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Italy’s Great Toni Servillo Returns to U.S. Screens in VIVA LA LIBERTA

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Many U.S. arthouse moviegoers were wowed last year when they were introduced to Toni Servillo, one of Italy’s finest actors, in The Great Beauty. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Next Friday the 28th we are excited to open Mr. Servillo’s latest film to make the journey from overseas, VIVA LA LIBERTA. Servillo plays Enrico Oliveri, a politician who realizes that the decline of his party is inevitable and decides to disappear, fleeing to Paris to find peace in the home of his ex-girlfriend Danielle (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) while creating a panic within the party. His top aide and his wife decide to contact his twin brother, a genius philosopher suffering from bi-polar disorder and living in a psychiatric institution. The three of them concoct a dangerous plan.

We will open VIVA LA LIBERTA at the Royal, Playhouse and Town Center on Friday, November 21.

http://www.vimeo.com/106627472
Toni Servillo

BRAHMIN BULLS Q&A’s this Weekend at the Playhouse

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In BRAHMIN BULLS, when Ashok makes a surprise trip to L.A. to visit his estranged son, the two begin a journey to mend their relationship until Sid discovers that his father has actually come in search of an old flame.  Starring Sendhil Ramamurthy (Heroes, Beauty and the Beast), Roshan Seth (Gandhi), Academy Award winner Mary Steenburgen (The Help), Justin Bartha (The Hangover), and Academy Award nominated Michael Lerner (Barton Fink), BRAHMIN BULLS is a heartfelt and humorous look at the ever-evolving relationship between a father and son, the women in their lives, and the powerful secrets they keep.
The BRAHMIN BULLS filmmakers will participate in Q&A’s all weekend at the Playhouse: they will answer audience member’s questions after the 11/21, 22, and 23 7 PM screenings, as well as after the 1:20 PM show on Sunday the 23rd.
11/21 – Cassidy Freeman (actor), Mahesh Pailoor (director), Anu Pradhan (co-writer), Yoshi Tsuji (producer);
11/22 – Presented by Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, Gingger Shankar (Composer), Mahesh Pailoor (director), Anu Pradhan (co-writer);
11/23 (1:20 PM) – Mahesh Pailoor (director), Anu Pradhan (co-writer);
11/23 (7 PM) – Presented by the Indian Film Festival Los Angeles, Mahesh Pailoor (director), Anu Pradhan (co-writer).

FOOD CHAINS, Documentary Expose About the Exploitation of Farm Workers, Opens this Weekend with Q&A’s and Panel Discussions

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This weekend we open FOOD CHAINS, a new feature documentary that exposes the abuse of farm workers within the United States and the complicity of the multi-billion dollar supermarket and fast food industries. There is more interest in food these days than ever, yet there is very little interest in the hands that pick it. Farm workers, the foundation of our fresh food industry, are routinely abused and robbed of wages. In extreme cases they can be beaten, sexually harassed or even enslaved – all within the borders of the United States.

The FOOD CHAINS filmmakers are planning a number of events around the screenings at the Playhouse 7:

November 21st

5:20PM – TENTATIVE PANEL – details tbd

7:30PM – PANEL:

Thomas Saenz (MALDEF)

Lupe Gonzalo (CIW),

Elena Stein (CIW)

November 22nd

5:20PM – PANEL:

David Damien Figueroa (MALDEF, Executive Producer of Food Chains),

Jon Esformes (Operating Partner of Pacific Tomato Growers featured in Food Chains)

7:30PM – PANEL:

Lupe Gonzalo (CIW),

Elena Stein (CIW); UNCONFIRMED PANELIST: Melody and Bobby Kennedy Jr

(After 5:20 screening there will be Wine Happy Hour at Whole Foods Pasadena).

November 23rd

1:00PM – PANEL:

Joann Lo (Food Chains Worker Alliance),

Lupe Gonzalo (CIW),

Elena Stein (CIW)

7:30 PM – TENTATIVE PANEL – details tbd

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqZLrXVAde4

THE WAY HE LOOKS Cast and Crew Q&A at the Playhouse this Saturday

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Set to the music of Belle and Sebastian, Daniel Ribeiro’s coming-of-age tale THE WAY HE LOOKS is a fun and tender story about friendship and the complications of young love. Leo is a blind teenager who’s fed up with his overprotective mother and the bullies at school. Looking to assert his independence, he decides to study abroad, to the dismay of his best friend, Giovana. When Gabriel, the new kid in town, teams with Leo on a school project, new feelings blossom in him that make him reconsider his plans.

