Cork 50th fest follows Toronto's lead

MANY of the hot tickets at Toronto will be turning up at the 50th anniversary edition of the Cork Film Festival, which runs from October 9th-16th.

Among them are Walk the Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter; The Proposition, an Australian western scripted by Nick Cave and starring Guy Pearce; music video director Mike Mills's Thumbsucker, with Lou Pucci, Tilda Swinton and Keanu Reeves; Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst; Tim Burton's stop-motion animation delight Corpse Bride; and producer Steve Woolley's directing debut, Stoned, with Leo Gregory as Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones.

The confirmed titles for Cork also include Factotum, the Charles Bukowski adaptation starring Matt Dillon; Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's two Pusher sequels, With Blood on My Hands and I'm the Angel of Death; and Sugar, co-directed by Paddy Jolley and Reynold Reynolds.

A raft of new documentaries will include March of the Penguins, which has been breaking box-office records in the US; Fatih Akin's Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul; Patrick Kavanagh - No Man's Fool, directed by Se Merry Doyle; and Guinness Size Me, in which two Irish filmmakers live on the eponymous beverage for a week.

The full festival programme will be announced shortly at www.corkfilmfest.org.

The satisfied audience award

At Toronto International Film Festival's prize-giving lunch last Sunday, the event's most coveted award, the People's Choice, voted by the paying public, went to Gavin Hood's South African gangster drama Tsotsi, which also took the audience award at the recent Edinburgh festival.

The international critics at Toronto gave the Discovery award for best first feature to Sarah Watt's Australian drama Look Both Ways. Jean-Marc Vallee's C.R.A.Z.Y. was named best Canadian feature, and there was a tie for best first Canadian feature between Louise Archambault's Familia and Michael Mabbott's mockumentary, The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico.

Duel in Montreal

While the Toronto festival goes from strength to strength, a bitter battle continues between two rival festivals up the road in Montreal. The long-running Montreal World Film Festival, run by Serge Losique, this year lost its principal funding from Telefilm Canada, which instead supported the new Montreal FilmFest, run by former Berlin festival director Moritz de Hadeln. Any hopes that Losique's festival would promptly disappear were dashed. Even though none of the Canadian distributors gave him films this year, Losique proceeded with a low-profile line-up that ran from August 28th- September 5th, did good business and attracted directors Chen Kaige and Theo Angelopolous as guests.

The well-funded new FilmFest, which started last Sunday, also failed to draw a strong line-up and this week lost its closing film, Tony Scott's Domino, which was pulled by its US distributors. And there was a public spat when de Hadeln criticised FilmFest president Alain Simard's company on the front page of Montreal paper Le Devoir last Saturday, the eve of the new festival.

Meanwhile, Losique insists his festival will be back next year.

A Katie faux pas

Irish producer Alan Moloney, whose credits include Breakfast on Pluto, was chosen as one of the year's 10 Producers to Watch at a Toronto event organised by the trade paper Variety. The presenter was Steven Cojocaru, fashion correspondent for US TV show Entertainment Tonight, and clips were shown from the producers' new movies. Introducing Thank You for Smoking, Cojocaru was heard to mutter "that Scientology bitch" when Katie Holmes appeared in the clip. He later apologised and insisted he was only joking.

Tony's music muse

Despite having worked as an actor for 50 years, Anthony Hopkins said in Toronto that he was sidetracked into the profession from his first love, music. He announced that he is writing a symphony with former Eurythmic Dave Stewart for a Las Vegas show. Hopkins was at the festival with his new movie, The World's Fastest Indian, in which he plays a New Zealand motorcycle rider who, at the age of 68, set a new world speed record that still stands.

The celluloid is his canvas

In Toronto for Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, Liam Neeson told Canadian daily The Globe and Mail: "This is my third film with Neil, and his cinematic language has just gone through the stratosphere since Michael Collins. He was possessed shooting the movie. He reminded me what an abstract painter would have been like, just applying colour all the time."