Zinemaldia 2011 will pay tribute to Jacques Demy, American film noir

This year, the 59th edition of San Sebastian International Film Festival, running from 16-24 September, returns to its tradition of programming three cycles. The usual retrospective dedicated to a classic filmmaker will be accompanied by another two thematic cycles.

The festival will dedicate a complete retrospective to the work of French filmmaker Jacques Demy (Pontchâteau, 1931-Paris 1990), a figure key to French cinema who pumped surprising new breath into the musical genre. Although initially grouped with other young directors belonging to the nouvelle vague movement, Demy’s work eventually became so unique and difficult to classify that he set off along his own, absolutely personal path. His original approach to “singing cinema” and his exquisite sense of artistic direction always shunned the movie fashions or trends of the moment.

Under the title of American Way of death, the aim of the second retrospective is to offer a weighty selection of some of the most remarkable contributions to American film noir ,underscoring its untold mutations and variations with time: nostalgic recreations of that former film noir, film adaptations by masters of noir fiction and post-modern revisions.

The cycle includes important works by moviemakers like Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, Abel Ferrara, Ethan and Joel Coen, Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and David Fincher. Here we can classic films in the genre like Reservoir Dogs(1992), Wild at Heart (1990) Miller’sCrossing (1990), Seven (1995), Fargo (1996), Collateral (2004) and Zodiac (2007).

The titles brought together in the third cycle, called Digital Shadows, show some of the more unusual angles of Chinese reality thanks to plural points of view and varied approaches. The cycle will comprise 18 movies filmed digitally from 2000-2010. We will therefore also discover some of the most interesting Chinese filmmakers to have made their appearance in the last decade. Among others, we will screen Zhu Wen’s Seafood (2001), Andrew Cheng’s Destination Shanghai (2003), Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide (2004), Peng Tao’s Little Moth (2007), Emily Tang’s Perfect Life (2008) and Zhao Ye’s Jalainur (2009).