THE WAY HE LOOKS writer-director Daniel Ribeiro, producer Diana Almeida and actors Ghilherme Lobo, Fabio Audi and Tess Amorim will participate in a Q&A after the 3:10 screening at the Playhouse on Saturday afternoon, November 8th.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcb0VnB2vnQ

 

THE WAY HE LOOKS director Daniel Ribeiro

PELICAN DREAMS in Newsweek: “Stuck with the Bill.”

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What’s it like to try to get to know a flying dinosaur? In PELICAN DREAMS, Sundance and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Judy Irving (“The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill”) follows a wayward California brown pelican from her “arrest” on the Golden Gate Bridge into care at a wildlife rehabilitation facility, and from there explores pelicans’ nesting grounds, Pacific coast migration, and survival challenges.

Newsweek Magazine just published this piece about the film. It begins, “‘A friend of mine was in this traffic jam,’ Judy Irving recalls. ‘She said, ‘You’ll never guess why I was held up on the bridge.” It’s not unusual for traffic to come to a stop on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge: There’s the ever-more-L.A.-like traffic, the occasional protest or suicide jumper. But in this case it was a pelican that stopped the show and Irving knew she had her next movie.”

http://vimeo.com/102655510
Judy Irving (filmmaker) & Gigi (pelican) in the aviary at International Bird Rescue.

THROUGH A LENS DARKLY: BLACK PHOTOGRAPHERS AND THE EMERGENCE OF A PEOPLE Q&A’s at the Playhouse

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The first documentary to explore the role of photography in shaping the identity, aspirations and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present, THROUGH A LENS DARKLY probes the recesses of American history by discovering images that have been suppressed, forgotten and lost. Bringing to light the hidden and unknown photos shot by both professional and vernacular African American photographers, the film opens a window into lives, experiences and perspectives of black families that is absent from the traditional historical canon.

THROUGH A LENS DARKLY director Thomas Allen Harris will participate in Q&A’s after the 7:45 PM screenings at the Playhouse Friday through Tuesday, November 14-18.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4Kd1GfkfW4
Thomas Allen Harris, director of THROUGH A LENS DARKLY. Photo by Russell Frederick from Chimpanzee Productions, Inc.

Indiewire Interview with FORCE MAJEURE Filmmaker: “The tourists dressed up in neon colors, and the goggles, the well-to-do people who don’t have problems in their lives. I was fond of the idea of messing things up for those people.”

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On October 31 we open the Swedish film FORCE MAJEURE, Ruben Östlund’s wickedly funny and precisely observed psychodrama about a seemingly model married couple who suddenly find themselves in crisis after the husband does something extremely cowardly and selfish. Written and directed by Östlund (Play, Involuntary), the film was a word-of-mouth sensation at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where it won the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard. Östlund recently sat for an interview with Indiewire’s Ryan Lattanzio to talk about this top contender for the Foreign Language Oscar:

Indiewire: What initially interested you about a couple in crisis?

Östlund: It started with the avalanche: I had been skiing a lot and when I was between 20 and 25, I was making ski films in the Alps, traveling around Europe and in North America. Then I went to film school, and I left the ski world behind me, and I was trying to go back to the ski world, and to highlight the absurdity of that world. I was inspired by a YouTube clip of a group of people sitting at an outdoor restaurant filming an avalanche tumbling down the mountain. I was interested in the three seconds where it goes from “wow, beautiful” to nervous laughter to total panic.

Then I developed the idea and got to the point where someone said, “What if the father is running away from his wife and his kids when this happens?” Immediately I understood that this situation is raising questions about gender, expectations on gender, the role of the man and the role of the woman. If you see the ski resort, it’s totally constructed around the nuclear family. All the apartments are made for a mother, a father and their kids. It was a setup of holiday, the avalanche, the man doing something that is so forbidden when it comes to the expectations of the man, and that made me dive into the questions in between the relationships after this incident.

Ruben Östlund



I read sociological studies about airplane hijacking. You can tell from this study that the frequency of divorce is extremely high after airplane hijacking. It points out expectations about how we should behave in a crisis situation and when a man isn’t the hero he’s expected to be, couples have a really hard time getting over that.

What’s so absurd about the world of ski resorts?

The tourists dressed up in neon colors, and the goggles, the well-to-do people who don’t have problems in their lives. I was fond of the idea of messing things up for those people, having them meeting human mechanisms that you mostly see in war or a nature catastrophe: they don’t have any experience how they would react when in survival instinct mood. The ski resort itself is like a metaphor: there’s a constant struggle between man and nature. The civilized, trying to control the force of nature. The resort is always trying to stabilize the snow. There was something about that that fit the subject of the film very well.

