We're on a holiday for the next few days, the next edition of indieWIRE will be published on Monday, January 3rd.

In the interim we'll update this site, indieWIRE Insider, with news and/or links.

Happy New Year!

So many people have the same reaction when I tell them I'm going to see DiCaprio - ask him why he's not made a good film since Gilbert Grape. I'm desperate to get a reaction out of him by now, so decide not to phrase it as politely as I probably should. I ask him if I can be honest. He leans forwards. "Sure, yeah, why not?" The Guardian interviews Leonardo DiCaprio.

He claims he doesn't need the attention, but for weeks actor Don Cheadle has been meeting people, shaking hands and doing some Hollywood politicking to persuade Oscar voters to see his new film "Hotel Rwanda," Bob Tourtellotte reports for Reuters.

While Hollywood shied away from reminders of Sept. 11, 2001, Sean Penn figures the terrorist attacks added urgency to produce his film "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," David Germain reports.

In a New York Times article, Nancy Ramsey looks at the state of political documentaries:

"Political documentaries are not going to come to an abrupt halt because of the re-election of George Bush," said Errol Morris, whose prescient Academy Award-winning documentary, "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara," looks back on the fateful decisions that led the United States into the Vietnam War and kept it there. During the campaign, Mr. Morris filmed political commercials with MoveOn featuring people who had voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 but planned to vote for Senator John Kerry in 2004.

Director Roland Emmerich will lead the jury for the 2005 Berlinale, organizers announced today.

Planners have also unveiled eleven of the titles that will screen in the Berlinale competition. Set to compete are the previously announced opening movie, Régis Wargnier’s "Man to Man" and ten other films (listed below, details provided by the festival).

We're on a holiday for the next few days, the next edition of indieWIRE will be published on Tuesday, December 28th.

In the interim we'll update this site, indieWIRE Insider, with news and/or links.

Zhang's own loyalties are difficult to surmise. On one level, he is now the official poster boy of Chinese cinema. Both Hero (his previous martial arts film) and House of Flying Daggers have been huge hits in Asia. Hero, meanwhile, has broken box-office records in the US. Zhang has travelled widely to promote the films. He has talked about them repeatedly in aesthetic and philosophical terms. The one subject he won't mention is politics. The Guardian reports.

If you want to make Paul Giamatti squirm, just try complimenting him. "Oh, please, no no," he says, holding up his hands in protest when he hears praise being heaped on him for his eclectic performances. Tell him he's clearly not aware of how cool he is, and his face lights up. "Am I really cool?" Jenelle Riley reports.

In Woody Allen's America, Bordeaux or Burgundy wine and other things French are always in vogue. But he admits his European sensibility makes his films less popular back home, A.P. reports.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese and Cate Blanchett were in London last night for the UK premiere of their new film, The Aviator. Click on any of the thumbnails below to launch a gallery of pictures from the event, The Guardian reports.

Paul Rusesabagina still has sleepless nights. And when he does nod off, he still has nightmares. Witnessing wholesale slaughter and narrowly eluding death remains fresh for the hotel manager who saved 1,268 people during Rwanda's genocide a decade ago, Douglas J. Rowe reports for A.P.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire have been sued by a producer who claims the two actors blocked distribution of a 1995 independent film they starred in, A.P. reports.

The 2005 Berlin International Film Festival will open with the world premiere of Régis Wargnier's British/French co-production, "Man to Man", the festival announced today. The film, called a historical adventure epic, is described as "the story of a group of anthropologists who have embarked on a research trip to South Africa in the 1870s," will kick off the event on February 10th in Berlin and will be in the event's competition. The film depicts the search for the "Missing Link" between man and ape. In the words of the festival announcement, "'Man to Man' portrays not just the beginnings of modern evolutionary science, but also its unscrupulous abuse for selfish motives."

Wargnier wrote the film with William Boyd, author of "A Good Man in Africa." It stars Joseph Fiennes ("Shakespeare in Love") and Kristin Scott Thomas ("The English Patient").

In other Berlinale news, fest organizers recently announced the event's selection committee for 2005. The Berlinale advisory film selection committee for the competition includes 12 people who are attending screenings and recommending titles to Festival Director Dieter Kosslick.

The list of advisors, joining Wieland Speck/Panorama, Christoph Terhechte/Forum, Alfred Holighaus/ Perspektive Deutsches Kino, Thomas Hailer/Kinderfilmfest and the head of the Berlinale’s European Filmmarket Beki Probst, are (bio info provided by the festival):

AP writer Douglas J. Rowe speaks with real life Hotel Rawanda manager Paul Rusesabagina and Don Cheadle, who plays Rusesabagina the film.

From the AP:

Paul Rusesabagina still has sleepless nights. And when he does nod off, he still has nightmares. Witnessing wholesale slaughter and narrowly eluding death remains fresh for the hotel manager who saved 1,268 people during Rwanda's genocide a decade ago.
 
For a long time, he was bitter. Somehow, though, the movie "Hotel Rwanda" has helped him allay some of that pain — which stemmed from the world ignoring the hellish situation.

Sharon Waxman reports for the NY Times on the drop in the movie audience attendance this past year. In particular, it is noted that indie films "The Passion of the Christ" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" contributing half a billion dollars to the declining yearly box office gross.

From the NY Times:

That audience drop appeared especially troubling in a year in which Mel Gibson's controversial "The Passion of the Christ," distributed by Newmarket Films, brought many new moviegoers into the megaplexes and finished No. 3 at the domestic box office with $370.3 million in ticket sales, while Michael Moore's anti-Bush hit documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," from Lions Gate Films, became a magnet for political activists and sold $119.2 million in tickets.

"If you took the half-billion dollars of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' and 'Passion' out of the marketplace, we'd be in a real dismal situation, and they barely got distribution," said Paul Dergarabedian, Exhibitor Relations president, referring to behind-the-scenes struggles that ultimately landed both films with independent distributors.

Lynn Hirschberg on Bob Berney and Newmarket Films, for The New York Times Magazine:

The extraordinary success of [Bob] Berney and Newmarket Films (which is owned by Berney and two British financiers, William Tyrer and Chris Ball, who live in Los Angeles) has not gone unnoticed by the studios. This fall, Tom Freston, co-president of Viacom, which owns Paramount, approached Newmarket about purchasing it. The arrangement would be similar to the original deal between Miramax and Disney...''In the past few years, independent films have become big business,'' says Sherry Lansing, the outgoing chairwoman of Paramount. ''They are not just quality films that you stick in your release schedule like filler...Most of the time, those films would come from the ranks of the independents, like Newmarket.''

Martin Scorsese will appear at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in April to pay tribute to the work of Italian documentary filmmaker Vittorio De Seta, organizers announced, A.P. reports.

As a child, Oscar Torres fled the civil war in his homeland. Now he has brought his story home as a new film, "Innocent Voices," opened before enthusiastic crowds in the nation's capital, Marcos Aleman reports for A.P.

In a disappointingly thin interview with Martin Scorsese in the New York Times, Julie Salamon reveals that the director hates to fly, doesn't like his coffee to get too cold, and prefers to work on films like "The Aviator" in between his passion projects:

Why did Mr. Scorsese accept what he calls "the assignment" of making a period movie about the aviation pioneer Howard Hughes, whose epic life had tempted many filmmakers, but not him? A glamorous billionaire, test pilot and Hollywood director, Hughes also built an airline and slept with many trophy women (among them Katharine Hepburn, played in the film by Cate Blanchett). "The Aviator," which opens tomorrow, begins in the 1920's, when Hughes came to Hollywood, and ends in the 1940's, before he became notorious for his elusiveness and weirdness and more or less vanished from public view until his death, in 1976.

Mr. Scorsese is famous for spending years nursing his "labors of love." But in between, he likes to work.

In the last 10 years, film festivals have spread across the country. According to the Web site filmfestivals.com, there are roughly 2,500 worldwide. Withoutabox, a Los Angeles-based company that helps filmmakers apply to film festivals, estimates that there are 950 festivals in the United States alone, with 300 more in Canada; in North America, there are 100 Jewish film festivals, 30 gay and lesbian film festivals, and 279 festivals that either focus on animation or have animation categories, Charles Lyons reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

Kicking off their review of the year, Xan Brooks picks the twelve films you should have seen this year. Whether you've seen them or not, you can vote for your best and worst films of 2004 in our polls, or read on to recap a year coloured by deaths, controversies, and tax regulations.

Ron Tsuruda has joined IFC Films as the company's top marketing executive. As the new SVP of Marketing, Tsuruda picks up duties once handled by Caroline Bock (who managed marketing for both IFC Films and IFC TV). Earlier this year, IFC TV hired Evan Shapiro to oversee network marketing. Tsuruda is the former Senior Vice President, Advertising at Focus Features.

The complete press release follows.

Shyam Shroff of India's largest film distributor, Sringar Films, joins the board of the Indian Film Festival of LA.

Mick Davis' "Modigliani" will open the 2005 Miami Film Festival, running February 4 - 13 in Florida. The film, featuring Andy Garcia as artist Amedeo Modigliani, will kick-off the event, while Joaquin Oristrell's "Unconscious" (Inconscientes), a Spanish farce, will close the event.

indieWIRE will have a report on the 2005 Miami Film Festival lineup in Thursday's edition.

When "Amelie" became an international hit a few years ago, actress Audrey Tautou was hailed as the new French gamine. But she has emerged as a more substantive onscreen presence. A gamine of steel, if you will.

Tautou kept the drive of do-gooder Amelie but ditched the whimsy to play an unhinged stalker in "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not'' and a Turkish chambermaid evading organ snatchers in "Dirty Pretty Things.'' She has reteamed with "Amelie'' director Jean-Pierre Jeunet for her most determined character yet, a woman searching for her missing World War I soldier fiance, in "A Very Long Engagement," Carla Meyer reports for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The last film to be made by the slain Dutch director Theo van Gogh, called "06/05," has been premiered in The Hague. Members of Van Gogh's family and celebrities attended the screening of "06/05," based on the murder of the anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, BBC reports.

indieWIRE Blogger Matt Dentler of SXSW settled in at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin this weekend for 24 hours of straight movie watching (aka Butt Numb-A-Thon, Harry Knowles' annual movie marathon birthday party).

Dentler and the 200 security-screened guests watched 11 films in the 24 hours, including sneaks of "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," "The Phantom of the Opera," a pair of films from Sony Pictures Classics, heading to Sundance ("Layer Cake" and "Kung-Fu Hustle") and Magnolia Pictures' "Ong Bak." A full report is posted now on his blog, while "Robogeek" offers a diary of blog posts via cell phone, until tightened security made it tough to send updates.

"With no J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy to lord over Hollywood's prom night, an eccentric mix of real-life characters may step in to fill the void at the Academy Awards," CNN reports.

Predictably enough, the picture of American culture that emerges is of a polarized nation in which permissiveness and Puritanism battle over the bodies and souls of the innocent. Each side, convinced of its righteousness, demonizes the other. Depending on whom you choose to believe, we are threatened either by Internet pornographers and other peddlers of perversion, or else by prudes and hypocrites who want to drag us back to the 50's, or the Middle Ages, or some other time we can pretend was less obsessed with sex than our own. A.O. Scott reports for the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

Robert De Niro was in Rome on Friday to discuss putting Italian movies in the spotlight at next year's edition of the New York film festival he co-founded. The actor had missed a Rome meeting about the Tribeca festival in October, a day after angering officials in Milan by turning up late to an awards ceremony and failing to pick up a prize from the city. De Niro later said that "serious communications problems" led him to miss the appearances, A.P. reports.

In Spanish Harlem on Tuesday night, acclaimed Latin American directors Walter Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries"), Alfonso Cuarón ("Y Tu Mamá Tambien"), and Sebastián Cordero (Crónicas) gathered for a panel discussion about the New Wave of Latin American filmmaking at New York's El Museo del Barrio. The group were met by a crowd of 600, following a screening of Salles' "The Motorcycle Diaries."
[Photo by Donald Bowers/Getty Images, via Focus Features.]

On the heels of her screen adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, the internationally acclaimed Indian director is poised to shoot her next film in the bustling eastern Indian metropolis where she spent many summers as a young girl. The film is based on The Namesake, Pulitzer Prize-winning Jhumpa Lahiri's novel about the Bengali expatriate community in Boston. It feature a cast of Indian and American actors, Saibal Chatterjee reports for BBC.

A hit documentary about Al Jazeera television drew sharp reactions this week in a rare screening in the Arab world where the popular channel is often banned. "Control Room" was a surprise hit at U.S. box offices this year with its fly-on-the-wall look at the Arabic channel and its coverage of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. But the response of Arab viewers to the film, which has yet to be distributed in any Arab country, was one of anger and unease at the Dubai International Film Festival at a screening watched by Hollywood star Morgan Freeman, Andrew Hammond reports for Reuters.

An Indian cellular phone company plans to air a new Bollywood movie on mobile handsets for free and in full Thursday in a bid to promote its video-streaming service. "Rok Sako To Rok Lo," or "Stop, If You Can," will be available to Bharti Tele-Ventures customers in 11 Indian cities, provided their phones have the supporting technology, said Atul Bindal, a director at India's second-largest cellular service provider, A.P. reports.

Former Cinetic Media/ Sloss Law staffer Kerem Bayrak recently taken the
position of Head Of Business Affairs at Luc Roeg's newly launched production
and sales company, Artists Independent Films in London.

