The film ‘The Holdovers’, directed by two-time Oscar winner Alexander Payne, will open the 52nd International Film Festival FEST in the MTS Hall on 23 February 2024.
Alexander Payne’s ‘The Holdovers’ is this years candidate for the Oscar in several categories, including: best picture, best actor, best actress, original screenplay.
In this film, written by David Hemingson, a modest teacher at a prestigious American school is forced to stay on campus during the Christmas break and take care of several students who have nowhere to go for the holiday. Over time, he develops an unexpected bond with one of them, an emotionally damaged, smart, troubled student but also a school cook who lost her son in Vietnam.
The cast in Payne"s film, which has already been described as ‘a charming, delicately written and sensitively acted comedy’, includes: Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, Brady Hepner, Ian Dolley, Jim Kaplan, Andrew Garman, Michael Provost, Gillian Wigman and others.
The film ‘The Holdovers’ has already been awarded the 2023 Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy (Paul Giamatti) and Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and was screened at festivals in Toronto, London, Busan,
Tallinn, Thessaloniki, Turin and Marrakesh.
As they like to emphasize in the USA, the director, screenwriter and producer of Greek descent, Alexander Payne, is one of the few in Hollywood who has the right to complete artistic freedom and the ‘final cut’ of his films. Many actors from the films of this American, who earned two Oscars for the best adapted screenplay, in 2005 for ‘Sideways’ and in 2012 for ‘The Descendants’, won awards or earned nominations, such as: Jack Nicholson, Kathy Bates, George Clooney, Bruce Dern.
Payne, ‘an icon of independent film’, also directed acclaimed films: ‘All about Schmidt’ from 2002 (premiered at Cannes), ‘Nebraska’ from 2013 and ‘Downsizing’ from 2017, which was shown at the opening of the Venice Film Festival.
