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Eurocinema – International box office films

eurocinema — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:19:17 +0000

Eurocinema delivers the greatest International box office films to the US audience. Available On-Demand right in your home!

www.eurocinema.com

Eurocinema Presents: Cinema from The Netherlands

eurocinema — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:31:29 +0000

Love is All (Alles is Liefde)
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Directed by Joram Lursen, Dutch with English subtitles,Winner of 10 international film awards, including awards for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress (Carice Van Houten). Our stories all take place during the celebration of Sinterklaas, when he arrives by boat from Spain. Klaasje has divorced Dennis, who cheated on her with a school teacher. Dennis wants her back, but has a young lover and it looks as if he has missed the boat. Meanwhile, Klaasje’s best friend Simone is the pivot of her family. Her husband Ted often feels ignored and he does not have the guts to tell his wife that he has been laid off. Pool attendant Victor is looking forward to marrying the love of his life, Kees. But Kees has doubts. Victor’s sister Kiki, (Carice Van Houten, BLACK BOOK, VALKYRIE co-starring with Tom Cruise, REPOSSESION MAMBO, co-starring with Jude Law), a sales assistant at a department store, is dreaming of a prince on a white horse. But she is unaware of the fact that a real prince, Valentijn, is crazy about her. With the arrival of a mysterious Santa Claus, all these amorous ups and downs reach a climax, while the happy endings come closer too. Read the Carice Van Houten interview in our press section.

European Movies You Must Watch – Presented by Eurocinema

eurocinema — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:09:13 +0000

All movies below are available on Eurocinema via your cable operator, click here to find out more.

Summer ’04 Directed by Stefan Kromer, Drama/Thriller, German w/English subtitles. The film stars Martina Gedeck who we have seen in such film hits as THE LIVES OF OTHERS and MOSTLY MARTHA. This film finds a family taking an idyllic summer vacation, which becomes shattered in this sexually charged thriller. Miriam and Andre, a seemingly happy couple, welcome their teenage son and his Lolita-like girlfriend to their cottage by the sea. When Miriam sees the young girl flirting with a mysterious older man she becomes concerned for her safety and sets out to end their blossoming romance, but the closer she gets to the charismatic stranger, the more she finds herself drawn to him, triggering a volatile love triangle. Matt Zoller-Seitz of the NY Times called this movie “Sexy and Smart, with a first rate cast”

My Best Enemy (Il Mio Miglior Nemico) Directed by Carlo Verdone, Comedy/Romance, Italian w/English subtitles, nominated for 12 Donatello awards including Best Director, Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress. The film reunites actor-director Carlo Verdone with his MANUAL OF LOVE co-star Silvio Muccino in a tale of enemies coming together for the love of a girl: one of the men her boyfriend, the other her father. Achille (Verdone), is the CEO of a hotel owned by his wife and brother-in-law, he accuses one of his employees of stealing and fires her on the spot. She cries to her son, Orfeo (Muccino), who urges the boss to rehire his mother – to no avail – then decides he is going to ruin the adulterous Achilles’ life. Along the way, Orfeo falls in love with the beautiful but troubled Cecilia, Achilles’ daughter played by Ana Caterina Morariu.

Ellis in Glamourland Directed by Pieter Kramer, Comedy. Romance, Dutch w/English subtitles. Joan Collins stars as a world famous glamour guru, in town publicizing her hugely successful self-help book, “How to Marry a Millionaire”. In a moment of brashness at a publicity presentation, she randomly selects an unsuspecting hotel maid and single mother, Ellis, promising to turn her from “ugly duckling” to “beautiful swan” fit for the highest reaches of wealthy society. Initially Ellis is not happy with the idea of being a social experiment, but after some persuasion she agrees to take up the offer. Ellis finds herself on a quest to find Mr. Right, discovering how true wealth can only ever be found on the inside. Its part “Pretty Woman” and “My Fair Lady”.

Miss Montigny Directed by Miel Van Hoogenbemt, French w/English subtitles, Comedy. Sophie Quinton and Ariane Ascaride star. An official selection at the Montreal Film Festival. In the former coal-mining town of Montigny, 19 year old Sandrine works by day selling cheese in a local supermarket, and in the evenings as she works as a beautician. Her dream is to one day open her own beauty salon with her best friend, Gianna. But Paolo, Sandrine’s boyfriend, wants to leave Montigny and head for the city to find work. He begs Sandrine to join him, but she won’t, her heart is too set on opening her beauty parlour in the heart of Montigny. Sandrine’s mother, Anna, has many regrets in life and so wants more than anything to help her daughter make that dream come true. The problem is finding the money, no bank will offer a loan. When a local beauty contest is announced, Anna realizes that this is Sandrine’s chance to become a local celebrity and obtain a bank loan for her parlor. Sandrine is reluctant to enter the contest but, much to her surprise, passes the first selection round, winning her way through to the Miss Montigny final.

