Durban film studio premiers six films at festival

VIDEOVISION Entertainment will premiere six films at the 36th Durban International Film Festival, which takes place from 16 to 26 July.

The films, which will all have either South African and African premieres at the festival, are Wolf Totem, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, Strangerland, Mommy, Coming Home and White Bird in a Blizzard.

“As a proudly Durban based company, we are pleased to be continuing our partnership with the DIFF by bringing these great films by some of the world’s top film-makers to the festival. Of particular significance for Durban, is the attendance of the award winning director Jean-Jacques Annaud at the African premiere of his visually spectacular film Wolf Totem on July 20 and the selection of the animated adaptation of Khalil Gibran’s seminal work, The Prophet directed by Roger Allers, as the closing night film of the festival,” said Sanjeev Singh, director of acquisition and distribution for Videovision Entertainment.

The much-lauded Wolf Totem by the celebrated, award-winning French director Jean-Jacques Annaud is a visually beautiful adaptation of the Chinese best-seller by Jiang Rong. The film has received critical acclaim and has also achieved box office success, reaping in US$ 111 million in China and US$9 million in France.

Inspired by the beloved classic Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, the film is a richly-animated tale of an unlikely friendship between a young, mischievous girl and an imprisoned poet. Interwoven with Gibran’s lyrical and inspiring words on the true nature of love, work, freedom and marriage, the film is written and directed by Roger Allers and features the voices of Liam Neeson, Salma Hayek-Pinault, Quvenzhané Wallis, John Krasinski, Frank Langella and Alfred Molina. The film had its World Premiere in the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival this year.

White Bird in a Blizzard directed by Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin), stars Shailene Woodley, Eva Green and Angela Bassett. This dramatic thriller, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, has been described as sexy and haunting, tells the story of a young woman discovering her own sexuality when her mother mysteriously disappears. At first she is not impacted by it, but on returning home on a break from college, finds herself confronted with the truth about her mother's departure, and her own denial about the events surrounding it.

The multi award-winning, Mommy, by acclaimed director Xavier Dolan had its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is set in a fictional Canada, where a new law allows parents to abandon their troubled children to the hospital system.

Strangerland directed by Kim Farrant starring Nicole Kidman, Hugo Weaving and Joseph Fiennes, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is about a family that finds their dull life in a rural outback town rocked after their two teenage children disappear into the desert, sparking disturbing rumours of their past.

Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s drama romance, Coming Home, which was in the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection, is an epic story of love and loss, is pitted to become a new classic in Chinese cinema.

“We would like to thank Videovision Entertainment for their constant interest in, and contribution to, the festival by providing top-end films from celebrated directors. We have a vision to provide our audiences with films that are at once accessible and aesthetically pleasing, and to ensure that some of the films screened provide stimulation for the growth of the South African film industry, and these titles certainly speak to both of these notions,” said Pedro Pimenta, director of DIFF.