Festival Week: ColCoa, IFFLA, Depeche Mode, Anil Kapoor

Sorry I've been incommunicado all week - too much going on. For starters, my car died on the way to work one day and required getting towed to the mechanic (had to make up the hours missed at work) and then picked up again, outside of work hours, of course. Then I've dealt with a lot of my surgery prep and it looks like I'll have a surgery date to communicate next Tuesday, knock on wood.

But the biggest time drain this week, and in a good way, were the ongoing film festivals, with the concomitant cross-town driving and late nights! I saw two films that I really liked at the French Film Festival ColCoa - short for City of Lights (which would be Paris) City of Angels (that would be us), which happens every year at the Directors Guild in Hollywood.

I won't dwell on this much but if you have the opportunity, check out Le premier jour du reste de ta vie , a moving dark family comedy with the fabulous Zabou Breitman, Jacques Gamblin and Marc-Andre Grondin, and the fascinating Les Bureaux de Dieu, a Cannes selection about a Paris family planning center based on real interviews, but with such abortion counselors as the stunning Nathalie Baye, whom I love, and the scandalous Beatrice Dalle, she of Jean-Jacques Beineix 1986 classic 37°2 le matin (released in the US under the title Betty Blue).

IFFLA is the Indian Film Festival Los Angeles, and we caught a film there that we had missed in Mumbai: Little Zizou, about the Parsi community in Mumbai, directed by Sooni Tarapolevala, who is the co-writer on Mira Nair's movies. It was ok.

What really made the trip to the Arclight worthwhile that night was that free concert that Depeche Mode was playing just a couple of blocks away, at the storied intersection of Hollywood and Vine, for the release of their new album. Hollywood Boulevard had been closed off, with the stage placed just east of Vine. We only caught one song before we had to turn around so as not to miss the beginning of the movie, and we could see precious nothing because we were on the wrong side of the stage...
... but of course the music was booming and that one song we heard in its entirety was the opening song Never Let Me Down Again, so it worked out great and I was very happy.
There are lots of crappy videos of the event on YouTube. Thankfully, I only had my iPhone with me, otherwise I'm sure I couldn't have resisted and would have added some myself.

Anyway, as part of the Indian Film Festival, I also attended a seminar ominously entitled Hollywood's Spotlight on India, with a bunch of panel discussions on such engaging topics as The State of the Indian Entertainment Industry, Film Financing: Co-productions and Alternatives and Producing Indian content for the Indian and International Market, the latter affording the opportunity to brush shoulders with Anil Kapoor, who was on that panel (he's the show host in Slumdog Millionaire). And since people keep asking me if he's short, let me tell you that I can vouch for the fact that he is as tall as I am, which is a reasonably respectable 1.72m.

And to round off the week, we're trekking to the Polish Film Festival today (what a stroke of programming genius to have all three festivals happen at the same time). Greg's former roommate, a Polish guy by the name of Przemek, who studied film in LA and then went back to Poland, has a short movie showing there today, and he's in town himself, so that should make for a happy reunion....