Author: Bijan Tehrani

Hiroshi Okuyama’s My Sunshine is a film that works like a whispered poem, quiet in tone yet immense in emotional impact. It is the kind of work that never tries to overwhelm the viewer with spectacle, but rather builds its power through patience, intimacy, and an almost invisible craftsmanship. What immediately stands out is the way Okuyama approaches the essence of childhood and memory, not through nostalgia in the conventional sense, but through a gaze that feels both tender and unflinching. He captures the fragility of moments that slip through our fingers, the fleeting warmth of human connections, and the…

Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives is not a film that demands attention through spectacle or through the machinery of plot; instead, it whispers, it lingers, and it reminds us that life is built not out of dramatic climaxes but from fragments of intimacy, moments of hesitation, encounters that might last only a few minutes yet leave behind reverberations that shape our inner landscapes for years. The film takes the daring form of nine separate episodes, each filmed in a single unbroken take, each focused on a different character caught at a threshold between past and future, desire and renunciation, love and…

Rodrigo García’s Ten Tiny Love Stories is one of those rare cinematic experiments that proves how much can be conveyed with the simplest of means when guided by a filmmaker with sensitivity and courage. Built entirely around a series of monologues, each performed by a different woman, the film strips away the trappings of conventional narrative—no elaborate sets, no flashy editing, no multi-strand plot mechanics—to focus instead on the naked intimacy of confession. What García accomplishes is a chamber piece that feels both startlingly raw and profoundly human, offering us not just “stories” but lived fragments of longing, heartbreak, desire,…

Ido Fluk’s Köln 75 is a vibrant and heartfelt retelling of one of the most remarkable nights in modern music history, a film that succeeds as both an intimate character study and a celebration of artistic perseverance. At its center is Vera Brandes, the teenage promoter whose faith and determination led to Keith Jarrett’s legendary Köln Concert. As embodied by Mala Emde, Vera is a force of nature, bubbling with youthful enthusiasm and comic energy, a performance that critics have rightly singled out as dynamic and joyful. Emde captures both the recklessness and conviction of an eighteen-year-old who dares to…

Cinema Without Borders has announced its jury members to decide on the winner of 2025  Bridging The Borders Award at the LUCAS International Festival for Young Film Lover in Germany. LUCAS programmers have also announced the nominees for the Cinema Without Borders’ Bridging The Borders Award sponsored by 360 Media. A jury of six, formed by CWB will decide on the winning films at the closing night of the festival. Keely Badger, Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of 360 MEDIAn Consulting , the sponsor of the Bridging The Borders Award, will announce the winning film in a video message that will be…

Bashu, The Little Stranger remains one of the most luminous works in the history of Iranian cinema and its recognition at the Venice Film Festival is both a triumph of artistic integrity and an affirmation of the universal power of storytelling that transcends borders, languages, and cultural boundaries. Bahram Beyzai’s masterpiece is at once a tale of exile, survival, motherhood, cultural collision, and above all, human resilience, told with a poet’s sensibility and a dramatist’s sharp instinct for human conflict. That this film, made decades earlier, has returned to the center of global cinematic attention and secured the Golden Lion…

This year, the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, held from August 27 to September 6, 2025, was once again dedicated to presenting the latest works of world cinema along with a selection of classics and timeless films. The festival this year hosted a mix of great filmmakers and new talents. The most important prize of the festival, the Golden Lion for Best Film, went to Jim Jarmusch’s new work, Father Mother Sister Brother, a film that, in the filmmaker’s usual tradition, arises from a poetic and calm look at life and human relationships and earned the admiration of the jury.…

A tribute to Rodrigo Garcia – Part 1 Rodrigo García’s Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her is one of those rare works of cinema that does not need to raise its voice to be heard, a film that quietly asserts itself as a masterpiece of subtle observation, an act of listening as much as storytelling. Released in 2000 as García’s feature debut, it feels less like the arrival of a new director than the continuation of a cinematic tradition that values silence, tenderness, and human fragility over spectacle. From its first images, it announces its commitment to…

The film The Voice of Hind Rajab by Kaouther Ben Hania is one of the most powerful cinematic works to emerge in recent years, a film that instantly captured international attention when it premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. It received an unprecedented standing ovation of nearly twenty-four minutes, the longest in the history of major film festivals, and immediately became a focal point for debates about cinema, politics, and ethics. The subject of the film is as simple as it is devastating: it recounts the final moments in the life of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who,…

The new Hulu series on The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox positions itself as an exposé of Italy’s broken justice system, but in doing so, it slips into a kind of national self-deception. The filmmakers spare no detail in condemning the investigative blunders in Perugia: contaminated evidence, overzealous prosecutors, a press corps hungry for scandal. Yet the story is framed as though such injustice is uniquely Italian, a foreign pathology. This selective outrage is its greatest weakness. Because if we glance homeward, the picture is far uglier. The United States currently cages innocent immigrants in what detainees themselves call “Alligator…