Noticias

The two-day finance and co-production market will take place on October 14 and 15.Scroll Down For The Full List Of Projects

Power to the Pixel has announced the 35 cross-platform projects from Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and South America set to participate in this year’s The Pixel Market, a two-day finance and co-production market taking place during this year’s BFI London Film Festival (Oct 7-18).

Presenters at this year’s Pixel Market Finance Forum include Guy Gadney, from the Project Factory, whose digital productions include Sherlock: The Network, Alexandre Brachet of Upian, who worked on Do Not Track And Alma – A Tale Of Violence, and Christopher Sheppard from Adventure Pictures, the British company that produced Ginger & Rosa and Orlando.

From the 35 projects included, eight will compete for the Arte International Prize for The Pixel Market, which comes with a $4,500 (€4,000) award. Those involved will present to a panel of commissioning executives and financiers, with the winner...

Power to the Pixel event to include a major Nordic delegation.Scroll down for full list of projects

Power to the Pixel (PttP) has announced the 32 cross-media projects from across Europe, the Us, Canada, the Middle East, Australia and South America selected to participate in The Pixel Market (Oct 8-9).

The two-day finance and co-production market is run as part of 8th Power to the Pixel: The Cross-Media Forum (Oct 7-10), held in association with the 58th BFI London Film Festival (Oct 8-19).

From the 32 teams, PttP has selected the top eight to compete for the Arte International Prize for The Pixel Market, a €6,000 ($7,800) award sponsored by the French/German broadcaster.

The producers and creators will present to a panel of international commissioning executives, financiers and experts who will use these projects as a backdrop to discuss successful finance strategies, sustainable business models and the companies actively investing in new media.

The winning team will be...

Power to the Pixel has selected more than 30 participants for its cross-media workshop.

A total of 16 cross-media projects from across Europe have been chosen to take part in the annual Pixel Lab, taking place in Wallonia in Belgium at the end of the month.

Now in its fourth year, it offers media professionals a six-day workshop on how to create, produce and distribute cross-media stories that can engage audiences as well as monetise.

Participants include 16 international producers showcasing projects that incorporate film, gaming, mobile, publishing, live events, interactive, TV and online as well as 15 media professionals from across the industry.

Participants attending with a project include award-winning producers Holly Elson from Hark Pictures Ltd with Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue (UK), Agitrop’s Martichka Bozhilova with The Cars We Drove Into Capitalism (Bulgaria) and Robert Cibis from OVALfilm GmbH with Pop the Glock! (Germany).

Each project producer will be partnered with a participant not bringing a project...

Even as I carry on updating the entry on Doc NYC, there's quite a lot besides going on in the field of nonfiction filmmaking. Last week, both the International Documentary Association and Cinema Eye Honors announced the nominations for their respective awards, and yesterday, Cinema Eye unveiled "a new, periodic award called the Hell Yeah Prize, to be given to filmmakers who have created works of incredible craft and artistry that also have significant, real-world impact. The inaugural Hell Yeah Prize will be presented to Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky for their HBO Documentary Films trilogy Paradise Lost, which played a critical role in securing the release from prison of the wrongly prosecuted and convicted West Memphis Three."

And the other day, when I pointed to Dennis Lim's review of Travis Wilkerson's An Injury to One (2002), "one of American independent cinema's great achievements of the past decade, just issued on DVD by Icarus Films,...

Title: Pianomania Directed By: Lilian Franck, Robert Cibis Written By: Lilian Franck, Robert Cibis Cast: Stephan Knupfer, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, Till Fellner, Julius Drake, Ian Bostridge, Rudolf Buchbinder Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 10/20/11 Opens: November 4, 2011 There are pharmacists who do nothing all day behind the counters of Duane-Reade and Walgreen’s and Rite Aid but read the prescriptions, take some good guesses from the physicians’ handwriting on the drugs to be issued, and put the pills into an automatic counter. Then there are pharmacists hired by Gsk and Squibb and the other biggies who do intensive research into new products, racing for the cures. Similarly,...

[Our thanks to Frako Loden for offering her perspectives on these three entries at Berlin & Beyond 2010.]

Pianomania (Austria/Germany: Lilian Franck / Robert Cibis, 2009) screened at the 2010 San Francisco International Film Festival [where it won the Golden Gate Documentary Award] and plays at Berlin & Beyond on October 26. For those who love piano and the mysteries of sound, this documentary will be a treat. It's also a 90-minute-long commercial for Steinway & Sons, being a profile of its master tuner Stefan Knüpfer and a career that matches the exacting artistry and high professional standards of the pianists he serves--big names like Lang Lang, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Alfred Brendel. Knüpfer is remarkably patient and diplomatic with the extremely minute, sometimes incomprehensible demands of the artist preparing for a big performance at a major concert hall. He tunes the piano also to accommodate the hall's acoustics, the recording of the performance and the instrument's own peculiarities. The problem always arises of how to verbalize a problem with sound, how to express in words something that one hears or even can't hear.

