super tuesday part II - vive juliette!

The day has borne out well. Though the final release of film titles is slimmer than expected, the programmes can now be examined in their robust final fit for how they are going to hang together. There is also good news about Juliette! - as L'Heure d'Ete has indeed been programmed into Contemporary World Cinema. Focussing on the lives of three siblings who meet up at their mother's birthday party, it stars Charles Berling and Jeremie Renier and a very blonde Juliette!

In this same program, Samira Makmahlbaf (see below) premieres Two-Legged Horse with the kind of ingeniously simple premise that is a hallmark of Makmahlbaf family films. In the Dialogues program, Terence Davies (also mentioned below) is presenting the rarely seen trilogy of his works Children, Madonna and Child, Death and Transfiguration about a young Catholic boy facing his sexuality. Dialogues is dedicated this year to the late David Overbey's programming vision. Masters has added a new film by Paul Schrader that looks extremely interesting, looking at mental illness among holocaust survivors in Israel. Also on an Israeli theme, in Reel to Real, I am drawn to Leon Geller and Marcus Vetter's The Heart of Jenin (pictured here), about the donation of organs to Israeli children from a deceased Palestinian child.

Speaking of the Coen Brothers (see below), this dynamic duo will give us Burn After Reading, a thriller about a CIA analyst whose memoirs go astray. In the Gala programming, I am partial to seeing Anne Fontaine's new feature, La Fille de Monaco, only because I once interviewed her and really enjoyed the conversation. The heat is on! and now's the time to use the press releases to winnow down your 50 most likely favourites, so that you are ready to most time efficiently read the full write-ups when they become available online next Tuesday the 26th. Happy planning!