Was the rape-revenge flick The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo too hard-core for sunny Miami?

​For the fifth time in a decade, Miami International Film Festival is in the market for a new festival director after choosing not to renew Tiziana Finzi's contract. A festival insider from Italy with a reputation for discovering new cinema talent, she was hired in 2009. For 2010's festival, she choose The Secret in Their Eyes, which went on to win the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which was so popular that Hollywood is planning on ruining remaking it for American audiences.

Finzi sold out Gusman Center for the Performing Arts with such festival programming. But she also played to the art house film crowd with picks like Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers, No One Knows About Persian Cats, and Eraserhead.

Back in March, she told us "I accepted this job as a challenge to bring my taste -- cutting-edge, radical films -- to this town, a beautiful place where people come for enjoyment, big parties, and holiday but not to see a Russian or Chinese movie." So were her tastes too edgy? Did the sold out crowds complain?

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The Miami International Film Festival, which ended Sunday, has announced its competition winners. The Best Miami Mini Film was awarded to Where It Stops by local filmmaker Kyle Shea. As you'll see in the above clip, it's an intense and uncomfortable short film about aging. Yet with all the gambling and guns, it looks like the cast of the Sopranos was replaced by that of the Golden Girls. (Considering the upcoming exhibition "Golden Gals Gone Wild," it might be the year of the raging old lady.)

Other winners in the Florida Focus program:
Best Short Film by High School Student: Last Laugh by David Harrison of DASH
Best Short Film by College Student: Blooming Hope by Marcela Moyna-Rosero of St. Thomas University

In the documentary category, one film took home both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award: Sins of My Father. It's the story of mustached druglord Pablo Escobar as told by his son. If you missed it at the festival, look for it on HBO this fall. Here's the trailer:
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After producing several documentary films (and a few shorts) over the last six years, Bahamian filmmaker Kareem Mortimer has finally made the leap to feature-length fiction work with Children of God. And he has no intention of looking back. "Documentaries were really, really important to me. I will probably return to that form at some time. But it won't be in the next five years. I've always wanted to do narrative," he says. More >>

Catherine Keener has played the smart, neurotic gal in so many indie flicks, we assumed she was born in the land of Woody Allen -- New York City. But the actress was actually born and raised right here in Miami. She's a graduate of Hialeah's Archbishop Coleman F. Carroll High School.  (We voted her Best Local Girl Made Good in 2006.)

​Her filmography reads like our favorite movie list: Where the Wild Things Are, Into the Wild, Being John Malkovich and The 40 Year Old Virgin. She was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006 for her portrayal of To Kill A Mockingbird author Harper Lee in Capote.

She'll be in town tonight for the Miami International Film Festival, where her latest film, Please Give, will have its East Coast premiere. Directed by Nicole Holofcener, the film is a funny family-drama about quirky New Yorkers who own an upscale furniture shop.

Red Carpet begins at 6:30 p.m. and the screening begins at 7 p.m. at the Gusman Center, 174 East Flagler St., Miami.

The Rizzos are an average family -- two parents, two kids -- who make their home on City Island, an old fishing town in the Bronx. The patriarch, Vince (Andy Garcia), is a New York State corrections officer with dreams of being an actor. His wife, Joyce (Julianna Margulies), is a beautiful but aging housewife and mother who laments the education she lost when she became pregnant with her daughter, Vivian (Dominik García-Lorido, Andy Garcia's real-life daughter), now college age. And then there's Vinnie (Ezra Miller), a skinny 15-year-old master of the smart-ass remark.
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On Saturday night, we saw the American debut of Swedish film The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo at the Miami International Film Festival. Gusman was packed. Not only was the 1,600-seat house sold out, a hundred or so people waiting outside for tickets had to be turned away. (Psst, we warned you to buy tickets weeks ago.)

The new face of feminism: a goth-hacker with a temper.

​Of course, it helps that the film was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, one of the most popular films in Europe last year, which was based on a book that sold 22 million copies.

In it, a wayward girl assists an investigative reporter in solving a murder mystery. Using blurred black-and-white photos, computer tricks, and the victim's diary, the two are able to uncover a family's dark secrets (incest and Nazism are two of the less shocking).

But this isn't your typical who-done-it thriller. The heroine, Lisbeth, is a 90-pound, septum-pierced, black-lipstick-wearing cyber-punk who's spent some time in prison and is one hell of a hacker.
 
Life has been hard on Lisbeth, but she bites back. On several occasions, half the Gusman audience (i.e. all the women) exploded in cheers as she gets revenge on a scumbug rapist. The film is fairly graphic in scenes of abuse and torture. Yet with Lisbeth as a dark angel of vengeance, Dragon Tattoo manages to also be a feel-good flick, where the bad men of the world get their due. In fact, the original Swedish title of the film was Män som hatar kvinnor -- literally, "Men Who Hate Women." Watch the trailer after the jump.
 
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Yuma (Alma Blanco)

​On the surface, this debut feature by writer-director Florence Jaugey is about a girl boxer, Yuma (Alma Blanco), struggling to escape the barrios of Managua. She lives in a concrete-floor shack with her often-absent mother, unemployed pedophilic stepdad, teen junkie brother, and two younger siblings. She loves and protects the children but despises the adults. Meanwhile, outside her home, Yuma's street thug boyfriend, Culebra -- whose name means "snake" -- tries to control her, saying, "Women don't box." But Yuma is wild and tough. She continues training and soon starts an affair with Ernesto, a middle-class journalism student at Universidad Centroamericana.

Last night, the closing night film of the Miami International Film Festival The Secret in Their Eyes won the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the Academy Awards. According to the festival's artistic director Tiziana Finzi, director Juan José Campanella will not only attend this year's closing night, he's bringing that little gold man statuette with him.

The Secret in Their Eyes is a Argentinean murder mystery, which Finzi believed to be better suited for America's cinematic sensibilities than the more graphic Peruvian film The Milk of Sorrow, screening tomorrow and Sunday at the festival.

Watch The Secret in Their Eyes this Saturday at 7p.m. at Gusman. Call 305-237-FILM or visit www.miamifilmfestival.com.

Here's Campanella accepting the award. He couldn't help but take a dig at Avatar.

Michel Gondry must have been on to us. He knew we'd expect something as imaginative as his last film, The Science of Sleep, or his popular Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So in The Thorn in the Heart (L'Épine Dans le Coeur), he presents an evenhanded documentary about his aunt Suzette, a retired teacher in rural France thought to be avant-garde by her students and the life of the party by her family.

​Well, almost. Gondry had intended to document Suzette's life as a teacher, but a more complicated relationship emerged -- that between Suzette and her son, Gondry's cousin Jean-Yves. Juxtaposed between scenes in which Suzette is praised for her skill with schoolchildren are shots of a fragile Jean-Yves, a grown man still living under his mother's thumb and suffering nervous breakdowns after coming out as gay; his mother even hid his father's death for days. Suzette is blunt in her opinion of Jean-Yves, calling him weak and a thorn in her heart.
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Vidal Cantu

​In 1994, Juan Angel Ruiz was involved in a devastating car wreck. In the first terrifying moments after regaining consciousness in his hospital bed, Juan Angel tried to look around the room. "I opened my eyes. The light over my bed blinded me. It was too bright," he says in A Step From Heaven, the new documentary based on his experiences. More >>