News

WINNER: BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM AT OPEN WORLD TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL

TORONTO.- Open World Toronto Film Festival announced on September 28 the awardees list on its official website. What a great surprise that the jury deliberations of ended up with a new win for Arthur Balder’s AMERICAN MIRROR: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY as Best Experimental Film 2019.

WINNER: BEST FEATURE DOCUMENTARY AT GUAYAQUIL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2019

GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR.- Director and producer Arthur Balder was presented with the Golden Iguana as winner of the competitive category Best Feature Documentary of the Festival at the Guayaquil International Film Festival after participation of AMERICAN MIRROR: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY in the official selection.

Guayaquil International Film festival has experienced an enormous growth during the last five years, greatly due to the industry-oriented programs it offers across its different sections, such as Guayaquil Lab, Actors Lab, Construye, Cinema 72, La Revol, . Home to a vibrant community of film lovers and film professionals, Guayaquil, biggest city of Ecuador, hosts one of the most interesting competitions in South America.

The president of the Jury since 2015, Jorge Suarez, is a film critic and theorist of El Universal, and has assisted since 1968 to the Oscar ceremony uninterrupted, covering it as film critic for Ecuador news agencies, cinema magazines and media outlets.

Visit the official site of Guayaquil International Film Festival.

WINNER: SPECIAL JURY MENTION AT MELBOURNE DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. – DA VINFI FILMS is honored to announce that Melbourne Documentary Film Festival has sent in the laurels of the Winner of Special Jury Mention for AMERICAN MIRROR: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY.

MDFF documentary-only competition is considered one of the most important now in the world, so we feel elated with this news. It marks another extraordinary victory for director and producer Arthur Balder’s unique cinema vision.

WINNER: MOSAIC WORLD FILM FESTIVAL Spotlight Feature Award Winner AT ILLINOIS PREMIERE

Complimentary information also published by The Rockford Register Star.

ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS. — 2019’s selections were curated from hundreds of submissions and 65 countries around the world, including this year’s Mosaic World Film Festival’s Spotlight Feature Award winner (the main award of the festival), “American Mirror: Intimations of Immortality,” directed and produced by Arthur Balder. Mosaic World Film Festival’s Spotlight Feature Award has become in last years a token of success in the American independent film festival circuit towards the Oscar season. The Spotlight Film Winner Mosaic World Film Festival 2018, “Minding the Gap”, was among the five finalist contenders for the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2019. By many considered as a ‘festival by experts for experts’, MWFF is specialized in finding the new ways and cinematic jewels of what is going to be the leading talent in the up-coming state-of-the-art cinema.

MWFF fest judges included some extraordinary filmmakers including: Oscar-winning director Dan Lindsay, Oscar-nominated and Sundance Film Festival winning director Bing Liu, cinematographer Cynthia Pusheck A.S.C., production designer Kevin Conran, filmmaker Col Spector, educator and filmmaker Camille DeBose, and director Elizabeth Allen.

Mosaic World Film Festival boasts a self-defining motto on its official website: “Make a film. Change the world.” The Mosaic World Film Fest presents quality independent work, and represents filmmakers and film communities from around the world.

Their website creed states that MWFF is “looking for competence in the filmmaking craft; work that has vision and spirit; original subjects with well-told stories; and diverse voices. We look for films that represent different facets of filmmaking, and polished productions to no-budget gems.”

Short films were presented Sept. 13-14, the Spotlight Film Winner was screened at 7:15 p.m. Sept. 13, films by regional filmmakers were screened at 7 p.m. Sept. 14 and all feature films will be screened beginning at 9 a.m. Sept. 15. The 12th annual Mosaic World Film Festival is taking place at 11 a.m. Sept. 13-14 and 9 a.m. Sept. 15 at the Nordlof Center, 118 N. Main St.

For more information: mosaicfilmfest.com.

WINNER: Canadian Cinematography Awards August 2019 ANNOUNCES WINS FOR Best Director, Best Documentary Cinematography and Best Lead Actress

TORONTO, CA. -Canadian Cinematography Awards organization bestowed on AMERICAN MIRROR: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY in August’s selection process a total of four wins: Best Director (Arthur Balder), Best Lead Actress (Susan Sarandon), Best Documentary Cinematography (Arthur Balder), and Best Film of Month, thus selecting the film for the Golden Eagle Awards 2019, with screenings and awards ceremony to take place in Toronto in June 2020.

