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The 2010 Miami International Film Festival, which is produced and presented by Miami Dade College, kicked off its 27th year with the Gusman Gala Red Carpet and Premiere of Looking for Eric by British director Ken Loach.
The Cannes Film Festival crowd pleaser, about a French postman who suffers a mid-life crisis and gets advice from his athletic idol, Manchester United’s world-famous French footballer Eric Cantona, was specifically selected by Artistic Director Tiziana Finzi to celebrate this year’s World Cup competition, coming up this summer in South Africa. British actress and Looking for Eric star Stephanie Bishop, marking her big screen debut, made a special trip to Miami to promote the film. Despite the cooler-than-usual weather for locals, Bishop, parading the Red Carpet in a classic, sleeveless little black dress, found Miami to be “perfect and refreshing. It’s much colder in England now—still!”
Inside the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts, the festival’s executive director, Vivian Donnell Rodriguez, welcomed the nearly packed house of cinephiles and movie lovers to Opening Night and thanked them for their continued support of the festival and foreign films at a time when we have to compete with so many other forms of entertainment. She offered a brief overview of this year’s lineup: 115 features, documentaries and shorts from 45 countries in more than two dozen languages, and thanked the festival’s many longtime and new corporate sponsors and partners, including: American Airlines, Comcast, Screen International, Stella Artois and the University of Miami.
Artistic Director Tiziana Finzi, who came to Miami in 2009 after nine years with Switzerland’s revered Locarno International Film Festival, celebrated her second year with the festival with her vision of a new kind of cinema experience for Miami audiences that she dubbed “Neo-Neo Realism.” This year’s lineup offers the kinds of richly told stories that usually only come to life on the film festival circuit: extreme diversity in cinematographic splendor, avant-garde experimentalism, social awareness and cerebral and emotional impact. In addition to being the premier film festival in the world that promotes new and emerging Ibero-American filmmakers from Spain, Portugal and Latin America, some of the festival’s more unique features come from Iran, Thailand, China, Russia, Israel, Romania, Philippines, Serbia, Haiti and the first feature from Bahamas ever screened during the festival.
Forget Vanity Fair’s Oscar season party: For the festival’s Opening Night After-Party at Miami’s historical landmark, the Freedom Tower, Miami Dade College’s art gallery exhibition space by day was miraculously transformed into a celluloid heaven and DP’s dream in just mere hours to become the evening’s hottest ticket in town. More than 2,000 people mingled among the black-and-white stills showing many of the festival’s films, and noshed on the likes of empanadas and facturas from La Estancia Argentina, chicken and mashed potatoes soufflé from the Hard Rock Café, pizzas from ECCO Pizzateca & Lounge, Italian meatballs and antipasti from the Graspa Group culinary chain (Van Dyke Café, Segafredo Lincoln Road and Spuntino Catering, among others) and imbibed the sweet nectars of Rums of Puerto Rico, cachaça and caipirinhas from Botequim Carioca, reds and whites courtesy of Barefoot Wine & Bubbly and cappuccinos from Nespresso.
That’s a wrap!
by Dana Ballestero, Daily Wrap Editor
VIEW DAILY WRAP Day 2: Saturday, March 6, 2010
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