The Rome Film Festival has announced that Oscar-winning director Michael Cimino will attend this year's event, slated for October 22-31. Really? The Deer Hunter director has been a mystery in recent years, He was spotted at Cannes in 2007, having made a short film for the Chacun son cinéma 60th anniversary program. Before that, however, he hadn't directed a film since the bomb Sunchaser in 1996. Before that? The Desperate Hours remake in 1990, which was also a flop. Of course no flop in the 1990s met the same kind of legendary status as his 1980 disaster opus, Heaven's Gate.

Cimino has stayed relatively quiet for a number of years, so in festival programming terms, his public appearance is a coup. In a Vanity Fair article earlier this year, writer Peter Biskind also documented the filmmaker's reclusive nature. While discussing the controversy around his 1978 Oscar-winner The Deer Hunter, Biskind writes:

Cimino, who has not directed a feature since 1996, and who has been the focus of gossip concerning his alleged desire to change his gender, could not be reached for comment. (His representatives said he was in China scouting locations for a new film.)

Based on an IMDB listing, this film appears to be Man's Fate, based on a novel by André Malraux. Hopefully we'll know more after this year's Rome Film Festival.

I saw Cimino speak at the Dubai Film Festival this year, where I believe he was on the jury. He espoused the general "the US government should stop hating these beautiful Arabs, they have much to teach us with their amazing culture" favored by many of the celebrity attendants who failed to understand the special relationship that exists between the US and the oil-producing gulf states.

In any case, he looked like he had taken extra crazy pills the night we saw him, which they maybe prescribed for him after he visited Faye Dunaway's plastic surgeon. He was a very small, taut, crazy man.

And Heaven's Gate is way better than most people suggested. Just thought I'd share.

"Heaven's Gate" is a nothing less than a masterpiece. Most people would not know this, because they have not seen the film, because critics and bloggers continue to borrow uncreative phrases from each other like "disaster opus" without first screening the film, even to this day. To see it is to love it, no matter your gender. Thank you. Doit.

Have recently discovered the European DVD release of "The Deer Hunter" with a very moving commentary and interview by Cimino. I remember seeing at first release during the healing over the Vietnam carnage but even thirty years later (gosh so long!) the movie has great resonance and certainly the work of a master. Creative forces come and go, everyone thought John Ford was washed up after being replaced on "Mr Roberts", then he unleashed "The Searchers", probably his best work.