My Brother is an Only Child (Mio Fratello e figlio unico) Directed by Daniele Luchetti, Comedy/Drama. Italian w/English subtitles. Winner of 5 international film awards. The film follows Accio and Manrico through years of Italian history. Accio played by Elio Germano is the cause of his parent’s desperation his brother Manrico played by Ricardo Scarmarcio is handsome, charismatic, everyone loves him. They have opposite political beliefs and both love the same woman. Yet they are so much alike

Right Now (A Tout de Suite) Directed by Benoit Jacquot, Thriller. French w/English subtitles. Winner of 1 international film award. A stylish, erotically charged thriller, a highly anticipated film from acclaimed French director Benoit Jacquot (Sade, A Single Girl). Based on actual events, it tells the story of sexy, free-spirited Lili, (Isild le Besco LA RAVISSEUSE, GIRLS CAN’T SWIM) a Parisian art student who falls for a charismatic bank robber (Ouassani Embarak, THE GOOD THIEF) and joins him on the run, a dizzying cross-continent escape through Spain, Morocco and Greece, when a sudden betrayal leaves her stranded in the middle of nowhere. Visually stunning, this film is a mesmerizing account of one womans breathtaking journey of self-discovery. “Gorgeous! A deft homage to the French New Wave. A nearly perfect film. Isild Le Besco is astonishing.” –Stephen Holden, New York Times

For more information go to www.eurocinema.com

Foreign idea finds a home on Brickell

eurocinema — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:13:58 +0000

When Sebastian Perioche arrived at Harvard to start work on his M.B.A. 12 years ago, he was shocked. Everybody in Paris had told him Boston was one of America’s most cosmopolitan cities, but he could hardly find a theater screening the films of Claude Chabrol, Pedro Almódovar or any of the other European directors he liked so much.
‘I used to always say to everybody, `With all these cable channels, there ought to be one where you could watch foreign film,’ ” he recalls. ‘And they would say, `What a great idea!’ ”
Such a great idea that Perioche finally tried it himself. And now his video-on-demand brainchild Eurocinema is in 20 million homes and adding half a million more every month — and doing it by defying practically all conventional wisdom about the tastes and habits of American television viewers.
The channel, headquartered in a Brickell Avenue high-rise, offers no movies in English, no movies that have won Oscars — in fact, just about no movies that anybody in the United States has even heard of. In a day when everything in television is built around marketing, this seemingly perverse thirst for obscurity is nonetheless paying off. Eurocinema is now available on Time Warner and Charter cable systems across America as well as DirecTV’s satellite service and will join the Dish Network satellite lineup next month. (Comcast, one of South Florida’s largest cable carriers, does not offer the network.)
”We play some movies that have been in American theaters,” says the 35-year-old Perioche. “We have Summer of ‘04, the German drama that played a little bit here. But we don’t run many of those. The idea of Eurocinema is to bring new stuff, stuff that people haven’t been able to see.
“We’re trying to take advantage of the limited availability of foreign films here. In New York or Los Angeles, it’s easy to see foreign films. Denver, or even South Miami, not so much.”
OBVIOUS CHOICES
So seemingly obvious choices for a foreign film channel — say, La Vie en Rose, which won Marion Cotillard an Oscar this year for her portrayal of French chanteuse Edith Piaf, or The Lives of Others, a Best Foreign Film Oscar winner about the fishbowl life in Stalinist East Germany — won’t make it to Eurocinema. The channel’s buyers scour European festivals and back away from any movie in which channels like HBO or Sundance show interest.
“Our objective is to provide service to real foreign movie fans underserved by television,” says Larry Namer, head of the channel’s Northeast operations. “If a movie is on HBO, wonderful, but then what’s the point of us carrying it?”
The channel does try to feature some familiar faces from time to time, digging up films with stars well-known in America that somehow failed to find distribution deals here. Notable example: Amantes, a Spanish film featuring Victoria Abril, who built a U.S. following in the movies she made with Almódovar. Or Ellis in Glamourland, a Dutch take on My Fair Lady with Joan Collins in the Professor Henry Higgins role.
But even when the face is familiar, the film almost certainly isn’t. ”You take 10 movies made in Europe, and maybe three are really good,” says Perioche. “Of the three, one will probably be picked up for distribution in the United States. And that leaves two very good films that won’t be seen here. Those are the ones we want, even if nobody’s ever heard of them.”
So a viewer tuning in to Eurocinema will find such fare as Vinci, a Polish crime-caper film that won awards at several European festivals in 2004; Kira’s Reason, a 2001 Danish drama in which a woman returns from a stay in a mental hospital to find her husband having an affair; or Corrupted Hands, a 2001 Iranian comedy about wedding planners who rob their clients.
Iranian films are a relatively new addition to Eurocinema, and an example of how the channel’s marketing has expanded in unforseen ways.
”We designed this to be a foreign-film fan channel, targeting people with a previous disposition to watching film with subtitles,” says Namer, 59. “But one of the things that popped out is that the nature of immigration has changed so dramatically. My parents came to America from Spain via Turkey, but in front of us they would speak only English — everything was geared to becoming Americans really quickly.