To read the full interview, go to Indiewire.com.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjjzVbTBF8o

 

LIFE INSIDE OUT: “Boy’s Triumph Over Autism Inspires New Film”

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From the San Diego Union-Tribune, October 2, by Pam Kragen:

“Boy’s triumph over autism inspires new film: Actress writes movie that draws on her onetime mentoring relationship with San Marcos college student.”

SAN MARCOS — When he was a toddler, Cal State San Marcos freshman Julian Kalb overcame an autism-related communication disorder with the help of L.A. actress Maggie Baird. Fifteen years later, he’s returning the favor as executive producer for Baird’s new film — a drama inspired by their long-ago mentoring relationship.

“Baird co-wrote and stars in “Life Inside Out,” the story of a mother who helps her socially awkward son find himself through music. Baird produced the low-budget, independent film — which opens a weeklong run Oct. 17 at the UltraStar Cinema Mission Valley — with the financial support of family and friends, including Julian, 20, of San Marcos, and his father, Ken Kalb, of Rancho Santa Fe.

“When Maggie started working with Julian, she was his helper and now, flash-forward 15 years, and he can help his teacher make her dream come true,” said Kalb, a film buff and entrepreneur who has started several software and telecommunications companies. He said he and his son cashed in some of their Apple stock to invest in Baird’s movie.

The title, “Life Inside Out,” comes from a song lyric in the film about discovering your inner self, something experienced in life by Julian and on film by the fictional teen son.

http://www.vimeo.com/106452628

“It’s about living your life authentically and being seen for who you really are,” Baird said. “In the film, the mother is dealing with a child who has not found his thing until music clicks for him, and Julian was definitely an inspiration for that.”

The Kalbs first met Baird in the late 1990s, when they lived on the same block in the L.A. neighborhood of Los Feliz. At the time, Baird was a member of L.A.’s comedy improv group The Groundlings. Kalb asked her if she could do some improv and theater exercises with Julian to help him better express his feelings. Beginning at age 2, Julian could only speak by parroting lines from cartoons and movies and he was unable to carry on a conversation, Kalb said.

Baird said she had no training as a therapist, but she decided to improvise when she first sat down with Julian. When he started talking to her with scripted lines he’d memorized from a Charlie Brown television special, she responded to him as Charlie Brown’s arch-nemesis, Lucy.

“I saw a light go on in his eyes when he saw that I was buying into it and we had long conversations as those characters,” she said. “Gradually over time, I expanded the dialogue so he learned the natural give and take of conversation.”

Baird worked with Julian for two years until the Kalbs moved to Solana Beach. With his newfound love for theater, Julian went on to perform in more than a dozen youth-cast musicals with J*Company in La Jolla. The Torrey Pines High School graduate now lives on campus at Cal State San Marcos, where he’s majoring in visual and performing arts.

“When I get onstage, I don’t feel very nervous at all,” he said. “It’s fun creating a character. I would like to work behind the scenes in the film industry as an executive producer and maybe work as a voice artist.”

Baird stayed in touch with the Kalbs over the years, and said she’s been impressed by how Julian has blossomed.

“He’s funny and charming and is still an amazing mimic,” she said.

Baird began writing the “Life Inside Out” screenplay in 2012 with her friend and fellow singer/comedian Lori Nasso. It’s the dual story of a mother of three who rediscovers her love of music at an open-mic night, and her social outcast son Shane, who finds his own musical voice along the way. She co-stars in the movie with her real-life son, 17-year-old Finneas O’Connell, an actor and singer who fronts the L.A. band The Slightlys.

Since its release on the festival circuit earlier this year, “Life Inside Out” has won 10 awards, picked up a distributor and is opening this month in several cities around the country.

“I’ve been delighted at how well it’s been received,” Baird said. “Audiences have responded so positively. Men and women have come up to me and said over and over ‘this is my story.’ ”

Kalb said that when he and Julian agreed to invest in the movie, they did it out of gratitude and friendship, not expecting it would become a festival hit.

“It’s been a remarkable experience and such a nice surprise,” he said. “We gave Maggie the money because we love her and she’s a life force, not because we expected it to become wildly successful. We’re just happy to be a part of it.”

pam.kragen@utsandiego.com

"Life Inside Out" co-producers Ken and Julian Kalb with screenwriter and star Maggie Baird at the film's screening at the Hollywood Film Festival.