AFI Fest: Switzerland's Oscar Submission "My Little Sister"

by Christopher James

The first image depicts a frail woman in a hospital hooked up to an IV. The camera moves in and seems to fixate on the needle in her arm. For the uninitiated, this introduction feels almost parody-esque of an Oscar foreign language film. Are we in for a two hour depression porn where beautiful Europeans slowly die from cancer?

Luckily, My Little Sister, Switzerland’s Oscar submission, is more than meets the eye in that opening moment. Yes, it’s a cancer drama. However, it’s a more unorthodox exploration of a complicated sibling dynamic...

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"My Little Sister" and Switzerland at the Oscars

by Nathaniel R

We have our second contender for Best International Feature at the forthcoming Oscars. Poland was first to announce but now we also know which film Switzerland will send. They're going with My Little Sister which stars two familiar German greats Nina Hoss (Phoenix, Barbara, A Most Wanted Man) and Lars Eidinger (Never Look Away, Personal Shopper, Clouds of Sils Maria). Hoss and Eidinger are only six months apart in age in real life and early reviews of their performances are strong so we can't wait to see them as twins. The movie is directed by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond, a directing duo that Switzerland submitted once before in 2010 for The Little Bedroom...

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Interview: Director Petra Volpe on Swiss Oscar Submission 'The Divine Order'

By Jose Solís

I don’t remember exactly what horrible thing the new US administration had announced it wanted to do the day I found myself walking into The Divine Order at the Tribeca Film Festival. I knew nothing about the movie and decided I’d give it ten minutes to capture my attention and help me escape whatever ghastly reality was shaping outside. I didn’t want to watch anything about war, genocide etcetera.

All I wanted was hope, and boy did Petra Volpe’s lovely film deliver...

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Locarno Winners: Huppert, The Big Sick, and More...

by Nathaniel R

Isabelle Huppert as "Madame Hyde"

The Locarno Film Festival wrapped up today in Switzerland and guess who's back for yet more film honors? Isabelle Huppert, that's who! In the new French film Madame Hyde she plays an eccentric teacher who is struck by lightning. When she wakes she, well, the title will probably cue you in to her sudden split personality. The sleeper hit/romantic comedy The Big Sick also took a big prize. The Awards are after the jump...

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TIFF Animated Wonders: The Red Turtle & My Life as a Courgette

Nathaniel R reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival

In the American landscape of animated features, barring extremely rare indies like Anomalisa, it's always safe to refer to animated films as "a genre" even though it technically isn't one. But you always know the type of film you're going to get. Some of them are magnificent, but even those play safely in-line with expectations: family friendly, cute and colorful, noisy/busy for short attention spans, funny. So long as you meet those four expectations you're allowed to color outside the lines of the actual governing genre (adventure/comedy) used by animation studios and draw from other genres like musicals, fantasy pictures, and horror so long as the horror is cute-grotesque (think Tim Burton's forays into the genre or all of Laika pictures).

For the forseeable future, though, we'll have to keep looking abroad for an understanding of animation as a film medium (what it actually is), capable of telling any type of story that might spring from any kind of genre. Festivals that program animated films are wise. They're often beautiful counterprogramming to more typical art fare. On the first day of the festival I caught two of them, both of which are aiming for Oscar love...

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