Mother (15)

(Bong Joon-ho, 2009, S Korea) Kim Hye-ja, Won Bin, Jin Ku, Yoon Jae-Moon. 130 mins

After his mutant tadpole movie The Host, Bong brings us another Korean monster: a middle-aged herbalist with a will of steel and some serious overprotection issues. Her simple-minded son has been fitted up for a schoolgirl's murder, and in a society of inept cops, exploitative lawyers and generally corrupt townsfolk, only mommie dearest believes he's innocent – and sets out to prove it. It's a mystery thriller to make Hitchcock proud, and a delectably warped parable of blood running thicker than water.

The Expendables (15)

(Sylvester Stallone, 2010, Us) Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li. 104 mins

Now that the 80s beefcake reunion has actually happened, does anyone care? Probably enough to make this a guilty-pleasure night out, and that's all it really asks for. With a last surge of testosterone coursing through their wrinkled physiques, our senior...

A fine documentary about Stefan Knüpfer, not so much a piano tuner as a creative collaborator. By Peter Bradshaw

In keeping with its subject matter, this high-minded documentary from Robert Cibis and Lilian Franck has elegance and exactitude. It is about an almost impossibly rarefied world, and yet with austere charm, and a very likable central figure, the film helps us to understand something of this world. Stefan Knüpfer is a piano tuner employed by Steinway to be a specialist point-man or liaison officer working directly with soloists who are preparing for important concerts or recordings. Knüpfer is no mere tuner: he is a creative   collaborator, a person who must be prepared to engage in the most demanding, in-depth discussions with the musician about the tone and timbre of sound required from the instrument for each piece, to feel instinctively what the maestro wants, and then provide it. It means...

This week, Jason Solomons meets the man behind what some have billed as the most horrific film ever made: The Human Centipede. Tom Six reveals how a tasteless outburst during his previous job as a Big Brother director inspired the film.

Jason also speaks to co-director of the documentary Pianomania Robert Cibis about his loving portrait of Steinway's master tuner Stefan Kupfner.

Xan Brooks drops in to review this week's other releases, including Angelina Jolie in Salt, and Sylvester Stallone in The Expendables.

Jason SolomonsXan BrooksJason Phipps...

How can it take a year to tune a piano? Jude Rogers on a gem of a movie about a bid to perform Bach's Art of Fugue perfectly

It does not, at first, seem the most promising of premises. But Pianomania, a delicate Austrian documentary about the painstaking work of a master piano-tuner, has spent the last six months scooping up international awards.

The film takes us into the life of Steinway's piano technician Stefan Knüpfer as he works on the instruments of the world's greatest virtuosos. In the pursuit of perfection, Knüpfer bounces tennis balls on piano strings, replaces the leg of one instrument with a cheap violin as an experiment – and spends an entire year working on one piano until it's the ideal instrument on which to play an unfinished masterpiece by Bach.

Pianomania began as a pipe-dream in 1999. Documentary-maker Robert Cibis met Knüpfer one afternoon as he...

Mexican director Pedro González-Rubio won the New Directors Award at the 2010 San Francisco International Film Festival for "Alamar" and Lixin Fan's "Last Train Home" won the investigative documentary prize at last night's ceremony in the Bay Area. Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis won the documentary feature prize for "Pianomania." Lixin Fan's acclaimed observational documentary, his first feature, charts the dramatic annual Chinese immigration, looking at how the situation affects just ...

The European Film Academy have announced the documentary film titles nominations and out of the ten mostly unknown titles we find a pair of exceptions in Burma VJ (which received some solid buzz at Sundance) and The Beaches of Agnes... - The European Film Academy have announced the documentary film titles nominations and out of the ten mostly unknown titles we find a pair of exceptions in Burma VJ (which received some solid buzz at Sundance) and The Beaches of Agnes (which received a film festival red carpet treatment and was shown at the Film Forum this summer). Previous winners of Prix Arte award include: last year's Helena Trestikova's Rene (read here) and 2007 the prize went to Rithy Panh's Paper cannot Wrap up Embers. The winner will be announced on the 12th of December. The Beaches Of Agnes - Agnès Varda, France Below Sea Level - Gianfranco Rosi,...

Cologne, Germany -- Political issues have pride of place among this year's nominees for the Prix Arte, the European Film Academy's documentary award.

Andres Ostergaard's "Burma VJ," on the 2007 protest by thousands of Burmese monks; German directors Leon Geller and Marcus Vetter's "The Heart of Jenin," an investigation into the Israeli army's shooting of Palestinian boy Ahmed Khatib; and Jawad Rhalib's "The Damned of the Sea," which looks at the plight of Moroccan fisherman, all made this year's short list.

Political undercurrents are also clearly visible in other nominees, including Gianfranco Rosi's portrait of anarchists living in a makeshift "slab city" in the California desert and "Defamation," a critical look at anti-Semitism from Israeli director Yoav Shamir.

But the scope of the 2009 Prix Arte nominees ranges from Agnes Varda's autobiographical essay "The Beaches of Agnes" to portraits of extraordinary people in Lilian Franck & Robert Cibis'...