Critical Divide – Standing at the critical divide

Autlook Filmsales to handle Cannes Uncut

Vienna-based sales outfit Autlook Filmsales has acquired global rights for the new documentary Cannes Uncut featuring Tilda Swinton, Ken Loach, Sharon Stone and an extensive array of filmmakers, actors and film industry professionals.

Cannes Uncut revels in the glamour, red carpets, movies, craziness, stunts, deals, parties and personalities that sees the business of show business implant itself for two weeks every year on the French Riviera. It offers an exciting high-adrenaline, roller-coaster taste of what the festival has come to represent over the decades and what it might offer in the future.

With extensive insight from Thierry Frémaux, the head of the festival alongside Cannes regulars Tilda Swinton, Juliette Binoche and Léa Seydoux; filmmakers such as Oliver Stone, Lynne Ramsay, Mike Leigh, Quentin Tarantino, Sean Baker, Ken Loach and Wim Wenders; and a supporting cast including producers, journalists, photographers, executives, festival programmers, fashion designers, party organisers and hotel managers, the film takes an exhilarating look behind the scenes of the world’s most famous film festival.

The film is co-directed by Richard Blanshard and Roger Penny, and produced by Colin Burrows, Blanshard and Critical Divide’s Mark Adams and Chris Pickard and is ready for release later this year. It is created by Adams and Pickard.

“Cannes has always had this mystery and fascination to it. It is fun to be able to invite film lovers, industry insiders and red carpet enthusiasts to the Riviera to take a look behind-the-scenes” says Autlook’s CEO Salma Abdalla.

Good Luck to Porto da Pedra Samba School

Critical Divide send all best wishes to the community of G.R.E.S Unidos do Porto da Pedra and its carnavaleso Mauro Quintaes. The Rio samba school parades fifth on Saturday, 18 February in Série Ouro with its samba “A Invenção da Amazônia”. The samba is based around a book by Jules Verne published as “La Jangada” in French in 1881 and “Eight Hundred Leagues of the Amazon” in English.

It was Porto da Pedra and Mauro who featured Ronnie Biggs in its carnival samba “Samba No Pé e Mãos ao Alto isto é um Assalto” (Samba On Your Feet and Hands Up. This is a Robbery) back in 1998. We spent an afternoon and evening with them in December 2022 as the school prepared for this year’s carnival. Mauro gave a great interview about Ron and 1998 for out documentary and then the school and community gave a magical, emotional and super charged performance of “Samba No Pé e Mãos ao Alto isto é um Assalto” over 20 years since it was first performed.

It would be great to see Porto da Pedra back in Grupo Especial in 2024, as they were in 1998. Boa sorte para Porto da Pedra.

A Decade of “Brazil the Guide”

10 years ago in April 2012 we launched a labour of love, www.braziltheguide.com, which was followed two years later – in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup – by the much more complete www.riotheguide.com.

The reason we launched the sites was that we were and still do get consulted about Rio and Brazil on a weekly basis and this seemed an easier way of telling people where to find the information and share it. We were also often asked when we would update “The Insider’s Guide to Rio de Janeiro”, last published in print form in 1995, and the web sites seemed the obvious answer. #brazil #riodejaneiro

Ronnie Biggs’ Rio: No One is Innocent: Documentary

Business Doc Europe’s coverage of our Ronald Biggs documentary “Ronnie Biggs’ Rio: No One is Innocent” that we are currently making with TvZero and Canal Brasil for broadcast in 2023, the 60th anniversary of the “Great Train Robbery”.

Read Here

Cannes @ 75: 20 September 1936-2021

Critical Divides wishes Festival de Cannes and everyone involved with it over the years, all the very best on the 75th anniversary of the start of the very first festival on 20 September 1946.

The festival had been due to start in September 1939, but the outbreak of World War II closed the festival before it opened. Seven years later the 1946 festival ran from 20 September to 5 October and the festivities started in the gardens of the original Grand Hôtel by the American singer Grace Moore singing “La Marseillaise”.

