Ben X Tagged Articles at Cinematical

For your hump day:

• Back in September of 2006, Lou Ye was banned from making films in China for 5 years because of Summer Palace, a film that mixed the Tiananmen Square massacre with a sexually explicit love story. Without China's permission, he'd screened the movie at Cannes and had scored himself another filmmaking ban (he'd previously had one for Suzhou River). Now the film is getting new life through Palm Pictures, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The company has picked up the North American theatrical and DVD rights, planning to release the film in late January. According to Palm, Ye can still do publicity for the film, and I guess his lust isn't getting stopped by caution.
• Nic Balthazar's Ben X has been riding the waves of success. It scored the top prize at Montreal's film fest this year, and is also Belgium's candidate for the foreign-language Oscar. To top that off, Variety reports that the director is planning to make an English-language remake of the film, which he will adapt into an American setting. The plan is to get a distributor and private investors to bring together the picture, with a budget between $8 and $12 million. X is about a mildly autistic teen who is withdrawn in real life and a warrior in online fantasy games, and I imagine it could be a pretty popular movie if they right people become involved.
• Finally, there's a new, Spanish social thriller on the way called Rabia, according to Variety. To be headed by Ecuadorian director Sebastian Cordero, the film will focus on "an immigrant couple who fall in love in a hostile mileu. Jose Maria, a construction worker, kills his foreman, and hides for a long time at the mansion where his girlfriend, Rosa, serves as a maid." While this may just sound like your ordinary thriller, there's a few things going for it. Actors Gustavo Sánchez Parra (Amores perros) and Leonor Watling (Paris, je t'aime) are attached, and the film comes from a book by Sergio Bizzio, who wrote the story on which the great XXY was based.

Don't worry, we've only got about 40 or 50 more entrants to wade through in the next month! I hope that the AMPAS offices have cleared enough space to accommodate all the candidates / film prints that must be flooding in as the deadline approaches for Best Foreign Language Film submissions. The latest hails from Belgium: Variety reports that Nic Balthazar's Ben X has been officially submitted.

As Monika Bartyzel told us, Ben X triumphed at the recently-concluded Montreal World Film Festival, sharing the jury's Grand Prix of the Americas award with Claude Miller's A Secret as well as winning the the audience award for Most Popular Film. The official site says that Ben's "life is a universe to itself," where he plays his favorite computer game avidly, trying to train himself to deal with constant bullying at school until "Scarlite comes into his life, the girl he has met in his on-line game." Dennis Harvey of Variety felt that the film's "mix of fantasy computer graphics ... classic misfit-vs.-bullies youth drama, hyperactive p.o.v. and some overly twisty plot developments doesn't quite cohere." He acknowledged, however, that the film's reception in Montreal "proved it's a potential crowd-pleaser."

Director Nic Balthazar is a former theater and film critic who has also worked extensively in television and enjoyed success as a playwright and stage director. Newcomer Greg Timmermans plays the title role. The trailer looks like a music video -- pretty cool. So far, Ben X does not have North American distribution; it opens in Belgium on September 26.

There's only a few days left until movie mania takes over the T-Dot for this year's Toronto International Film Festival, but as one gears up, another closes. Monday marked the end of Montreal's 31st World Film Festival, and this year there was a tie for the top. The Grand Prix of Americas jury prize went to two pretty different films -- Nic Balthazar's Ben X, about an autistic boy bullied at school, and Claude Miller's A Secret, about a Jewish family during and after WWII. While Balthazar's film had to share the top honor, it did get a boost by also nabbing the audience award for Most Popular Film. Sometimes juries and audiences do agree!

But of course, the winners don't stop there. The Special Grand Prix from the jury went to a film called Noodle by Ayelet Menahemi, Best Director was given to Jacob Berger for 1 Day, Best Artistic Contribution went to Ray Loriga for Teresa: El Cuerpo de Cristo, Best Actress was given to Andrea Sawaktzki for The Other Boy, Filipe Duarte and Tomás Almeida will share the Best Actor award for A Outra Margem, Samira's Garden picked up Best Screenplay for Latif Lahlou, and D75-Tartina City got the Innovation Award. There's also a bunch of Zenith awards and further audience picks which you can check out over at the Festival's awards press release. With that said and done, who will win Canada's next list of festival awards at TIFF?