The 42nd Haifa International Film Festival, which will run from September 26 to October 3, has unveiled the highlights of its international program.
It features much-anticipated new films by leading directors, including Danny Boyle, Nanni Moretti, François Ozon, Lukas Dhont, Olivier Assayas, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Andrey Zvyagintsev.
The festival’s main international competition, Carmel, will open with Boyle’s Ink, which opened this year’s Venice Film Festival.
The film tells the story of legendary Sun editor Larry Lamb and publisher Rupert Murdoch as they transformed the struggling British tabloid in the late 1960s.
The film comes to Haifa directly from the Venice competition
The festival will close with Moretti’s It Will Happen Tonight, based on a story by Israeli author Eshkol Nevo and starring Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca. The film comes to Haifa directly from the Venice competition.
Among the major international prize winners screening at Haifa are Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes; Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden; Dhont’s World War I drama Coward; and Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, winner of the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section.
Other highlights include Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Assayas’s political thriller The Wizard of the Kremlin, and Kore-eda’s family drama Sheep in the Box.
The festival will welcome several international filmmakers. These include Romanian director Tudor Giurgiu, who will present 3 Days in September, which includes a 65-minute sequence shot in a single take.
Alberto Sciamma will attend with Cielo, a magical-realist road movie set in Bolivia’s Altiplano.
Boaz Dvir will present his documentary To Kill a Nazi, about French Jew Michel Cojot’s pursuit of Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie and his connection to Operation Entebbe.
German filmmaker Hille Norden will attend with the coming-of-age drama Easy Girl. Muriel d’Ansembourg will present Truly Naked, a drama about a teenager reassessing his understanding of sexuality and intimacy.
Documentaries, animation, culinary cinema, and more
The Haifa Classics program will feature a Barbra Streisand tribute with Funny Girl, Hello, Dolly!, A Star Is Born, and Yentl, as well as a retrospective of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima and filmmaker Nagisa Oshima.
The Haifa Docs program will feature Broken English, a portrait of Marianne Faithfull, incorporating interviews, archival footage, and performances by musicians, including Nick Cave and Courtney Love, as well as The Match, about the legendary 1986 World Cup quarter-final between Argentina and England.
Other sections will include documentaries, animation, culinary cinema, and the Haifa Wild Nights genre program, featuring Asian action and films from Cannes’ Midnight screenings.
For more details, go to the festival website at www.haifaff.co.il/