Donald Clarkeon film
William Goldman's famous declaration that "nobody knows anything" could describe the inability of movie boffins to predict the source of the next great wave of art-house cinema.
A decade and a half ago, the films of Iran - hitherto an obscure pleasure for those outside that country - began winning major awards and influencing clever young western directors.
Now, following the success of such singular pictures as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Daysand The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Romania has been identified as the country to watch.
The Irish Film Institute and the Romanian Cultural Institute have come together to celebrate this unexpected development with a fine season of films. The New Romanian Cinema season, which begins in the IFI today, is showing both 4 Monthsand Mr Lazarescu, but the organisers are keen to demonstrate that there is more to Romanian movies than crumbling stairwells and damp hospitals.
Nae Caranfil and Marius Florea Vizante, director and star, respectively, of The Rest Is Silence, a period piece following the production of Romania's first feature film, will fly in to discuss their generous epic. The season, which is supported by the Romanian Embassy, also takes in Caranfil's black comedy Philanthropy. Essential stuff.
The New Romanian Cinema runs at the IFI, Dublin from tomorrow until June 15th. 01-6793477, www.irishfilm.ie
Awards cover the film bases
For the past two decades - going back to an era when Irish films were as rare as novels written by fish - Filmbase has sponsored budding directors with its admirable short film scheme. The latest Filmbase/RTÉ awards, which offer the winners €10,000 and a similar sum in equipment deals, were announced last week. The selected projects are Crossword, written by Hugh Travers and directed by Vincent Gallagher; Free Chips Forever, written and directed by Claire Dix; and Star Struck, written and directed by Emma Teck. The closing date for the next round is June 27th. www.filmbase.ie
Help for young film-makers
Attention Cork! Dónal Ó Céilleachair, a son of Macroom who has edited major Hollywood productions and helped establish the distinguished Ocularis film forum in Brooklyn, is currently acting as film-maker in residence in the Muskerry Gaeltacht. Ó Céilleachair will give a series of workshops for young people at various schools throughout the area and will mentor local visual artists and film-makers. For more information, contact info@imipictures.net.
Un menage à Tilda?
The home arrangements of Tilda Swinton, the terrifyingly etiolated, stomach-churningly posh Scottish actor, become more exotic by the day.
When she won her Academy Award for Michael Clayton, much of the press attention was focused on the fact that Swinton appeared to be maintaining two parallel romantic relationships: one with dishy young German artist Sandro Kopp and the other with 68-year-old John Byrne, the father of her children. Now it has been revealed that Byrne, writer of the great TV series Tutti-Frutti, has been seeing another woman, Jeanine Davies, for almost two years.
"It's all very relaxed and very amicable," Byrne said. "[ Tilda and I] have certainly not split up. We are still together. There is so much love there. I wish I could explain it. We love our children and our children love us - they are very accepting. But it is not an open relationship - that would imply we both had lots of partners, which is certainly not the case." Good for them.
A hot time in Tinseltown
What a strange vista last weekend's fire at Universal City in Hollywood offered. The conflagration began in the studio's version of New York City, and the firefighters of southern California were, thus, required to point their hoses at incongruous brownstones and displaced watertowers.
Movie bigwigs have confirmed that nothing significant was lost in the destruction of a massive video vault, but it seems that the town square set from Back to the Futureis no more. If only some mad scientist could invent a time machine, then we might still save it.
Sex sells at the box office
The galloping success of Sex and the Cityhas box-office analysts scratching their heads. It cannot be denied that the film exceeded most pundits expectations: in pipping Indiana Jonesto the number-one spot in the US, SATCsecured the biggest ever opening for a romantic comedy and one of the five biggest ever for an R-rated movie. But, defying all the traditional patterns, the film took in a significantly greater sum on Friday than it did on Saturday. Have the parties of fans setting out from work skewed the takings artificially?
It hardly matters. Any film that rakes in $55.7 million on its domestic opening is doing all right. If the four galpals can be persuaded to share oxygen once more, a sequel may be on the way.
"I haven't always made great movies, but I've been trying real hard"- Will Smith, star of Wild Wild West and Hitch, tells the truth at the MTV Movie Awards
17K
The estimated value in dollars of the trinkets contained in the goody bag given to presenters at the MTV Movie Awards
