Author: Bijan Tehrani

Most film critics keep a “sacred list” of their favorite filmmakers and films — a small circle that rarely changes. These lists usually include the same handful of names, and newcomers are seldom welcomed into this elite group. Yet, every once in a while, a film or filmmaker emerges with such undeniable power and charm that it breaks through the rigid walls of cinematic tradition and earns a place among the untouchables. When I first saw The Follies, it immediately took hold of me — it was love at first sight. Also, I’ve never liked the cliché of calling Rodrigo…

Last week, Sandra Lipski is the founder and director of the Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival, announced the winner of Cinema Without Borders’ Bridging the Borders Award at the closing ceremony of 14th Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival. Sandra Lipski read CWB’s jury statement in fron of over 600 people at the Mallorca’s Opera house: “The jury of the Cinema Without Borders’ Bridging the Borders Award is proud to present this year’s award to Majini, directed by Joshua Neubert and Victor Muhagachi from Germany. Majini tells the moving story of a young boy who cannot swim but must brave the sea alongside his brother when their father falls…

Cinema Without Borders jury announced the winners of the Bridging The Borders Award for 2025 Lucas International Film Festival for Young Film Lovers in Germany. GIRLS DON’T CRY a documentary film by Sigrid Klausmann and Lina Luzyte wins 2025 Bridging The Borders Award and our Honorary Mention goes to the OLIVIA AND THE INVISIBLE EARTHQUAKE Directed by Irene Iborra Rizo. Bridging the Borders Award is offered by Cinema Without Borders Foundation and sponsored by 360 MEDIA Consulting Kelly Barger, one of the jury members announced the winner of Bridging the Borders Award and also the Honorary Mention in a video…

On Tuesday, October 21, at 7:00 PM, the Cinema Without Borders Foundation honored acclaimed filmmaker Rodrigo García with its prestigious Bridging the Borders Award, recognizing his lifetime achievements and contributions to global cinema, at the beautiful Laemmle Royal Theatre in Santa Monica. The Bridging the Borders Award—previously bestowed on legendary filmmakers such as Andrzej Wajda and Asghar Farhadi—places García in distinguished company. Before a packed audience of film industry professionals, Bijan Tehrani, President and Founder of Cinema Without Borders, welcomed the attendees: https://vimeo.com/1129957812 After Bijan’s introduction, The Follies — the latest film by Rodrigo García — was screened. The Follies,…

Raymond & Ray Rodrigo García’s intimate comedy-drama about two half-brothers drafted into the strangest possible last act of filial duty, is the rare film that breathes with lived-in feeling from its very first frame and keeps deepening as it goes. Ewan McGregor (as Raymond) and Ethan Hawke (as Ray) arrive like two sides of a single wounded coin—one taut with manners and denial, the other loose with charm and habit—but what García pulls off is a duet in which both men gradually find the same rhythm, a rhythm that only grief, memory, and shared humiliation can teach. The premise could…

On Tuesday, October 21st at 7:00 PM, the Cinema Without Borders Foundation will honor acclaimed filmmaker Rodrigo García with its prestigious Bridging the Borders Award, recognizing his lifetime achievements and his contributions to global cinema. Legendary filmmakers such as Andrzej Wajda and Asghar Farhadi have previously received this award, placing García in distinguished company. The celebration will be held at the Laemmle Royal Theater, 11523 Santa Monica Blvd, 1st Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90025. The evening will begin with a special screening of García’s latest feature, The Follies, a film that has already been praised for its lyrical storytelling and…

From the moment Familia begins, one senses right away that Rodrigo García has crafted something intimate, deliberate, and quietly powerful — a film that refuses spectacle and instead trusts in the small fissures of connection, memory, conflict, and love to carry its weight. In a cinematic landscape saturated with bombast, this is a welcome reminder of how much drama, and how much beauty, can unfold in a single afternoon, simply by putting a group of people in a room and letting their pasts and present demands collide. The film’s conceit is deceptively simple: Leo (played with haunting gravity by Daniel…

Rodrigo García’s Four Good Days (2020) is a film that, at first glance, might seem to belong to the familiar cinematic terrain of addiction dramas. Yet García, true to his lifelong sensibility as a storyteller of quiet emotional earthquakes, transforms this apparently simple narrative into an intimate psychological study of love, endurance, and the almost unbearable fragility of hope. The film, co-written by García and Eli Saslow (based on Saslow’s Washington Post article “How’s Amanda? A Story of Truth, Lies and an American Addiction”), stars Mila Kunis as Molly, a woman fighting to escape the destructive gravitational pull of heroin,…

There are films that attempt to recreate the divine through spectacle, and there are others that dare to approach it through silence. Last Days in the Desert, directed by Rodrigo García, belongs to the second kind — a film that listens instead of preaching, that breathes instead of shouting, that dares to imagine the mystery of faith as something painfully human, fragile, and trembling before its own reflection. From its first frame, García makes it clear that we are not entering the territory of biblical grandeur or Hollywood’s well-lit sainthood. Instead, we are being invited to walk into a desert…

Albert Nobbs is not simply a period drama set in the streets and rooms of nineteenth-century Dublin; it is a meditation on survival, disguise, solitude, and the fragile hope that flickers even in the most stifled lives. Rodrigo García directs the film with the same quiet intensity that has defined his career, and in doing so, he transforms what might have remained a small and contained story into a haunting portrait of the human need for recognition. The film does not shout or demand; it whispers, it glances, it hides behind silences, yet by the end it leaves the viewer…