MTFB Oscar Update: Lead Acting / Middleburg Film Festival Awards Are All TFF films / Interviews and Profiles: Tucci, Baker and Berger

MTFB OSCAR UPDATE: LEAD ACTING

I'm updating the Lead Acting categories today.  These categories were last updated on Oct. 10th.  An actor's previous position is indicated in (parentheses).  TFF #51 films are in Bold. 

BEST ACTRESS

1) Mikey Madison/Anora (1)

2) Angelina Jolie/Maria (2)

3) Karla Sofia Gascon/Emilia Perez (3)

4) Nicole Kidman/Babygirl (4)

5) Saoirse Ronan/The Outrun (5)

Others: Mariann Jean-Baptiste/Hard Truths, Demi Moore/The Substance, Fernanda Torres/I'm Still Here.

BEST ACTOR

1) Adrien Brody/The Brutalist (3)

2) Ralph Fiennes/Conclave (1)

3) Colman Domingo/Sing Sing (2)

4) Timothee Chalamet/A Complete Unknown (4)

5) Daniel Craig/Queer (5)

Others: Paul Mescal/Gladiator II, Sebastian Stan/The Apprentice, John David Washington/The Piano Lesson

I'll be updating the Supporting Acting categories on Monday.

MIDDLEBURG FEST AWARDS ARE ALL TFF #51 FILMS

The Middleburg Film festival is one of America's standout regional festivals.  They traditionally schedule an incredible lineup of films each year.  This year, as usual, a number of films that screened at TFF made their way to Middleburg.  Four of those films earned Audience Awards as the fest concluded last Sunday.  

Conclave and September 5 tied for the Audience Award for Narrative Features.  The Seed of the Sacred Fig was named Best International Feature and Martha won the award for Documentary.

Other TFF films in the MFF included: All We Imagine as Light, Anora, Better Man, Carville: Winning Is Everything...Stupid,  Emilia Perez, The End, Maria, Memoir of a Snail, Nickel Boys, No Other Land, The Piano Lesson,  A Peal Pain, Santosh, Saturday Night and Separated.  

Other high profile  and non-TFF films included: Blitz, The Brutalist, Flow, Hard Truths, I'm Still Here, The Last Showgirl, Nightbitch. The Room Next Door, Sing Sing and The Wild Robot.

Complete coverage of the awards is linked here from Variety.

INTERVIEWS AND PROFILES

Sean Baker for Anora from The New Yorker

Edward Berger for Conclave from The Playlist.

Stanley Tucci for Conclave from Vanity Fair.

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New Darkest Hour Trailer Appears / HDS For Oscar Campaign Continues / News from Middleburg, Va. / More from Mexico...

Welcome back from the weekend.  It's October!


NEW DARKEST HOUR TRAILER APPEARS

As Focus Features readies Joe Wright's Darkest Hour for its release on Nov. 22 they released a new trailer for the film this week.  Here it is from YouTube:

Coverage is included here for the new trailer's release from Entertainment Weekly and Indiewire.



HDS FOR OSCAR CAMPAIGN CONTINUES

So, I'm sure you've noticed over the past two weeks plus my minute campaign to jump start a campaign to get Harry Dean Stanton into the Best Actor Oscar conversation for his final film, Lucky.  Well, heads up friends...I'm not the only one.  David Ehrlich took up the cause late this past week at Indiewire with an article entitled: "Why 'Lucky' Should Earn the Late Harry Dean Stanton His First Oscar".

Well, I was thrilled.  You might say David has a larger platform to make the point than  I do.  I know David just a little bit as he has been kind enough over the past few years to be one of the Telluride Pros who shares his ratings of the films he sees at Telluride that I then post so it was very gratifying to see that post pop up this week echoing the sentiment that I have been feeling since the passing of Stanton in Sept. 15.

So, friends, be aware.  The Harry Dean Stanton drumbeat is going to be continuing here (and from my Twitter and Facebook accounts) for the foreseeable future.  I hope it doesn't annoy and my apologies if it does.