It was said at the time that Cannes offered: “The finest films in the world presented in the finest setting in the world”. That spirit remains true 75 years on.

In 1951 the festival moved to its spring date that we now all know so well, and in May 2022 the actual 75th festival will take place and the celebrations can begin.

A celebration of 75 years of the best of cinema, glamour, business and more that is to be told in the film “Cannes Uncut”.

Joyeux 75e anniversaire.

Mark Adams speaks to The Hollywood Reporter

At the recent 74th Cannes Film Festival, Critical Divide’s Mark Adams spoke to The Hollywood Reporter to share his thoughts on his favourite things and places in Cannes and his new film “Cannes Uncut”.

“Cannes Uncut”… 75 years of the Cannes Film Festival in a new documentary

With 2022 marking the 75th anniversary of the world’s best known film festival, the feature documentary Cannes Uncut will delve behind the scenes of the gloriously glamorous and glitzy event that has come to represent the best in cinema and the business of showbusiness.

The creative and production team behind Cannes Uncut – Colin Burrows, Richard Blanshard and Critical Divide’s Mark Adams and Chris Pickard – will be filming and conducting interviews at Cannes 2021, the 74th festival, to sit alongside archive material, with the film being ready for the 2022 festival to coincide with diamond jubilee celebrations. Sales agents negotiations are being finalised.

The Cannes Film Festival is famous as an event brimming with stories and characters as outlandish and dramatic as the films that have premiered there, and Cannes Uncut will celebrate the great films as well as the wild parties; the spectacular promotional stunts as well as the iconic talents; the glorious successes and the infamous failures.

This is the documentary that dares to detail all the glamour, red carpets, craziness, deals, parties, movies, and personalities that saw the business of show business implant itself at the Cannes Film Festival. It offers an exciting high-adrenaline, roller-coaster experience of what has played out over the years.

In the decades following its launch in 1946 this initially modest French event established itself as the world’s pre-eminent film festival, and grew to define sophisticated film glamour as the world came to love the images and stories of the stars and starlets as they romped the sunny Cannes beaches by day, looked resplendent in sparkling jewellery and the finest of fashions on the red carpet and partied hard and late into the night.

Some 75 years on, the glorious excesses, triumphs and failures of Cannes is a story that is ready to be told. A story brought together by a band of brothers and sisters who have spent far too many decades pounding the Croisette, sweeping up the red carpet, hiding in the sales bunker, and drinking and carousing late into the night at the Petit Carlton and glamorous parties.

The “Cannes Uncut” team:

Colin Burrows is an independent producer, publicity consultant and CEO of the Special Treats Production Company, Europe’s leading production house for audio-visual coverage of the film industry. Clients include all the Hollywood majors, the Bond films for over 25 years, the Harry Potter films, and the The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit films.
Richard Blanshard is an award-winning photographer producer, director and director of photography. His career began with special still photography on feature films and television and he was the official photographer to the US and UK film industries at the Cannes film Festival for more than 20 years.
Chris Pickard has covered the global film and television industries as a journalist, commentator and critic for more than three decades. He was editor-in-chief of Moving Pictures International, and edited and produced publications at the Cannes, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Sundance, Rotterdam and Karlovy Vary film festivals. He has attended and covered Cannes for more than 20 years.
Mark Adams is a critic, writer and film festival consultant. He was most recently Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, joining the festival in 2015. He was Chief Film Critic and Reviews Editor for film trade paper Screen International for four years, and has also been a film critic for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Moving Pictures International.

13th Brazilian Convention & Visitors Bureau Congress

The 13th Brazilian Convention & Visitors Bureau Congress will bring the Brazilian travel and tourism industry and authorities together over two days on 17 and 18 June 2021 (via video conferencing) to look at the challenges facing the industry as it works to reset itself post pandemic.

While domestic tourism has held up quite well in Brazil over the past 18 months, when allowed to operate, international visitors have been very limited as travel between Brazil and rest of the world has been severely restricted and continues to be so.

