Estoril line-up features 14 European tiles in competition
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The second Estoril Film Festival, whose official competition features only European titles, will open on November 14 with French actor Vincent Cassel presenting his latest film, Mesrine: l'ennemi public n°1 [trailer], out of competition.
The festival will award three prizes: Best Film (€20,000), Best Second Film and the Special Jury Award, or CINEUROPA Award, following a media partnership established between the festival and this website.
Festival director Paulo Branco stated at the press conference that the competition section is one of the best possible selections of recent European productions "with a strong presence of Eastern and Northern European films, so far unreleased in Portugal".
The line-up includes Adrian Sitaru's Hooked (Romania), Ruben Östlund's Involuntary [trailer, film focus, making of] (Sweden), Seyfi Teoman's Summer Book (Turkey), Sergey Dvortsevoy's Tulpan (Russia), along with more southern titles like Albert Serra's second feature Birdsong and Daniel Villamediana's El brau brau, both from Spain, and Gianni Di Gregorio's Mid-August Lunch [trailer] (Italy).
The only Portuguese title vying for the Best Film Award, 4 Copas, marks the return of scriptwriter-editor-director Manuel Mozos (who co-wrote Miguel Gomes' feature debut A cara que tu mereces, 2004). The film, starring Margarida Marinho, João Lagarto, Filipe Duarte and Rita Martins, was produced by Rosa Filmes (the company behind João Pedro Rodrigues' Cannes entry Odete [trailer, making of]).
The jury, presided by South African Nobel laureate in Literature J.M. Coetzee, includes Catherine Deneuve, US writer-director Paul Auster, Spanish sculptor Cristina Iglesias and Portuguese plastic and video artist Julião Sarmento.
Whereas the competition section is all-European, the sidebar know no boundaries and includes retrospectives on the works of directors Tim Burton, Bernardo Bertolucci and Luis Buñuel and a tribute to Paul Newman.
The Europa Distribution network will also hold its annual conference during the festival. Over 50 European distributors will attend the three-day forum on the future of distributors in the age of new technologies, the European Audiovisual Policy, Video on Demand and a special focus on Portuguese cinema.
Vitor Pinto cineuropa.org