The brand new International Film Festival & Awards Macao, hitting the city next December, from the 8th to the 13th, is already well-known by having world famous Programmer Marco Müller on the wheel, as well as number of top filmmakers as Ambassadors – directors such as Johnnie To, Ann Hui, John Woo and Takashi Miike are amongst them.
Now, Müller just revealed the likes of some of these cinema masters and the scope of their participation in the Festival. “I’ve invited 12 cult directors to choose a genre film that they usually go back to, because they feel there’s something about that film that they constantly need to refresh in their memory and to experience watching again”, he said to Portuguese newspaper Público.
“Takashi Miike told me ‘There’s a film I always go back to’”, he recalls. After meeting Quentin Tarantino in Venice trough Müller (who at that time was the director of the Venice Film Festival), Miike decided to direct a spaghetti western casting Tarantino as an actor. The result was Sukiyaki Western Django. Curiously, says Müller, Miike favourite genre film is not the classical Django, but another film by Sergio Corbuci, called The Great Silence. “He told me: ‘This film was the only western totally shoot in the snow 35 years before The Revenant. I want to prove that what has been called an explosive experience [The Revenant] already existed in Italian cinema 35 years ago’.”
The Great Silence is going to be screened in the section “Crossfire”, alongside the picks of other cult directors. Surprisingly to Marco Müller, John Woo didn’t choose a French film noir. “I know his taste, but I was wrong”, he confesses. Woo is inviting the Macau audiences to watch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, by Jacques Demy. “All the youngsters who are fans of John Woo’s action films will discover a great musical comedy”, says Müller amusingly.
The Festival director also confirmed that “there will be Lusophone films in the programme” starting from this first year. “I’m paying attention to the most exciting works in Portuguese cinema, not only to the directors that already have a relation with Macau, but also to Lusophone projects about Asia. There are a lot of projects, not only from Portugal and Brazil, but also from the Lusophone Africa”, he says.
The 1st International Film Festival & Awards Macao is set to happen in December at the Macau Cultural Centre and the Macau Science Centre. The event official website is www.iffamacao.com
