Author: Bijan Tehrani

In Gun Hill Road , Enrique (Morales) returns home to the Bronx after three years in prison to find the world he once knew has changed. His wife, Angela (Judy Reyes, Scrubs, Oz), struggles to hide an emotional affair, and his teenage son, Michael (striking newcomer Harmony Santana, nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Independent Spirit Awards), explores a sexual transformation well beyond Enrique’s understanding.Unable to accept his child, Enrique clings to his masculine ideals while Angela attempts to hold the family together by protecting Michael. Still under the watchful eye of his parole officer (Isiah Whitlock Jr., HBO’s…

Azadeh Ghotbi is an international artist in the literal sense:; She was born in Iran, studied at Brown University and at INSEAD, lived most of her life in France & the U.S., and is currently based in Germany. Azadeh, an innovative painter, has had over 21 group and solo exhibitions of her work around the world. Last month, I had the opportunity of interviewing her over the phone for CWB. Bijan Tehrani: Looking at your paintings, I find a lot of similarities between all of the paintings but at the same time, like members of a family, they have their…

To learn about the new Acer Aspire Ultrabooks we had an interview with Eric Ackerson, Acer America’s senior product marketing and brand manager. Ackerson manages Acer’s mobile product marketing programs and helps the company realize strategic opportunities to develop and deliver winning products for the United States and Canada. His responsibilities include quality improvement initiatives for the OOBE (out of box experience), market analysis, communication, and product EOL (end of life) management for Acer and Gateway-branded notebooks, Ultrabooks and tablets. Prior to Acer, Ackerson was the director of marketing for Patriot Memory, where he developed the company’s new brand identity,…

Augustine, directed by Alice Winocour , is an examination of the real case story and unusual relationship between Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, the pioneering 19th century French neurologist – whom Sigmund Freud studied under – and Augustine, his star teenage patient. After suffering an inexplicable seizure which leaves her paralyzed on her right side, 19-year-old illiterate kitchen maid Augustine (27 year-old singer-turned-actress Soko in a break out performance), is shipped off to Paris’ all female psychiatric hospital Pitié-Salpêtriere which specializes in detecting the then-fashionable ailment of ‘hysteria’. Augustine captures the attention of Dr. Charcot (Vincent Lindon, Mademoiselle Chambon, Welcome) after a…

THE IRAN JOB follows American basketball player Kevin Sheppard as he accepts a job to play in one of the world’s most feared countries: Iran.With tensions running high between Iran and the West, Kevin tries to separate sports from politics only to find that politics is impossible to escape in Iran.Along the way he forms an unlikely alliance with three outspoken Iranian women. Thanks to these women, his apartment turns into an oasis of free speech, where they discuss everything from politics to religion to gender roles.Kevin’s season in Iran culminates in something much bigger than basketball: the uprising and…

5 Broken Cameras, a film directed by Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat and Israeli activist Guy Davidi, has been nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. An extraordinary work of both cinematic and political activism, 5 Broken Cameras is a deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil’in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching Israeli settlements. Shot almost entirely by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, the film was assembled by Burnat and Israeli co-director Guy Davidi. Structured around the violent destruction of each one of…

In Curfew, a film by Shawn Christensen, nominated for the Academy Awards Best Live Action Short Film, at the lowest point of his life, Richie gets a call from his estranged sister, asking him to look after his nine-year old niece, Sophia, for the evening.SHAWN CHRISTENSEN graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA in Illustration and Graphic Design. After graduating, he formed indie rock band Stellastarr* and, while on tour, wrote and sold many screenplays, including Sidney Hall (Scott Free Productions) and Karma Coalition (Warner Bros.). His short film Brink, was an Official Selection of the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival…

Tom Van Avermaet’s Death of a Shadow, starring Rust and Bone’s male lead Matthias Schoenaerts, has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.Following his critically acclaimed performances in Michaël R. Roskam’s Oscar-nominated Bullhead and Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone, Death of a Shadow sees Matthias Schoenaerts starring as Nathan Rijckx, a deceased World War I soldier, who is stuck in limbo between life and death. To earn a second chance at life and love, he has to capture the shadows of 10,000 dying men and women. But with just two shadows left to collect, he…

KON-TIKI, nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar happens half a century ago, when a young Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl became one of history’s most famous men with the Kon-Tiki voyage, an astonishing journey of 4,300 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean on a balsawood raft. But this is not the whole story.A handsome and charismatic figure, Thor developed a theory that Polynesia had been settled by peoples travelling east from South America, not west from Asia as previously thought. No-one in the scientific community took him seriously, to say nothing of having it published. After an American professor…

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE, nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar is a film by first-time director and award-winning journalist David France. (Who has been covering the AIDS crisis for 30 years, first for the gay press and then for the New York Times and Newsweek, among others) David culls from a huge amount of archival footage—most of it shot by the protestors themselves (31 videographers are credited)—to create not just an historical document, but an intimate and visceral recreation of the period through the very personal stories of some of ACT UP’s leading participants. A handbook for all…