A Festival of Foreign Films

I don't know about you, but I managed to get tickets for all the films I wanted to see at the Wisconsin Film Festival. It was a bit of a mad dash because, as noon Saturday loomed, I discovered that a few of the films I was keen on seeing were going to be coming to Sundance this spring so I decided to avoid those and go with some unknown propositions.

Firstly there's Joon-ho Bong's Madeo (Mother) which opens the week of the festival on 16 April.

The following week we get the Swedish thriller Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). Perhaps it will make a trend out of Scandanavian crime fiction.

7 May brings us the stop motion animated Panique au village (A Town Called Panic) from Belgium which is family-friendly and perhaps a good way to get your children into foreign cinema.

Although I wasn't planning on seeing it at the festival, The Art of the Steal hits Sundance on 14 May. It's a documentary about how a multi-billion dollar art collection was moved from a small, private suburban Philadelphia site to a grand public art museum in downtown Philly. I heard about it on NPR and it just sounded too biased and conspiratorial for my taste.

Although not playing at the festival, Nordwand (North Face) is coming to Sundance as well. It, along with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and another film at the festival, OSS 117: Rio ne répond plus (OSS 117: Lost in Rio) are distributed by a relatively new company in Chicago, Music Box Films. Newcity Film recently posted a profile of MBF which notes the outfit is mostly going after foreign films instead of American indie pics.

Andreotti says that going after micro-budgeted American independent films can be “tricky,” and it best suited the new company to focus on quality foreign films that have slipped through the cracks and haven’t received the attention they deserved. “In some ways, it’s, ironically, a safer bet to go after the foreign-language films,” he says.

Now, whether or not having MBF a relative hop, skip, and jump away will mean more for foreign films here in Madison or not, I don't know. But it is encouraging to see the films they're distributing showing up in our cinemas.