The Auteurs Cinema

Above: Agnès Varda’s seminal Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) played at Telluride in 1978.

For the last 35 years Telluride has been supporting the art of cinema. The Criterion Collection and The Auteurs, in association with Dell, are highlighting a selection of classic films from the festival’s history. The tribute features a rotating selection of feature length films to watch for free, as well as an exhibition of clips and trailers for all the films.  Check it out here.

The Auteurs is proud to announce the first stage in our vision to make our online cinematheque not only a destination for movie lovers, but for filmmakers as well. We call it the GARAGE - a place to upload films, find artistic collaborators, get feedback from viewers, and find a new kind of communal and collaborative form of filmmaking, one intended for online audiences.

As a signal of the kind of interest the community has in GARAGE, a group of filmmakers on The Auteurs conceived of an on-going series of projects to collaborate on and share online, each one unified by a broad theme. To contribute to this project, upload your own movies, view completed films, join the filmmakers’ discussion, or just to see what we have in store for GARAGE, check out the link below:

http://www.theauteurs.com/garage

To all our friends and fans, Finalists of the Cannes à la Flip Competition have been announced! During the Cannes Film Festival, we challenged short filmmakers to make a three-minute film on Flip Video Cameras. With less than a week to shoot their films, filmmakers had all of Cannes for their inspiration! The grand prize of $10,000 was presented by Facebook, along with an HP workstation with a 30-inch monitor. We couldn’t be more happy with the results. An esteemed jury of festival programmers and directors from around the world met in Cannes to determine the best submissions, and we are posting these films on Facebook for viewing. Check out the Short Film Corner Page on Facebook to watch the runner-up films, The Mario Valdez Story and Rainy Girl, and the grand prize winning film, The Flip Trip. You can also visit the official competition page at The Auteurs to see all entries in the contest.

Thank you to all the filmmakers who took part in our competition — your energy, passion, and creativity were inspiring!

Love, The Auteurs Team

THIRD PRIZE: Rainy Girl (Jerome Genevray)
Interview with Grand Prize winner Vincenzo CosentinoIt has been a great shock to know that I was the winner! I always take every competition with a smile, even if I lose. So when I thought that I lost I find out that I won! It was a spectacular email! For me this is a great success! I started doing filmmaking just in March 2007 (the first time I took a camera in my hands) and this is the third prize I have won! This is the most important because it was in Cannes and because it was a challenging competition. Shooting a video in less then 2 days, editing it and making it no more then 3 minutes long! It was very hard! Now I smile but in that moment I wasn’t smiling so much!I wanted to tell this story because I felt like the Flip camera of my video. Arriving to Cannes and feeling so small in front at everything but having to keep my will and my courage to be a filmmaker, a storyteller actually. Because I want to make people laugh, smile, feeling emotions…that’s why when The Auteurs told me that there were a lot of people laughing during the screening I felt good, I achieved my target but I felt bad that I couldn’t be there because I had to fly back. I’m very happy about winning but I’m even more happy because the people, with their laughing, appreciated my mini movie. My last thought goes to the creators of The Auteurs (they have been very kind and professional), the creators of the Flip camera (that’s a great video camera, easy to use and very helpful), Facebook, the staff of the Short Film Corner (my God how much they work! Especially Pierre!), and my girlfriend and my parents who always support me. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to show my creativity! Hope the best to everyone, especially to all the filmmakers that I met in Cannes. We are the future of this industry and we don’t have to give up even if sometimes people don’t like our movies. We have always to believe that we can make it, otherwise it will be over before it starts. Shoot 100 bullets, one of them will go in the middle. It must.

I now shoot on video, which is very cheap, so it’s very simple for me to make a budget. All I need is enough money just to live every month, me and three or four friends: one for the sound, one to help me with the camera, another to assist me - and the actors of course. We always try to have this balance or harmony, all being paid more or less the same. I want to show that cinema is not a luxury, it’s not just for very rich and glamorous people. It can be made with less money. It can be made with justice.”

-From Meditations XXI

NEW YORK, April 1, 2008

In a move expected by industry insiders for some time now, art-house film start-up The Auteurs announced today that it has purchased The Weinstein Company (TWC) for $2.1 billion. The deal is financed by Goldman Sachs (who acted both as principal and advisor on both sides), and two strategic investors: Hengameh Panahi, Founder and President of Celluloid Dreams, and Tom Luddy, Co-Director of the Telluride Film Festival.

This deal marks a major shift in attitude and demographic for TWC, who immediately announced they will no longer produce commercial films and will instead focus on international art-cinema. “Thanks to this deal, art house audiences worldwide will be saved from the potential threat of a SCARY MOVIE 5,” Efe Cakarel, CEO of The Auteurs, said in today’s press release. Richard Perry, whose hedge fund Perry Capital is believed to return 6x on his initial investment in TWC, praised the young start-up: “Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage..”

Details of the integration of the New York City-based movie production goliath into the 6-man online company are still sketchy, but Mr. Cakarel has confirmed that TWC’s headquarters will move to Palo Alto, with Harvey Weinstein to be named the Chairman of the Board of The Auteurs. Reports have come in that after the announcement roving bands of cinephiles have been seen dancing in the streets outside local cinematheques to mark the occasion.

The cinema, she is a whore. First she charge a nickel, now she charge five dollars. When she learns to give it away, she will be free.”

-Andrei Tarkovsky, quoted in Roger Ebert’s review of Solaris, pointed out by Glenn Kenny.

How great is Pecha Kucha? We love a night when creative people talk about creative things. So, it was a pleasure to give a presentation on essential art house earlier this evening during Pecha Kucha in San Francisco.

20 mages, each shown for 20 seconds are posted in our Notebook, and pictures from the evening are here.

Pecha kucha pecha kucha pecha kucha..

Welcome to the inaugural blog post for The Auteurs: a venue that combines streaming the best independent film available with a dynamic community for cinephiles to discuss, analyze, and debate world cinema.

While the core idea of The Auteurs is to unite great, previously unavailable works of contemporary world cinema with an avid online film community, through this blog and Notebook we will also provide active, intelligent reporting in the film world. While our global briefing will cover everything ranging from international film festivals to the latest theatrical art-house releases, this blog will communicate with our readers new acquisitions and content for The Auteurs website, share developments in our Movie Theater application on Facebook, introduce our staff and writers, and above all express our philosophy for cinema and for our project. We will make sure The Auteurs is not an anonymous source for films, news, analysis, and discussion, and through this blog we hope you will get to know us better and share our passion for film and The Auteurs’ community.

Through these resources of film viewing, film news and writing, and communal discussion and interaction, we plan to make The Auteurs a crossroads for the online cinephile community that has long been rich and active on the internet yet has not had a central meeting place to discuss films outside of the mainstream. The private beta is launching today (oba!). And starting with this first post, The Auteurs’ blog will be actively updated in order to open our venture up to the outside world by exploring the creation of our vision and acquainting our readers with the enthusiastic cinephiles behind the project. Check back soon or subscribe to our RSS feed for our latest coverage and news updates and stay tuned for the launch of the full site by Cannes in May 2008!