CALGARY FILM FESTIVAL
Highly touted western opens at gala
The Calgary International Film Festival will kick things off Sept. 19 with one of the most anticipated films of the year, offering French director Jacques Audiard’s take on Canadian novelist Patrick deWitt’s western The Sisters Brothers.
The festival’s executive director, Stephen Schroeder, made the announcement Tuesday at the Globe Cinema and also unveiled this year’s complete lineup of films. The Sisters Brothers will air at the Jack Singer Concert Hall as the festival’s opening red-carpet gala, although so far there has been no confirmation of who will be in attendance from the film. The festival runs until Sept. 30 and will include nearly 200 films.
The Sisters Brothers is based on deWitt’s darkly comic, Giller-winning novel about Eli and Charlie Sisters, two assassins sent by their boss to kill a prospector in 1850s Oregon. John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed and Rutger Hauer star.
It is the first English-language film for Audiard, who also directed 2009’s A Prophet, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival, and 2015’s Dheepan, which won the Palme d’Or. The Sisters Brothers is certainly one of the festival’s highest-profile opening-gala films in recent memory.
“It’s a great western,” Schroeder said. “I would go so far to say that it may just be a classic in the genre, it’s that good. The direction by Jacques Audiard is super tight. He gets fantastic performances out of the actors. Everyone in the film is incredibly compelling.”
Last year, the festival broke attendance records, attracting just over 40,000 people. This year, the festival received a record number of paid submissions from filmmakers.
“The reason paid submissions are important is that it’s a measure of how much we are on the radar globally,” Schroeder says.
“When paid submissions are going up, we think it’s a very strong indicator of the festival internationally growing.”
Here are some other highlights for the 19th annual Calgary International Film Festival. For a complete list of films, visit calgaryfilm. com.
ALBERTA FILMS
The number of locally made features may not be quite as high as in past years, but the festival will host four films shot in Wild Rose Country.
That includes Rob Grant’s Calgary-shot horror Alive starring Angus Macfadyen; the oil-andgas satire Circle of Steel by firsttime feature filmmaker Gillian McKercher; Calgary auteur Gary Burns’ drama Running Man; and the documentary Making Coco: The Grant Fuhr Story by Edmonton Oilers Entertainment Group vice-president Don Metz.
Making Coco will be the festival’s closing gala on Sept. 29.
WORLD PREMIERES
Both Alive and Circle of Steel will have world premieres at the festival. So will a handful of other Canadian films, including Sorry for Your Loss, Collin Frieson’s comedy-drama starring Bruce Greenwood and Justin Bartha; Wolfcop director Lowell Dean’s apocalyptic Supergrid and Chad Archibald’s horror flick I’ll Take Your Dead.
HEADLINERS
The Sisters Brothers is not the only highly anticipated film to make the cut this year. The lineup will also include Don McKellar’s adaptation of Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce; Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces; Montreal director Kim Nguyen’s The Hummingbird Project, with Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgard; and Under the Silver Lake, the newest curio from It Follows director David Robert Mitchell starring Andrew Garfield and Riley Keough.
DOCUMENTARIES
Documentaries always tend to do well at the Calgary film festival and this year’s crop is typically eclectic. They include Sharkwater Extinction, director Rob Stewart’s posthumous look at the black-market slaughter of sharks. Stewart drowned while shooting the film in Florida.
Other documentaries include Invisible Essence: Little Prince, a profile of the beloved 1943 novella, and Of Fathers and Sons, Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki’s exploration of a radical Islamist family in his homeland.
OTHER NOTABLES
This year’s Alberta Spotlight will concentrate on locally made music videos, which will be screened at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre. The NMC will also host screenings of music-related films such as Bachman and Up to Snuff.
Beakerhead, Cowtown’s festival of art and technology, will overlap the Calgary Film Festival this year, running from Sept. 19 to 23. The two will partner for a screening of the documentary AlphaGo, which chronicles the 2016 Google DeepMind Challenge Match where a master of the ancient Chinese game of Go took on an AI opponent.