Miami International Film Festival Announces This Year's Films

​The Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) has announced its program of films even though you, the general public, won't be able to buy tickets until February 19. As usual, the ten-day festival has a strong Ibero-American focus, featuring many big-screen creations from Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. The program of 115 films is a lot to skim through, so we thought we'd bring you some highlights. You're welcome. Hard-core film lovers can access the 16-page program here.

This year, MIFF opens March 5 with Ken Loach's Looking for Eric, a soccer, ahem, British football movie starring Manchester United's Eric Cantona. The festival will also honor German film director Margarethe Von Trotta with its Career Achievement Award for her work as a ceiling-shattering cinema feminist. Miami homeboy Andy Garcia will appear with his daughter in City Island, an our-family-is-crazier-than-yours drama that won an audience award at last year's Tribeca Film Festival.

If you prefer real-life to fiction, there will be documentaries about the Beatles (The Beatles on Record) and Mr. Playboy himself (Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel). The film adaptation of perhaps the only teen book to rival Twilight, Sweden's Man Som Hatar Kvinnor -- or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- will join other Foreign Film Oscar contenders such as The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) and Australia's Sam & Delilah.

If you like some indie in your metaphorical film coffee, pay particular attention to MIFF's Cinema 360 and Cutting the Edge programs. You'll find films such as Children of God, which takes a look at entrenched homophobia in the Bahamas, and Moloch Tropical, perhaps one of the last films to capture Port-au-Prince, Haiti, pre-quake.

The video work of Swiss wunderkind Pipilotti Rist was recently presented in a NYC MOMA retrospective, and her psychedelic fantasy film, Pepperminta, will play Miami as part of the festival. Also included in this year's lineup is Trash Humpers by Harmony Korine (of Kids fame); critics voted it Best Undistributed Film of 2009.

And then there's the shorts competition. Here's one of the scheduled shorts, Hipster Job by Thomas de Napoli:

The Miami International Film Festival runs March 5 to 14. General admission is $10 to $12, and the opening film, Looking for Eric, costs $25.