By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCES ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI AS 2015 FILMMAKER IN RESIDENCE

Posted Wednesday, July 15th, 2015 - Comments Off on THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCES ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI AS 2015 FILMMAKER IN RESIDENCE
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The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Jaeger-LeCoultre announced the selection of writer and director Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg, 2011 New Directors/New Films) as their 2015 Filmmaker in Residence, the third annual initiative and partnership between the two  organizations. Previous participants include award-winning directors Lisandro Alonso (Jauja) and Andrea Arnold (Red Road).

Lesli Klainberg, Executive Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center said: “We are very excited to welcome Athina Tsangari as the third annual Filmmaker in Residence during the 53rd New York Film Festival. Athina is a dynamic and fearless filmmaker, and we are thrilled to provide her with the space and time to develop new work while connecting her with a vibrant New York film community. Athina has already had a remarkable career, and we are so excited to see what she does next.”

“I feel greatly honored to be hosted as the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Filmmaker in Residence this year,” said Tsangari. “I am looking forward to working on my new script, part of which is set in New York City, and to drawing inspiration from the city itself, camaraderie from its essential film community, and stimulation from the Film Society’s invigorating programming. It is always an invaluable gift when Xenia—the goddess of hospitality—and cinema join their graces and forces.”

During her residency in New York, Tsangari will be working on a screwball action-thriller called White Knuckles that centers on two criminal sisters (a burglar and a bookkeeper) dealing with “VAT fraud, amour fou, architectural infiltration, and electrically amplified fistfighting.” Her newest feature, Chevalier, is a buddy comedy that takes place on a luxury yacht astray on the Aegean Sea and will have its world premiere in August at the Locarno l Film Festival.

Athina Rachel Tsangari holds a BA in Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and Drama from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. After graduation, she moved to Austin to study film directing. Her introduction to cinema came by a happy accident, with a small role in Richard Linklater’s seminal 1991 filmSlacker, and her relationship with Linklater continued when she served as co-producer on Before Midnight(2013), in which she also appeared as Ariadni. Her first short, Fit, was a finalist at the Student Academy Awards. Her MFA thesis feature at the University of Texas at Austin, The Slow Business of Going (2001), a lo-fi sci-fi road movie starring Lizzie Martinez, was shot with a skeleton crew in hotel rooms in nine cities around the world. The 2002 Village Voice Critics’ Poll listed it as one of the year’s “best first films,” and it also garnered several directing awards and now belongs in MoMA’s permanent film collection.

Her sophomore feature, Attenberg (2010), premiered in the main competition of the Venice Film Festival, where its lead Ariane Labed won the Coppa Volpi Award for Best Actress, and then went on to win several best film/directing awards at festivals worldwide. It was Greece’s Best Foreign Language Film submission for the 2012 Academy Awards, and a runner-up for the LUX Prize for Best European film. The Capsule (2012), made in collaboration with Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska and commissioned by the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art as both a film and an installation, premiered at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, followed by the Locarno, Toronto, and Sundance film festivals to critical acclaim. The script for her sci-fi “screwball tragedy”Duncharon (co-written with her longtime collaborator and Haos Film partner Matt Johnson) was awarded the “ARTE France Cinéma” Award for best European project in development, at Rotterdam IFF’s CineMart in 2012.

The Filmmaker in Residence program was launched in 2013 by Jaeger-LeCoultre and the Film Society of Lincoln Center as an annual initiative designed to support filmmakers at an early stage in the creative process against the backdrop of New York City and the New York Film Festival (NYFF).

The 2013 Filmmaker in Residence, Andrea Arnold (Wuthering Heights, Fish Tank), utilized her residency to develop the script and work on pre-production for first feature project shot in the United States, American Honeystarring Shia LaBeouf, which was introduced to buyers at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

The 2014 Filmmaker in Residence, Lisandro Alonso (Jauja, Liverpool, Fantasma, Los Muertos) is working on development for an untitled project that began during his residency at FSLC and is currently meeting with producers in South America, aiming to shoot soon in the United States.

Jaeger-LeCoultre and Cinema
Having celebrated its 180th anniversary last year, Jaeger-LeCoultre remains dedicated to the legacy of watchmaking traditions while maintaining its expertise for invention in creating authentic, fine watchmaking legends. Committed to a constant quest for excellence and supported by a unique inventive spirit, Jaeger-LeCoultre has a long-standing engagement in supporting the appreciation and preservation of film.

For a decade, Jaeger-LeCoultre has been closely associated with the best artistic film festivals around the world, including Venice, Shanghai, San Sebastian, Los Angeles, Toronto, and New York, and in turn pays tribute to the creative ingenuity of filmmakers by annually awarding the Glory to the Filmmaker Award. Through the close affinity with the world of film, Jaeger-LeCoultre has found shared values and a common mission: each second bears the imprint of a moment of eternity.

In addition to the annual Filmmaker in Residence initiative with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the multi-year partnership also extends to two of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s most prestigious annual events: the Annual Chaplin Award Gala and the New York Film Festival, a 17-day celebration showcasing the best and most significant films of the year from around the world.

For more information, visit http://bit.ly/JLCCinema and follow @jaegerlecoultre on Twitter.

ABOUT FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility, and understanding of the moving image. The Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year’s most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment magazine, the Film Society recognizes an artist’s unique achievement in film with the prestigious Chaplin Award, whose 2015 recipient was Robert Redford. The Film Society’s state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year-round programs and the New York City film community.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from American Airlines, The New York Times, HBO, Stella Artois, The Kobal Collection, Variety, Trump International Hotel and Tower, RowNYC, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.

Support for the New York Film Festival is also generously provided by Jaeger-LeCoultre, Fiji Water, and WNET New York Public Media.

For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com, follow @filmlinc on Twitter, and download the FREE Film Society app, now available for iOS (iPhone and iPad) and Android devices.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon