. His latest feature film is Sanpei The Fisher Boy (2009).

Man With A Movie Camera
(Friday, April 23, 2010, at 4pm)

THE ALLOY ORCHESTRA is a three-man musical ensemble, writing and performing live accompaniment to classic silent films. Working with an outrageous assemblage of peculiar objects, they thrash and grind soulful music from unlikely sources. Performing at prestigious film festivals and cultural centers in the US and abroad (The Telluride Film Festival, The Louvre, Lincoln Center, The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the National Gallery of Art, and others), the Alloy Orchestra has helped revive some of the great masterpieces of the silent era.

An unusual combination of found percussion and state-of-the-art electronics gives the Orchestra the ability to create any sound imaginable. Utilizing their famous "rack of junk" and electronic synthesizers, the group generates beautiful music in a spectacular variety of styles. They can conjure up a simple German bar band of the 1920s or a French symphony. The group can make the audience think it is being attacked by tigers, contacted by radio signals from Mars or swept up in the Russian Revolution.

Terry Donahue (junk percussion, accordion, musical saw, banjo), Roger Miller (synthesizer, percussion) and Ken Winokur (director, junk percussion and clarinet).

Synecdoche
(Friday, April 23, 2010, at 8pm)

CHARLIE KAUFMAN (director) is the writer of Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  He is the writer and director of Synecdoche, New York.

 

 

ANTHONY BREGMAN (producer)

I Capture The Castle
(Saturday, April 24, 2010, at 11am)

BILL NIGHY (actor) was born in Caterham, Surrey in 1949 and trained for the stage at the Guildford School of Acting. Following his debut at Newbury's Watermill Theatre, he worked in regional theatres in Edinburgh, Chester, and in Liverpool, where he formed a touring theater company with Julie Walters and Peter Postlethwaite.

Bill’s long association with David Hare began in the early 1980s as a cast member in Dreams of Leaving, a BBC film written and directed by Sir David. When Hare became Associate Director of the National Theatre in London, Bill became a founding member of the theater’s ensemble, which also included Anthony Hopkins. He has appeared regularly to rave reviews, including the prestigious Olivier Award for Best Actor. On Broadway, Bill received critical acclaim for his role in David Hare’s production, The Vertical Hour, co-starring Julianne Moore. The Observer called it “one of the most remarkable performances ever seen on a New York stage.”

Bill’s long list of television credits includes virtually every major drama series on British TV. He won a BAFTA Best Actor Award for the cult-series State of Play and a Best Supporting Actor Golden Satellite Award for The Lost Prince, both in 2003, and a Best Actor Golden Globe® for the BBC production The Girl in the Café (2005).

Bill’s work in film spans 30 years, including award-winning performances in Still Crazy (1998), Love, Actually (2003) and The Constant Gardener (2005). Other cinema credits include Underworld: Evolution, Shaun of the Dead, and Enduring Love. In 2003, Bill won four LAFCA Best Supporting Actor awards for his performances in AKA, Lawless Heart, I Capture the Castle, and Love Actually.  And nobody will forget his stellar turn as the half-squid, half-human pirate captain Davy Jones in Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007).

Bill appeared with Dame Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett in Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal (2007), and co-starred with Tom Cruise in Valkyrie (2008), a World War II thriller based on true events in Nazi Germany at the height of Hitler’s power. His 2009 credits include the animated adventure G Force, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, Astro Boy, Richard Curtis’s Pirate Radio and Glorious 39. In 2010 Bill will be seen in Wild Target, opposite Emily Blunt, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and in Chalet Girl, which is currently filming.

Vincent: A Life in Color
(Saturday, April 24, 2010, at 2pm)

JENNIFER BURNS (director & producer) is the founder of Zweeble Films, and Vincent: A Life in Color marks her debut as Director/Producer.  Prior to moving behind the camera, Jennifer had been working as an actor in Chicago in both theater and film and is an original member of the critically acclaimed improv company, pH Productions.  Jennifer had been looking for the right project to kick start her production company and found it right outside her window: a spinning, jacket-twirling vision in fuchsia.

VINCENT P. FALK (star)

Trucker
(Saturday, April 24, 2010, at 4:30pm)

JAMES MOTTERN (writer & director) has written and directed award-winning documentaries for a variety of media outlets including BBC and Discovery Networks. He is the former producer of the annual Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. He is the recipient of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Mottern has several projects in development with studios, including an original screenplay, Boomerang, financed by Mandate Pictures and produced by Bona Fide Productions.

Trucker, which he wrote and directed, had its World Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last spring.

 

MICHELLE MONAGHAN (actor & executive producer) continues to be one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood. Most recently Michelle starred in the box office hit thriller Eagle Eye for DreamWorks opposite Shia LaBeouf. Prior to that, she starred opposite Patrick Dempsey in the romantic comedy Made of Honor.

Michelle burst onto movie screens and received rave reviews for her performance in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, in which she starred opposite Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer for writer/director Shane Black. She then joined Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, and Sissy Spacek in North Country for director Niki Caro. More recently she starred in Gone Baby Gone with Casey Affleck and Morgan Freeman; in The Heartbreak Kid opposite Ben Stiller; and in Mission: Impossible III opposite Tom Cruise and Philip Seymour Hoffman for director J.J. Abrams. Her other film credits include Perfume, It Runs in the Family, Winter Solstice, The Bourne Supremacy, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Barfly
(Saturday, April 24, 2008, at 9pm)

BARBET SCHROEDER (director) (pronounced bar-BET) was born in 1941 in Tehran, Iran. His father is a Swiss geologist from Geneva, his mother a German physician. He grew up in Colombia, then at the age of 11 arrived in Paris, where he entered the French Lycée system and went on to study Philosophy at the Sorbonne. His first expérience in film was a collaboration at the French film magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma and L’Air (1958-63). In 1962 he worked as an assistant to Jean-Luc Godard for Les Carabiniers., and directed two short B & W 16 mm films. In 1963, he created the production company Les Films du Losange and produced Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon (1972) and Claire’s Knee (1970).

Schroeder received both Oscar® and Golden Globe® Best Director nominations for Reversal Of Fortune (1990) and a DGA Best Director nomination for Terror’s Advocate (2007), for which he also won the French César for Best Documentary (L’avocat De La Terreur).

In a career that spans nearly 50 years, he has directed 18 films and produced 20 films. Some of the films he is most well known for in the US include Murder by Numbers (2002), Desperate Measures (1998), Before and After (1996), Kiss of Death (1995), Single White Female (1992) and Barfly (1987), all of which he both directed and produced. For his complete biography and filmography, visit www.barbetschroeder.com.

Barbet Schroeder has also appeared in a number of movies, mostly directed by friends. Audiences will remember him as the mechanic in Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited (2007), as Monsieur Henny in Christopher Doyle’s segment of Paris, Je t’aime (2006), as the French President in Mars Attacks! (1996), and a man in a Porsche in Beverly Hills Cop III (1995).