The conference, organised by the Brasil Convention & Visitors Bureaux (BC&VB), will emphasise the growing importance of tourism to many areas of Brazil, and look at the challenges to be faced by the accommodation and aviation sectors post pandemic, flights being of key importance to a country the size of Brazil. Sustainable transport is on the agenda, and the participants will also hear about the current global situation for travel and tourism and how other destinations are looking to re-launch and open when it is safe to do so.

Via the magic of Zoom Critical Divide’s Christopher Pickard has the honour of giving his view of world events in a presentation entitled “O Mercado Global de Turismo – um olhar na realidade.” (The Global Tourism Market: A Reality Check).

Critical Divide features Mangueira for 2021

The Critical Divide calendar for 2021 features Estação Primeira de Mangueira’s parade at Rio’s carnival on 24 February 2020.

Sadly our On Parade with Mangueira: Carnival in Rio project will now have to wait until 2022 as it needs a proper full-blown Rio carnival to work, and that won’t now happen in 2021, although there may be parade of the top samba schools in July.

If that parade takes place, Mangueira samba will be “Angenor, José & Laurindo”, which refers to three of the school’s most iconic figures, the great composer, Cartola, (Angenor de Oliveira); the singer, Jamelão (José Bispo Clementino dos Santos); and the dance master or mestre-sala, Delegado (Hélio Laurindo da Silva).

2021 marks the centenary of the birth of Mestre Delegado who performed for the school from 1948 through to 1984, when he retired as the Mestre-Sala after Mangueira had won the Super-Championship to mark the first year of the Sambódromo. In that period Delegado had always scored a maximum 10 for his presentation.

Hopefully good things come to those that wait, but until then you can keep up to date on carnival and Rio at www.riotheguide.com.

Abba’s Super Troupers Land at the O2 in London

Abba Super Troupers The Exhibition opened at the O2 in London on 6 December 2019 and is scheduled, to the delight of Abba fans visiting London, to run through 31 August 2020.

The new exhibition occupies a 14,000 square foot space within London’s home of music, offers a musical journey into the phenomenon that is ABBA (Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid (“Frida”) Lyngstad) while offering visitors a time capsule of the 1970s and 1980s, a period when the band’s eight albums and many singles dominated the global charts.

The exhibit charts their music, lyrics, creative process and influence as one of the most iconic pop bands of the modern age. It examines ABBA’s rise to global superstardom through a series of atmospheric rooms, exploring each of ABBA’s multi-million selling albums, alongside the band’s personal and public journey.

ABBA first burst onto the UK music scene with a dazzling win on 6 April 1974 at the Eurovision Song Contest at the Brighton Dome, with the song that would become their first UK chart-topper, “Waterloo”.

The exhibition has been conceptualised and curated by Jude Kelly CBE, a renowned theatre director and the former artistic director at The Southbank Centre.

ABBA: Super Troupers The Exhibition displays an array of objects that include:

Personal artefacts from each musician’s youth that provide an insight into their pre-ABBA lives, including Björn’s school report, his military book and photographs from his time in service, and pictures of a 13-year-old Frida in a jazz band as a beatnik teenager.
Key items from the height of the band’s heyday, reflecting on both the personal – such as a collection of behind the scenes photos taken of the band on their ‘77 Australian “Arrival” tour – and the professional, with iconic items from the height of their success, including a limited-edition replica of the ‘Star Guitar’ played at Eurovision ’74, signed by all four members; over 40 Gold Discs from ABBA’s personal archive, including “Dancing Queen”, their biggest selling single, worldwide; a collection of exquisitely designed, image-defining costumes and personal clothing.
A recreation of superfan Andrew Boardman’s Manchester living room, a veritable shrine to ABBA memorabilia. Andrew began collecting 40 years ago, having fallen under the band’s spell when, at age 16, he first attended an ABBA concert. This room explores the notion that ABBA may have the most ardent and committed fans of any contemporary band.

Visitors are fully immersed in the ABBA story through the ABBA: Super Troupers The Exhibition’s theatrical staging, including:

A recreation of the Eurovision Song Contest stage at the Brighton Dome, where, from lush deep theatre seats, fans can watch the performance.
Multiple photo-opportunities, where attendees can capture themselves beside:

- A full-sized replica of the helicopter that graced the cover of “Arrival’.
- Replicas of the iconic “Super Trouper” album cover costumes.
- A life-size replica of the scoreboard that saw ABBA secure Eurovision Song Contest victory (despite null points from the United Kingdom…).

A glimpse inside the band’s POLAR Studios, where the hard-working pop perfectionists refined their defining harmonised sound, with interactive elements that include a voice recording booth and mixing desk.
Ending the experience on a high, guests are invited to sing, dance, add to fan mail, explore memorabilia and indeed say “Thank You For The Music” in The Legacy finale, as a specular audio-visual backdrop documents the very best of the band’s successes.

TICKETS

Tickets are sold in 30-minute entry slots. Anticipated average dwell time within the exhibition is 90 minutes.

Adult £27

Adult Return £59 (up to a maximum of 4 visits)

Child £13.50 (children under 5 go free)

Tickets available at abbasupertroupers.com or by calling 08442 491 000*

OPENING TIMES

Mon – Wed 10.00 until 19.30 (last ticket 18.00)

Thu – Fri 10.00 until 20.30 (last ticket 19.00)

Sat – Sun 09.30 until 19.30 (last ticket 18.00)

Closed 25th December 2019 and 1st Jan 2020

Some Fun ABBA Facts…

At the Grand Hotel in Brighton on the eve of Eurovision, quite by accident, ABBA discovered that the organisers had booked them into the Napoleon suite. They took it as a good omen.
Least glamorous fact – in 1979, ABBA fronted a poster for British Rail and Keep Britain Tidy
In 1973, ABBA competed in Melodifestivalen (the Swedish qualifying competition for the Eurovicion Song contest) with “Ring Ring” but only came third.
When ABBA won Eurovision in Brighton with Waterloo, the UK gave them ‘nul points’.
3.5 million people applied for tickets to their 1977 London tour dates.
Lasse Hallström, who directed ABBA: The Movie and most of the band’s videos was nominated for Oscars for his direction on My Life as a Dog and The Cider House Rules. He also directed What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Chocolat.
ABBA scored their first number one album in the US in 2008. It was the film soundtrack to Mamma Mia.
By the age of 19 Agnetha was already one of the most popular singer in Sweden.
ABBA Gold is one of the best-selling albums of all time in the UK, outselling Sgt Pepper’s. Lonely Hearts Club Band and second only to Queen’s Greatest Hits.
For the Sex Pistols’ 20th anniversary shows, John Lydon (an ABBA fan since early Seventies) wanted to walk onstage to ‘Dancing Queen’ in a bid to highlight how bad music was before punk – but, despite Lydon’s intentions, the crowd roared their approval and started dancing as soon as the ABBA hit kicked in.
Already a household name, Agnetha played Mary Magdalene in the 1971 Swedish production of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Arrival was ABBA’s fourth LP but was their first studio release to hit the Number One spot in the UK (ABBA’s Greatest Hits went to No. 1 first).
Anni-Frid is a mezzo and Agnetha is a soprano.
ABBA never officially broke up. In 1982 they decided to have a rest. It just went on a while.
Both Led Zeppelin and Genesis recorded at Abba’s POLAR Studios.
After finally deciding on the name ABBA Benny flipped his “B” horizontally during a photo shoot. This inspired their official logo, though it was later given a proper design by Rune Soderqvist.
In 1973 after she had given birth to their daughter, Linda, Agnetha was replaced on their German tour by a lookalike. She was a local singer and friend of Anni-Frid called Inger Brundin.
A 1976 ABBA TV special, filmed in Australia, got more views than the 1969 moon landing in that country.
ABBA were the very first group from a non-English-speaking country to achieve top spots in charts in all English-speaking countries including Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.