One of the key strands of this year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival is a focus on contemporary Quebecois cinema, of which the big title is J’ai tué ma mère, one of the best examples of a young person’s nakedly autobiographical art that I can recall and a popular festival hit last year. Almost as popular (best debut at Toronto, audience award at Slamdance) is Alexandre Franchi’s (English language) The Wild Hunt, an attempt to conjure the resonance of Norse myth through the weekend games of a large group of live medieval role-players.

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Why did Un prophète win the Grand Jury prize at Cannes last year? Because it’s an absorbing, gritty prison drama following the unsentimental education of a quietly appealing young man as he learns, struggles and triumphs, executed with a high degree of skill and clear-eyed unsentimentality, and boasting a satisfyingly dense texture and enough stylistic flourishes to give the film its own distinctive character.

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Terribly Happy or Frygtelig lykkelig is set in a tiny town in South Jutland, Denmark’s back of beyond, stranded in the flat marshy lowlands, encircled by bog. This is where Copenhagen cop Robert is being sent after some unspecified personal incident that has left him in disgrace, with prescription pills and an estranged wife. What he finds is a closed-off world with its own ways, where the locals would have preferred a marshal with local blood, getting the nearest city police involved is undesirable and people have a knack of “disappearing” into the sucking bog.

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The stars of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans - Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes and Jennifer Coolidge – held court in the Four Seasons together with director Werner Herzog last week. The movie got its US premiere at the AFI Festival and the positive reactions there and in Toronto promise a good showing in theaters.

Cage plays a drug-addicted, procedure-ignoring police lieutenant in New Orleans just post-Katrina; Mendes is his high-class prostitute lover; Coolidge is his booze-sodden stepmother; and Werner Herzog is one of the world’s greatest living directors, famed for his visionary features of the seventies (Even Dwarves Started Small, Aguirre Wrath of God, Heart of Glass, tho little to match that work since 1982’s Fitzcarraldo) and for his idiosyncratic documentaries (Little Dieter Needs to Fly, My Best Fiend, Grizzly Man). In response to various members of the press, here’s what they had to say for themselves:

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And so the 2009 American Film Institute Festival has, as all good things must, come to an end. A smaller selection of films than recent years, showing mostly in one screening only, was offset by the remarkable fact that in conjunction with its sponsors, the AFI was able to present the entire festival for free. This is obviously a good thing, and it would be remarkable if viable in the long term. The drawbacks, however, are that about two thirds of the screenings I attended had empty seats despite advance ticket “sell” outs, and some of the late-night screenings had a back-row contingent of the Hollywood blvd demographic looking for anywhere warm inside at that time of evening. A nominal dollar or two fee would perhaps take care of these issues, but the aura and allure of the free ticket remains unmatchable.

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One of the AFI Fest’s exclusive screenings in its final two days’ removal to Santa Monica was Portugese João Pedro Rodrigues’ acclaimed transvestite drama Morrer Como Um Homem. From the war-paint-as-make-up opening, followed by a terrific sex-change origami demonstration, to the musical afterlife-view finale, Rodrigues glides smoothly and unhurriedly through the story of aging transvestite Tonia (Fernando Santos), scared of the butchery implied in the final transformation, secure in her inner identity but undeceived by the outer, and slowly dying from the very things that help make her what she is (leaking breast implants).

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The AFI Fest moved on Friday from its Hollywood home to the westside, coinciding with the start of Santa Monica’s American Film Market. This occasioned the welcome replay of a handful of titles, as well as some screenings exclusive to the new location. One of the former, widely-praised after an appearance at Cannes, was the Politist, adj., Romanian Corneliu Porumboiu’s follow-up to his 12:08 East of Bucharest.

The plot, such as it is, concerns provincial cop Cristi trailing a schoolboy suspected of selling hashish. The boy does very little at all as Cristi follows at a discrete but purposeful distance, and as the camera in turn does likewise. This is not thrilling stuff – we get to watch as Cristi eats his lunchtime soup and even the policeman hired to consult on the movie found the first part too boring on first viewing – but Porumboiu’s careful long-take camera is as concentrated in its attention as Cristi’s and compels the same from the engaged viewer.

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The AFI fest continues to support and expose new Argentine cinema with El Secreto de sus ojos by feature and TV director Juan José Campanella. It is essentially a legal eagle murder mystery movie; Campanella has been behind the camera for several episodes of Law and Order, and the TV form is intermittently evident here, but it’s to his credit (he also adapted the source novel) that it plays rarely like a feature-length small-screen piece, and more like a fully-fledged good old-fashioned movie.

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So the deal is that Edward Pressman, producer of Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant, owns the rights to the title and decided the time was right to reuse it with an eye to kick-starting a franchise (he is also currently planning Wall Street 2, and a reboot of The Crow.) He wanted someone unexpected to direct and eyebrows were certainly raised when news filtered out that it was to be crazy German arthouse-favourite Werner Herzog; and in star Nicolas Cage, Herzog may just have found a worthy replacement for his erstwhile muse, the late, great and certifiably insane Klaus Kinski.

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