Author: Bijan Tehrani

Mondays at Racine directed by Cynthia Wade is nominated for 2013 Best Documentary Short Film Oscar.  Every third Monday of the month, brassy Long Island, New York sisters Cynthia and Rachel open up their hair salon, called Racine, and offer free beauty services for women undergoing chemotherapy.  Determined to make their customers feel beautiful, the glamour duo knows that Mondays at Racine goes beyond purple painted toes or a frothy facial.  The sisters are determined to give women who are losing their hair, eyebrows and eyelashes a sense of normalcy and dignity in a traumatic and uncertain time. The story…

This week we had the opportunity to interview James Koenig, director of Scandinavian Film Festival, LA, about the 2013 festival. James Koenig is used to both sub and super-titles in his dealings with foreign language film and in his non-film endeavors as a classical singer. In fact, his voice has been heard in various arts arenas -not only as a singer, but also as an arts advocate, writer, director, commentator, and teacher. He has served on juries evaluating both singers, and films. He is the founder/director of the 14 year old SFFLA. Bijan Tehrani: Organizing Scandinavian Film Festival, Los Angeles…

Palm Springs International Film Festival will open on January 3rd and continue through January 14th. PSIFF has consistently proven to be a fantastic platform for international film exhibition, as well as an outstanding event for international film fans within the U.S. and abroad. Last week, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Darryl Macdonald, Director of the festival, and discussing the ins-and-outs of the 2013 PSIFF.Bijan Tehrani: Every year there is a new trend at festivals, what are the trends that you see in the films coming to the festival this year?Darryl Macdonald: I think the overriding trend that…

Drew Denny’s first feature film is an adaptation of a performance artwork she presented on Father’s Day 2011 in memory of her dad. Shot on super 16mm and digital, The Most Fun I’ve Ever Had With My Pants On follows two childhood girlfriends Andy and Liv who reunite to scatter Andy’s dad’s ashes from LA to Austin where Liv will audition for the role of a vixen spy in a noir film. Between performing mini-funerals in surreal southwestern landscapes, the girls practice being bad! Hilarious dialog, military cross-dressing, an incredible underground soundtrack, and performances by Sarah Hagan (Freaks and Geeks,…

Purge, Finland’s Oscar entry is set in Estonia in the time period before the Stalinist deportations in 1949 until after the country’s independence in 1991. Two women from two different eras are linked by separate tales of deceit, desperation and fear. Aliide has experienced the horrors of the Stalin era and the deportation of Estonians to Siberia. Zara is a victim of human trafficking and has just escaped from the claws of the present-day Russian mafia. Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other’s motives. Gradually their stories emerge, with the culmination…

I have always missed the mood and glory of the seventies’ and eighties’ film festivals that has faded in face of weak economies; I also regret the replacement of personal, face-to-face relationships, with the world of on-line interaction. Old and traditional festival parties are what I miss most; where you had a long evening to find new friends, chat while having a good, real dinner, and drinking fine wine in a crystal glass. You were not given a coupon for a drink and you didn’t have to jostle for position with others in order to have bite to survive the…

Cesar Must Die, Italia’s 2013 Oscar entry opening scene is in a theater in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison. A performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has just ended amidst much applause. The lights dim on the actors and they become prisoners once again as they are accompanied back to their cells.Then we go to six months earlier, when the warden and a theater director speak to the inmates about a new project, the staging of Julius Caesar in the prison. The first step is casting. The second step is exploration of the text. Shakespeare’s universal language helps the inmates-actors to identify with…

The story of WHITE TIGER, Russia’s 2013 Oscar Entry happens when World War II is drawing to a close and furious and prolonged fighting is exhausting both the Soviet and the fascist troops. The more decisive the advance of the Soviet army, the more often White Tiger, a huge, indestructible fascist tank, appears in the battlefield. It relentlessly emerges from the smoke of combat, ruthlessly destroys the adversary and swiftly vanishes. No one can either verify or refute its existence. However, the Soviet military command decides to build an extraordinary tank – a special version of the T-34.The crew of…

MULBERRY CHILD is based on Jian Ping’s book Mulberry Child: A Memoir of China, the history of her coming-of-age under the brutality of Mao’s repressive Cultural Revolution. Told with the help of never-before-seen film footage inside the Cultural Revolution, MULBERRY CHILD, more than a journal of individual survival and family principles, is a lucid account of a dramatic period in China’s history. Susan Morgan Cooper was inspired to make her first documentary Mirjana… One Girl’s Journey, about a young Croatian girl displaced by The Balkan War. Her last documentary, the award winning An Unlikely Weapon was the story of photographer Eddie Adams who won a Pulitzer …

In 2013 Palm Springs International Film Festival Cinema Without Borders will present HP’s Bridging The Borders Award to a film that helps to bring people of our world closer together. The prize of the winning film will be a HP Elitebook 8770W mobile workstation. The following is our interview with Ray Gilmartin , the Worldwide Market Segment Manager for HP Workstations (focused on the Media & Entertainment market segment).Prior to joining HP, Ray spent over a decade in Product Management at Avid Technology. Ray’s prior experience includes Product Management roles in Interactive TV technology as well as hands-on production and…