“But immigrants of the past 20 or 30 years are concerned with maintaining their linkage to their home country and passing that linkage on to their children. We found an audience of Iranians who wanted to see films in Farsi, and we’re catering to it.”
Being a video-on-demand channel allows Eurocinema to provide films to smaller constituencies without boring everybody else — a customer picks from 20 to 30 movies available on the channel at any given moment (for $3.95 a pop — ”less than a gallon of gas,” notes Perioche) and can simply ignore those that don’t pique interest.
Perioche, who was making his living in international trade before he finally found the financial backing for Eurocinema, originally envisioned a regular 24-hour television channel. But he changed his mind after joining forces with Namer, a cable-TV veteran (he founded the E! Entertainment network).
`FUTURE OF TV’
”Doing it this way not only costs about a 10th as much, it’s the future of television,” declares Namer, who believes that conventional — ”linear,” as he calls it — television is in its death throes.
”I worked for a while as a consultant at Microsoft,” he says. “And I became a great believer in storing programming on disk drives — big ones on the transmission end, which is what video-on-demand channels use, or small ones on the receiving end, like TiVo — where the viewer can watch it whenever he wants.
“Eventually all linear television will disappear. Why should I care about what somebody at NBC thinks about when Frasier should be on? It should be on when I want it.”
Meanwhile, Eurocinema will put all that expertise it has acquired in scouting European film festivals in sponsoring one itself — the Romance in a Can festival scheduled for Valentine’s Day week in 2009. It will feature two dozen foreign-made romance flicks. ”They make a lot of romantic films in Europe,” Namer observes. “The difference between theirs and ours is that sometimes in theirs, people die.”

Euricinema On TVWEEK.COM

eurocinema — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:10:19 +0000

y Daisy Whitney Video-on-demand service Eurocinema, which showcases foreign films, plans to start its first consumer marketing campaign this month, betting that niche marketing will work best for a targeted VOD service. The VOD service will spend $100,000 in its January outing and $2 million in total marketing this year, said Larry Namer, head of U.S. operations for EuroMedia Holdings, the owner and operator of Eurocinema. When the VOD network launched with Mediacom in April 2006 it reached about 1.5 million homes. By year-end, Eurocinema had obtained distribution on Time Warner systems and upped its reach past 13 million homes, Mr. Namer said. Now he wants to build on that base and let consumers know that Eurocinema is like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for foreign films. That’s why Eurocinema will market the service through a series of cross-channel spots that are slated to run on like-minded networks. It also will promote its films through the newsletters published by embassies, consulates and social groups associated with various European nationalities, he said. The newsletters will detail which movies are targeted for which country. “The first year was focused on distribution and now we are moving into consumer marketing,” Mr. Namer said. “It’s inefficient for us to take out an ad in USA Today for the 1 percent that wants foreign films,” Mr. Namer said. “With grass-roots marketing we can be effective.”

About Eurocinema

eurocinema — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:41:21 +0000

Eurocinema is the first movie channel dedicated to award-winning European and international films.

Eurocinema is offered On-Demand on cable, satellite and broadband services.

Each film block is accompanied by commentary on directors, actors, producers and other relevant points of interest.

One or two short films tied together thematically also accompany each feature film. The theme could be the same director, writer, same country, the same or a different look at the same topic.

A unique presentation of diverse styles of award-winning independent and artistic cinema as well as documentaries, celebrity guests and coverage of major international film festivals make it the first programming service of its kind in the United States.

Look for Eurocinema movie titles on your Video-On-Demand menu.

Contact your local cable operator or satellite provider and tell them that you want Eurocinema!