WINNER: AUDIENCE AWARD AND MICHEL FOUCRE AWARD FOR BEST DIRECTING AT 6th Ierapetra International Documentary Film Festival

IERAPETRA, CRETE, GR. – Arthur Balder was presented by Eleni Vlassi, artistic director and founder of the Ierapetra International Documentary Film Festival, with the Michel Foucré Award for Best Directing for his work in AMERICAN MIRROR: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY, which was part of the official selection.

The festival’s audience, spread over the prefecture of the Greek island of Crete, out of the 167 films in participation in its different sections additionally bestowed the Audience Award 2019 on AMERICAN MIRROR: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY.

With these two wins AMERICAN MIRROR: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY became most awarded film of 6th Ierapetra International Documentary Film Festival, alongside with “Searching for Andreas: Political Leadership in Times of Crisis”, directed by Harris Mylonas and Theo Prodromidis, which also garnered two awards from the Greek competition of the festival.

The members of the International Competition Section Jury of the 6th Ierapetra International Film Festival were:

• Philippe Muyl – President Director, Writer.
• Nir Avieli Professor of Food Anthropology at Ben Gurion University of Israel, President of the Israeli Anthropological Society.
• Benoît Lelièvre Director, Art Director.
• Nissim Gal Professor of Art History at University of Haifa, Israel.
• Christoforos Charalambakis – Honorary President Professor of Linguistics at the University of Athens.

REVIEW: “A strange beast of a feature” FilmInquiry, Australia, by critic Alex Lines

“‘American Mirror’ is (…) a strange beast of a feature“

“there’s a lingering, finely-drawn intelligence to Arthur Balder’s hallucinogenic compilation, one which welcomes many readings no matter how you look at it”

“with a healthy dose of David Lynch” (…) strikingly original, (…) what the art represents in an allegorical sense”

“Perplexing (…). It definitely shrugs off any expected genre conventions“

“An undefinable fever dream“

“‘American Mirror’ eschews any traditional documentary formats when attempting to align Balder’s own film theory digressions alongside the scattered memories of his main subject, which makes for a mystifying, if not wholly fascinating experiment”

“a fractured mosaic of brooding introspection, abstract memory play and candid celebrity interview, it’s hard to define…”

Read more at FilmInquiry.com: “American Mirror: Intimations of Immortality”

OFFICIAL SELECTION: Actress Florence Faivre Attends Red Carpet of 10th New Media Film Festival, Los Angeles

On July 4th 2019, actress and co-star Florence Faivre Attends Red Carpet of 10th New Media Film Festival, Los Angeles, where AMERICAN MIRROR: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY was Official Selection and Finalist on Best Trailer category.

Melbourne Documentary Film Festival – A Review of its 2019 Official Selection

(Broadwayworld.com, Melbourne, Australia.)

Without remaining in the slipstream of the film festivals out of which Melbourne Documentary Film Festival extracts some of its highlights (TIFF, Tribeca, Hot Docs, DOC NYC, and such likes), the fourth edition of this young though quite well-known film event in the circuit promises also to add again its own line-up of discoveries. Nine feature documentaries picked up by Netflix, while other nine Feature documentaries that became Oscar eligible were screened previously at MDFF. Only 2018 saw four feature documentaries of its official selection make the Oscar longlist, one of the highest of any documentary-only film festival in Australia.

A rough look into the 2020 program grid boasts more than hundred documentary films, shorts and features.

Among them, there are three films that were awarded or premiered at DOC LA (the Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival curated by the Parajanov-Vartanov Institute): “Ballad for a righteous merchant”, directed by Herbert Goldberg, featuring Werner Herzog, ‘American Mirror: Intimations of Immortality”, featuring Susan Sarandon, directed by Arthur Balder (winner also of the Parajanov-Vartanov Award 2018), and “Pain is Mine”, directed by Farshid Akhlaghi. Another film festival located on the US west coast out of which MDFF seems to have drained inspiration is the American Documentary Film Festival. Six of the movies selected by MDFF premiered there, among them “David’s Way”, by Tom Donahue, “The Beeman”, by Frances Elliott and Samantha Marlowe, the provocative “For Your Consideration”, by Patrick Green, “Chasing A Million”, by Albert Klein Haneveld and Stefan Egberts. Four films had premiered internationally at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, among them “Thursday Fields” by Harry Zernike, “Pariah Dog” by Jesse Alk, “Right to Harm” by Matt Wechsler and Annie Speicher. The line-up reveals six movies that had premiered at DOC NYC, while two of them had made it so at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, and the number of films from Slamdance, Toronto International Film Festival, Hot Docs, Tribeca Film Festival and others do not rises over two films each, while from DOX:CPH only one film made it into the MDFF official selection.

Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, whose director is Lyndon Stone, has established a good and rising international reputation in a short period of time, as some of the specialized magazines have recognized of late, becoming the port of entry for international documentary productions into the Australian arena. Three times now, it has been rated as a Top 100 Film Festival on submission platforms well audited and has consistently been ranked in the top 2% of the over 6,000 film festival in the world over the last 3 years.

The Melbourne Documentary Film Festival is currently rated as the Documentary Film Festival of the Year (2018) by FilmDaily and named Top Documentary Film Festival in the Southern Hemisphere on Guide Doc. It premieres, screens and showcases more quality local Australian and International documentaries each year than any other documentary only film festival in Australia and gives more talented Indie Filmmakers a chance to compete and screen to a big, receptive audience in Melbourne, Australia.

FINALIST: Best Special Effects and Best Feature Editing Finalist Nomination at Utah Film Festival 2019

SALT LAKE CITY, UT. – Visit the Utah Film Festival official site the complete list of winners and nominees.

AMERICAN MIRROR: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY has been Finalist for Best Special Effects and Best Feature Editing Award at Utah Film Festival 2019.

OFFICIAL SELECTION: Vision Du Reel Industry Selection 2019, Nyon, Switzerland

NYON, SWITZERLAND. – ‘American Mirror: Intimations of Immortality’ has been in 2019 part of the worldwide curation Vision Du Reel Industry Selection 2019, Nyon, Switzerland.

FINALIST, OFFICIAL SELECTION: 10th New Media Film Festival Nominates Best Trailer

LOS ANGELES, CA. – (From Broadwayworld.com) On June 4-6, 2019 will take off at The Landmark 10850 W. Pico Blvd. LA CA 90064 the 10th Annual New Media Film Festival, presenting 128 New Media Films & Content from 23 countries across 6 Continents. 47 World Premieres, 9 U.S. Premieres, 20 L.A. Premieres. In a world where technology is ever-evolving, it is a story that will satiate the soul of humans. Not just any story, but stories worth telling. New Media Film Festival year after year strives to produce a festival that highlights and honors the hard working and uprising content creators in the New Media Industry. It highlights the best from the USA, UK, Germany, France, Canada, and Australia amongst many others together with VIP soirees, Q&A’s and panels are part of the festival program.

The Best Trailer category zooms in on the power of condensing a whole story in its shortest -and most demanding among the pros- edit possible.

At the intersection of high cinematic art and social media.

Arthur Balder wonders what is the true beauty in his new project “American Mirror: Intimations of Immortality”. On our Instagram or Facebook pages, we show only the best part of ourselves, the “beautiful” part of our lives. We hide in this fake. We are so immersed in the process of creating our ideal virtual personality that we forget about real life. We forget the simple truth that beauty is inside.

Two-time Academy award-winner Paul Haggis congratulation

Screenwriter, director and producer Paul Haggis, two-time Academy award-winner:

“I congratulate you for having made me feel uneasy, for having abandoned the safe zone and tried to go beyond.”

Paul Haggis

Declarations after winners announced by Paul Haggis, who had been Jury President Fabrique Du Cinema Awards 2018, published by Fabrique Du Cinema Awards, Rome, Italy. “American Mirror: Intimations of Immortality” was winner Best International Documentary.

WINNER: ‘American Mirror: Intimations of Immortality’ most awarded film at DOC LA 2018

“American Mirror – Intimations of Immortality”, directed, produced, written and edited by Arthur Balder, was the most awarded film at DOC LA, the Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival 2018, where it garnered Best Innovative Film (Arthur Balder), Best Cinematography, Best Composer (Mark Petrie) and
the top prize, the Parajanov-Vartanov Institute Award (Susan Sarandon).

Actress Florence Faivre poses for the press with one of the four coveted awards on the red carpet event of DOC LA, the Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival, October 21st 2018. (Foto Credit: DOC LA.)