AFI FEST 2010 announced today the four feature and two short films that are the recipients of this year’s Audience and Jury Awards out of the 97 films (66 features, 31 shorts) selected from 3,000 submissions divided across 31 countries.

“We’ve had extraordinary, diverse audiences and incredible attendance at the festival this year, so it’s especially rewarding to acknowledge the films that our audiences have loved the most,” said Jacqueline Lyanga, Director of AFI FEST presented by Audi.  “And we had an incredibly knowledgeable and talented shorts jury who had to make tough decisions given the array of short films deserving recognition this year.”

One film in each of the following sections received an Audience Award:

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I will admit to not being a huge fan of American independent cinema in general, largely for its tendency to recycle self-regarding postures and technique instead of ringing out with intelligent, individual voices. And so I approached the AFI Fest‘s Young Americans strand with caution, but am pleased to say that Mike Ott’s Littlerock does its part to restore the good name of the 20-something indie genre.

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As guest artistic director of this year’s AFI Fest, David Lynch gets to screen some old classics that mean a lot to him. One of them is Bergman’s  Hour of the Wolf, whose psychological horror techniques echo throughout Lynch’s oeuvre from Eraserhead on. I will admit to having an unresolved relationship with Bergman (don’t we all!) but whichever way you slice it, this is a film both of brilliantly mounted psychological tension and of naked, neurotic exposure that could have been made by nobody but Bergman, and would barely even have been contemplated by anyone else. Partly because he displays that same sense of self-importance as always, but this time it’s fundamental to the subject matter, and in any case it’s hard to say that it isn’t actually justified.

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It was a little alarming to hear the AFI Fest‘s associate director of programming describe Takeshi Kitano’s latest, Outrage (Autoreiji), as a return to form, since it comes off the back of his masterpiece, Achilles and the Tortoise. What he means is that it’s a return to the straight Yakuza genre with which Kitano started his career, and into which he has injected some interesting elements at various subsequent points. Not so much here, which from anyone else would be fine,but from him is a disappointment. Nonetheless, it is a perfectly efficient gangster film, told at the usual slow-steady pace, laced with black humour, and boasting some particularly unpleasant moments of violence.

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Last night David O. Russell’s The Fighter starring Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Amy Adams had it’s first ever screening at AFI Festival. The secret screening was only announced yesterday morning and over 100 people were turned away at the door. The star and producer of the film Mark Wahlberg was there to introduce the film and he told the audience “I’m happy it got to the big screen. It took me such a long time to get the movie made that if you don’t like the movie, I’ll do two hours of hard labor.”

Well if one thing is clear it’s that nothing is clear and we’re not sure if Wahlberg is due for some hard labor or an Oscar!

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The AFI Fest offered an intriguing proposition on Sunday afternoon: back-to-back screenings of South Korea’s most famous classic film, Ki-young Kim’s The Housemaid (1960), together with Sang-soo Im’s 2010 remake/re-imagining. It wasn’t an entirely successful event – problems with the digital print of the older version meant the new one was screened first, which was obviously undesirable, and the older came on a DVD in the end, with ropey sound syncing. But they are both interesting films, and the original at least is worth seeing under any circumstances, if only for its strangeness (free on mubi.com, for example). And they are different enough that in fact one does not really need to discuss them together. But I am going to anyway.

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Lucky us! Well some of us! If you’re in the LA area you can be one of the first to screen the new drama starring Mark Wahlberg alongside the stellar supporting cast of Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Amy Adams, in The Fighter. AFI Fest just announced today that they will be screening the film from director David O. Russell for festival attendees tonight at 9:30 p.m. at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. See it before it starts winning awards!

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Bertrand Tavernier has a long and distinguished career behind him, of well-crafted, intelligent films across a wide range of genres (L’horlogier de Saint-Paul, ‘Round Midnight). But he’s never been exactly a hit name, and his recent films haven’t even made it to these shores, so it was a treat to attend the AFI Fest‘s presentation of his latest, La princesse de Montpensier. An ex-critic and fan of the Hollywood studio era, part of Tavernier’s skill is that he works a little like those directors, aiming for efficient quality in any subject matter, and that perhaps engenders a certain anonymity, no doubt a contributing factor to his not being better-known. But for all that Tavernier recalls an American model, his latest piece is French through and through, a 16th-Century drama (dealing with the period just prior to that of La reine Margot) adapted from the first short story by France’s first novelist (and a woman to boot – Madame de Lafayette) and dealing with that almost-epitome of Frenchness, blind, mad passion.

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What one really wants form a film festival is to be surprised, and the AFI fest did a pretty good job on Friday night, with a midnight screening of Switzerland’s first science-fiction film, Cargo.

As with Johnson’s walking dog, the surprise is that it is done at all. An immensely ambitious undertaking, set almost entirely in deep space, on a long-haul cargo ship, the film took nine years to make; but the time and care spent to make it show right there on the screen in the incredibly impressive digital environment and highly-detailed production design. Occasionally an effect doesn’t come off (usually the deep space green screen when human figures are involved) but for the most part the intricacy of the giant space stations and vessels, their movement and the hard light of deep space are rendered in an astonishingly accomplished and well-imagined manner that bears valid comparison with similar features in 2001. Would that the substance of the film was so sophisticated.

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