Gijon Film Festival unveils lineup

'Welcome,' 'Good Heart,' 'Pivellina' compete

By JOHN HOPEWELL

'Welcome'

Philippe Lioret’s “Welcome,” Dagur Kari’s “The Good Heart” and Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s “La Pivellina” will compete at the 47th Gijon Film Festival.

Maverick U.S. helmer Harmony Korine, a fest regular, will receive a tribute and a career retro. Korine will attend Gijon and present his latest celebration of bad taste, “Trash Humpers.”

Gijon, which runs Nov. 19-28, closes with Cruz Angeles’ “Don’t Let Me Drown,” a “Romeo and Juliet”-like story about two high school teens in the Bronx after 9/11.

Well received at Berlin, “Welcome” revolves around a young Iraqi Kurd trapped in France but determined to swim the Channel to a new life in England.

“The Good Heart,” sold by Wild Bunch, is directed by Iceland’s Dagur Kari (“Noi Albinoi”). Centered on a bartender training his substitute, a young homeless man, it was picked up by Alta Films for Spain at Toronto.

A Directors’ Fortnight player, “La Pivellina” recounts a woman circus worker’s temporary adoption of a 2-year-old girl.

Elsewhere, Gijon’s competish selection nails two key trends in specialty filmmaking: dramatic minimalism and darkly humored, off-kilter fare.

Both Masahiro Kobayashi’s lonely teen tale “Where Are You?” and “Between Two Worlds,” a mood poem from Sri Lanka’s Vimukthi Jayasundara, belong to the minimalist school.

“Frontier Blues,” from the Iran-born Babak Jalali, is a black-humored portrait of life in the Golestan province of Iran.

Also competing is the wacky laffer “The Last Days of Emma Blank,” from Dutch auteur Alex van Warmerdam; Romanian Bobby Paunescu’s offbeat immigration story “Francesca”; and a quirky small-town 1960s noir that tips its hat to the Coen brothers, Uruguayan Alvaro Brechner’s “Bad Day to Go Fishing.”

Pics join a bevy of already announced competition contenders that should yield some of Gijon’s most popular titles: from the U.S., Lynn Shelton’s “Humpday” and Josh and Benny Safdie’s “Go Get Some Rosemary”; and from France, Riad Sattouf’s “French Kissers” and Alain Guiraudie’s “The King of Escape.”

Competish is rounded out by Portuguese helmer Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ drag-queen meller “To Die Like a Man.”