John Malkovich, Nastassja Kinski and David Cronenberg are involved in projects lined up for Independent Film Sales, the new sales division of production operation Artists Independent Films (AIF). Malkovich and Kinski, clients of sister management business Artists Independent Management (AIM), are to star in "The Holy Beast." Erich Breuer is directing the gothic horror from his screenplay. Also in the works is a Cronenberg project based on Iris Murdoch's acclaimed "The Sea The Sea." The novel tells the story of a retired theatre legend living on the rugged north English coast, where his pursuit of self-knowledge is riddled with unconscious projections and supernatural interventions.

While many admire the bleak realism of his films, others see only working-class caricatures. As his award-winning "Vera Drake" is released, Mike Leigh talks about low-budget heaven and why he prefers British actors to Hollywood stars, Sean O'Hagan reports in an article appearing in The Guardian.

Some of the finest noses in the French wine world are snorting into their decanters over a new film which claims they are complicit in the American-led homogenisation of world tastes and the steady destruction of France's centuries-old tradition of "terroir." "Mondovino", a low-budget documentary by American sommelier-turned-filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter, has been a surprise hit at the box-office since it opened last month -- pulling in some 200,000 viewers -- but the reaction among many in the wine-making establishment has been as sour as a corked bottle of chateau plonk, Agence France Presse reports.

"The bustling Gulf emirate of Dubai took a step towards establishing itself as a Cannes of the Middle East, opening its first international film festival in a bid to bridge cultural divides. The first so-called Gala films, French-Moroccan movie "Le Grand Voyage" and Indian-Canadian movie "Bollywood/Hollywood", both tales of east meets west, are making their Middle East premiere here, Agence France Presse reports.

A group of Muslims has reported two Danish broadcasters to the police for airing the film Submission by murdered film-maker Theo van Gogh. Denmarks Radio and TV2 showed the film, which examines abuse against Muslim women, and put clips in news bulletins, BBC reports.

Once upon a time in Hollywood, the stars shone with a radiant glamour; in Chinese film they still do. In movies from Beijing to Hong Kong, actresses like Zhang Ziyi and actors like Tony Leung Chiu-wai fill the screen with heart-skipping beauty and charm. In May at the Cannes Film Festival, audiences swooned for Wong Kar-wai's romantic drama "2046" and Zhang Yimou's latest swordsman epic, "House of Flying Daggers." Although they couldn't be more different in story, sensibility and visual pleasures, what the films share in addition to Ms. Zhang is an extraordinary glamour born from the tension between release and repression. Manohla Dargis reports for the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

The International Film Festival Summit starts Tuesday.

On Tuesday December 7th experts from all over the world will gather
at the Hudson Hotel in New York City to talk about the current state
of the Film Festival Industry. Since the 1930's, film festivals have
been gaining cultural and economic relevance, but over the past four
years there has been a near epidemic growth in the number of
festivals. This summit fills an important need by fostering a sense of
community amongst the diverse spectrum of individuals who are involved
in the festival landscape.

In its opening weekend, Zhang Yimou's "House of Flying Daggers", from Sony Pictures Classics, earned an estimated $417,000, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. The film, opening on 15 screens, had an estimated per screen average of $27,800 during its opening weekend. Mike Nichols' "Closer," from 'Big Sony' made an estimated $7.7 million on 476 screens, for an estimated $16,176 per site in its debut.

For (Italian Prime Minister) Silvio Berlusconi, a starring role in politics and business may not be enough. Italy's media magnate prime minister is now reported to be considering a flirt with the silver screen. "I have in mind the idea of making a movie," newspaper La Stampa reported Berlusconi as saying on Friday. It would not be first time the self-made billionaire has suggested putting his life on film, Reuters reports.

One of Berlin's oldest and best-loved arts cinemas is threatened with closure, despite having been renovated only three years ago. The Babylon in former East Berlin is facing a financial crisis at the end of December, having had its subsidy from the city authorities withdrawn, Matthew Tempest reports for The Guardian.

Hundreds of Indian devotees have been donating money to a temple charity over the past three weeks to raise funds for a low-budget movie's Oscar publicity campaign in the United States, one of the producers said. It is part of a nationwide drive to collect about 15 million rupees ($334,000) -- more than twice what it cost to make the film ("Shwaas") -- which the producers say they need to promote India's entry for an Oscar nomination before the shortlist is announced in January, Reuters reports.

Mike Leigh's moving portrayal of a back-street abortionist in 1950s London swept the British Independent Film Awards late Tuesday, taking six awards, including Best Film and Best Director. "Vera Drake" also snared the Best Actress award for Imelda Staunton and Best Actor for Phil Davis, Reuters reports.