USA,
2000, 120 min
Shown in 2001
CREDITS
- dir
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Michael Winterbottom
- scr
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Frank Cottrell Boyce
- cam
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Alwin Kuchler
- editor
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Trevor Waite
- mus
-
Michael Nyman
- cast
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Peter Mullan, Sarah Polley, Wes Bentley, Milla Jovovich, Nastassja Kinski
- source
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MGM, 2500 Broadway Street, Santa Monica, CA 90404. FAX: 310-449-3020
-
COMMENTS
Closing Night film. Michael Winterbottom in person.
OTHER
British director Michael Winterbottom reimagines Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge as a tale of the California Gold Rush, and makes a movie that deserves to be matched with the great, mad epics of mountains, arrogance, snow and coldness. Twenty years after the Gold Rush, the bold, upright Daniel Dillon presides over the small town he founded. The town is called Kingdom Come, and he is its god. He supervises trading and policy decisions, and has the sexual rights to Lucia, a beautiful Portuguese brothelkeeper. But now, decades after the desperate night when he sold away his young Polish wife and their daughter for the claim to a great mine, the two women come back into his life and his town. Filmed in temperatures of 20 degrees and winds up to 75 miles an hour, the severity of the shoot registers in every shot; the snow is a character here. Suffused in a gentle, nearly religious whiteness—a tone remarkable in delivering spiritual moods, and which seems to expose lives to moral scrutiny—The Claim deserves comparison with some of the great silent films in its awesome infatuation with wild nature. Winterbottom, in his entirely surprising yet wondrous new film, has made us feel the adventure, the escape and the moral strictness of the Sierra Nevada better than any other filmmaker.
—David Thomson, New York Times
FACTOID #73
James Wong Howe was the first cinematographer to receive a tribute at the Festival, October 19, 1974. The legendary lenser photographed such classics as The Thin Man, Pursued, Sweet Smell of Success and Hud.
