An unconventional and outsider, but also a top-notch star, a never-fading teenage icon, but also a seductive anti-hero starring in dark and daring roles, multifaceted and beloved Matt Dillon, one of contemporary American cinema’s most iconic figures, will honor this year’s Festival with his presence. The renowned American actor will attend the 65th TIFF to present his new film Being Maria (2024) by Jessica Palud. The screening of the film, which revolves around the troubled life of Maria Schneider and is blessed with an outstanding performance by Matt Dillon in the role of Marlon Brando, will take place on Sunday November 3rd, at Olympion. Moreover, Matt Dillon will be bestowed with the Festival’s honorary Golden Alexander on Monday November 4th, at Olympion, before the screening of the film City of Ghosts (2002), which signaled his debut as a film director and a screenwriter, receiving widespread acclaim both by the critics and the audience.
Matt Dillon’s presence at the Festival’s lineup is threefold, as he also stars in the film Interfears (2023) by Jesper Just, a resourceful and inventive “topography” of an actor’s brain, which will be screened in the form of a visual installation for the entire duration of the Festival, at MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts (Warehouse B1-Port of Thessaloniki), within the framework of the 65th TIFF’s tribute to the multifarious Danish artist. Matt Dillon will join Jesper Just at the official opening of the visual installation Interfears, in the “Meet the Artist: Jesper Just” event, which will be held on Monday November 4th, at 5pm, at MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts
With the immense praise of “the best actor of his generation” under his belt, attributed to him by legendary film critic Roger Ebert, Dillon has teamed up with a series of renowned directors, in films that left their mark in cinema history. Among others, we single out Rumble Fish and The Outsiders by Francis Ford Coppola, Drugstore Cowboy by Gus Van Sant, Crash by Paul Haggis, in a performance that garnered him a Best Supporting Actor nomination both in the Oscars and the Golden Globes, Factotum by Bent Hamer, where he portrays Carles Bukowski’s alter ego, The House that Jack Built by Lars Von Trier, Asteroid City by Wes Anderson, as well as the short film Nimic, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Most recently, Matt Dillon starred in the film Haunted Heart by Fernando Trueba, shot in Greece. In 2022 he visited Thessaloniki and Olympion theater and he promised to return for one of TIFF’s editions. In 2001, Dillon was a Grammy nominee for Best Spoken Word Album, for the narration of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, while in 2016 he was a Saturn Nominee for Best Actor on Television, for his performance in the first season of Wayward Pines.
The three films starring Matt Dillon screened at the 65th TIFF:
Being Maria
Jessica Palud
France, 2024, 102΄
Maria is a young, struggling actress with promise. When an emerging Italian director casts her to headline a new film alongside an American superstar, her dreams are coming true. But what seems like a big breakthrough turns out to be the start of a living hell. That movie is Last Tango in Paris. The actress is Maria Schneider. A story that exemplifies the influence of toxic masculinity in the realm of the spectacle, an anatomy of (structural) violence and the trauma that wrecked the psyche of a young actress, but mostly a daring portrait that underlines the double standards of cancel culture, as well as the burning imperativeness of the victims’ memory.
*Being Maria will hit the Greek theaters in summer 2025 distributed by Rosebud.21.
City of Ghosts
Matt Dillon
USA, 2002, 116΄
Jimmy is a conman who has been working for an insurance company in New York City that the FBI is investigating since it cannot pay policyholder claims following a hurricane. The mastermind of the scheme and his mentor, Marvin, is in Thailand. In Bangkok, Jimmy learns from Joseph Kaspar, a partner in the scheme, that Marvin is in Cambodia, where he is involved in a casino scheme. The roads are not safe so a guide takes Jimmy by back trail to Phnom Penh. There, he hires a cyclo driver named Sok, to take him to his destination, a run-down bar and hotel owned by a Frenchman named Emile. He learns to trust the word of Sok when attempting to make contact as there are unsafe places and people. He meets an NGO worker named Sophie and dabbles in romance with her while attending a rave party at an ancient temple. Marvin turns up, but the scam he is trying to put together – involving corrupt Cambodian government officials, high-ranking military and the Russian mafia – turns out to be more risky and dangerous than was anticipated.
Interfears
Jesper Just
Denmark, 2023, 16΄
In his new film Interfears, Jesper Just explores the emotional topography of an actor’s brain. Encaged in an fMRI scanner, the actor is reciting a monologue while the machine captures and presents his brain waves in two and three-dimensional representations. By combining enactments of feelings with fMRI technology, the film turns a clinical gaze on emotions as cultural artifacts and on emotional representations as artificial, whether played out by an actor or depicted by a machine. The claim that emotions are always produced in a socioculturally contaminated environment leads to the major point that emotions in general are in fact to a large degree performative – we can learn to do them right, and we follow protocol because we like to be readable as emotional subjects. The film takes this statement further by letting the actor present a character who has trouble feeling emotions, while at the same time monitoring the actor’s actual brain as it goes through pretended emotions. Here, fiction and anatomy come together highlighting connections between role-playing and everyday effects. If feelings are cultural objects, they can be staged and exhibited; here, they come as moving pictures.