Here's the coda for this week.  Links to rapturous reviews for the film and Stanton's performance in particular from Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone.


NEWS FROM MIDDLEBURG, VA

I received a friendly email from MTFB reader and TFF patron Patrick Healy this week.  Patrick is working hard currently in the run up to the Middleburg Film Fest in Middleburg, Va.  Patrick works for the fest in PTR and wanted to alert me to the fests lineup and dates.  It grabbed my interest because Patrick has been a respondent to my requests for the "People's Ratings" for TFF and also because the MFF lineup is A) Fantastic! and B) includes a ton of TFF titles.

Middleburg TFF #44 films: Darkest Hour (their opener), Lady Bird (their centerpiece) as well as Faces/Places, A Fantastic Woman, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, Loveless, The Other Side of Hope and Wonderstruck.  MFF has also programmed such intriguing titles as Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Last Flag Flying, Happy End, Call Me By Your Name, I Tonya, Mudbound and Breathe.

That's just a rockin' lineup...

The Middleburg Fest runs Oct.19-22.  Check the website here: The Middleburg Film Festival, Middleburg, Va.


MORE FROM MEXICO...

Last Monday I posted a story about film preservationists in Mexico challenged due to the recent earthquake there.  Gary Meyer of Eat Drink Films and former co-director of the Telluride Film Festival pointed out that, among other things, there is a very definite connection to TFF.

From Gary's email:

Michael,

Thanks for posting about  Viviana's situation with her archive. Obviously it has it roots with Telluride. Tom saw a very rough cut of PERDIDA in Morelia and became interested because of his own passion for some Mexican films and especially the actress Nino Sevilla who got a Silver Medallion in 1995 and we showed a documentary about her as well as the classics VICTIMS OF SIN and AVENTURERA. He met Viviana in Morelia and gave her extensive comments about the film and also introduced her to some key people for her story, some she did not know were still alive.

I sent this email out to many archive and press friends and art house operators.

===================

If you saw the wonderful documentary PERDIDA by Viviana Garcia Besné that premiered in Telluride in 2009 you know about the incredible story of how the filmmaker "was told that her family had made some of the worst films in the history of Mexican cinema. Viviana spent many years ashamed of that legacy and distanced herself from everything that the Calderón family had ever done. But a chance encounter sparked her interest and led to a 3-year quest to uncover the story of a family that had been involved in all aspects of the film business in Mexico and the United States -- theaters, distribution, and production -- whose rise and fall throughout the 20th century closely mirrored that of Mexican cinema as a whole, a once-powerful film industry that was now virtually nonexistent. The story that Viviana discovered through old film reels, photographs, newspaper articles, clips from the family's film vaults, and interviews with the survivors of Mexican cinema's golden eras included tales of romance and stories about movie and music legends like Ricardo Montalbán, Lupe Vélez and the mambo king Damaso Perez Prado, and allowed her to make peace with a legacy of film pioneers." (IMDB).

In the process researching she found hundreds of reels of Calderon films that included everything from genre films like El Santo and Aztec Mummy wrestling movies to classics like Emilio Fernández' VICTIMS OF SIN with Ninon Sevilla.

She and her husband Alistair have been unearthing, cataloguing and restoring the films. 

Here is a short video of Viviana recovering films.  

And then the earthquake hit this week  

​badly damaging

 the archive building 

​ and films​

 .

Our mutual friend and Berkeley-based collector Peter Conheim and archivist has been working with them and set up a Go Fund Me page where you can also donate:

https://www.gofundme.com/earthquake-damage-archive-rescue

Yesterday he sent out this letter and the attached letter from Viviana with photos of the damage.

This evening Peter reports: "I spoke to Viviana at around 7pm and got a further update, which was actually quite amazing – an armada of 30-some volunteers have managed to get the films off the floor. But now a lot of them are in people’s cars! "

Your support would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Gary

That's going to do it for your MTFB Monday post.  I'll have more on Thursday...

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