Toronto International Film Festival
Across the Universe by Julie Taymor will likely be screened in Madison long before next year's Wisconsin Film Festival.
Though it's become an important event for debuting big-budget Hollywood productions and the attendance of A-list stars, the Heckman, a Ph.D. student in the UW-Madison Communication Arts department, doesn't formally work for the WFF, but shares an office with Hamel and hopes to help this year. "It's a tradition that the Cinematheque programmer puts together a handful of films for the festival," she says, "and I expect that I will do the same." Kolb, also a programmer for the UW's film series, is more directly charged with helping program for the festival. Both have been busy watching the screens in Toronto with an eye towards the Wisconsin festival. As befits her interest in cinema from Argentina and Germany, Kolb was impressed by the Argentine films XXY and Encarnación, as well as the Turkish/German co-production The Edge of Heaven and the Icelandic/German co-production Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, an American documentary directed by John Gianvito that has been described as a loose adaptation of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. For her part, Heckman has an eye on Le Deuxième Souffle, a remake by Alan Corneau of the Secret Sunshine, which she describes as 'an absolutely devastating film from South Korea." She has also seen Eat for This Is My Body by Michelone Kay, the epic '60s-via-The Beatles musical Across the Universe by Julie Taymor, and the Hong Kong mystery The Exodus. Both Heckman and Kolb were big fans of My Winnipeg, a docu-dream by Guy Maddin about gettting lost in the titular Canadian prairie city. 'We are also both interested in revivalist films," adds Heckman. As for the possibility of any of these films making their way to the festival, it all depends on what kind of American distribution they get. In fact, some might be seen in Madison much sooner than next spring. "Now that Sundance is in town, I think we may find that the Wisconsin Film Festival will have to draw from films that hit the international market much closer to its April date than ever before," says Heckman. "We'll see."
