We Will Be Happy is a documentary film about Daniel, a young man from Lipiny – the poorest town in the southern Poland. Daniel wants out of the omnipresent misery. With a mobile phone camera in his hand he wanders round his neighborhood asking kids and grownups questions about their dreams. Are they going to come true, at least, for some? However, in the process of Daniel’s filming there emerges a hidden layer: the love between him and his charismatic grandmother. But will he ever manage to complete his film?We Will Be Happy directed by Pawel Wysoczanski ia part of…
Author: Bijan Tehrani
Bijan Tehrani
Bijan (Hassan) Tehrani Founder and Editor in Chief of Cinema Without Borders, is a film director, writer, and a film critic, his first article appeared in a weekly film publication in Iran 45 years ago. Bijan founded Cinema Without Borders, an online publication dedicated to promotion of international cinema in the US and around the globe, eighteen years ago and still works as its editor in chief. Bijan is has also been a columnist and film critic for the Iranian monthly film related medias for 45 years and during the past 5 years he has been a permanent columnist and film reviewer for Film Emrooz (Film Today), a popular Iranian monthly print film magazine. Bijan has won several awards in international film festivals and book fairs for his short films and children's books as well as for his services to the international cinema. Bijan is a member of Iranian Film Writers Critics Society and International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI). He is also an 82nd Golden Globe Awards voter.
Halloween, a short film by young Polish filmmaker Aleksandra Terpinska, has received Cinema Without Borders’ award for the Best Polish Short Film at the 2012 Polish Film Festival Los Angeles“All the short films at Polish Film Festival, LA were finely crafted and artistic films by young promising filmmakers. After a long deliberation, Cinema Without Borders’ jury picked Halloween, by Aleksandra Terpinska, as the winner of the Best Short Film Award. Halloween bring’s us the journey of a young girl embarking to find her roots and identity on Halloween night. She goes through many dark moments, but finally realizes that comfort…
It’s a cold Colorado evening and I am sitting with my notebook, typing my reports from my visit with HP—a very impressive day, I should say! I have already transferred my video report from my camcorder to the HP EliteBook, and even edited a three-minute piece. The hotel’s terribly slow WiFi reminded me why I should always be using my Verizon MiFi device. After trying to work on the establishment’s snail-paced network, I retrieved the MiFi hotspot. Believe it or not, the download speed was 22 Megabits! This was a spark for celebration (and relaxation), so I pulled up The…
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…
ESCAPE FIRE: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare tackles one of the most pressing issues of our time: how can Americans save their badly broken healthcare system?American healthcare costs are rising so rapidly that they could reach $4.2 trillion annually, roughly 20% of their gross domestic product, within ten years. Americans spend $300 billion a year on pharmaceutical drugs – almost as much as the rest of the world combined.ESCAPE FIRE also presents attainable solutions. After decades of resistance, a movement to bring innovative high-touch, low-cost methods of prevention and healing into our high-tech, costly system is finally gaining ground.…
In The Mill And The Cross, directed by Lech J. Majewski, we witness a translation of Pieter Bruegel’s 1564 epic masterpiece The Procession to Calvary into cinema. Lech J. Majewski mischievously invites the viewer to live inside the aesthetic universe of the painting as we watch its creation. As various lives unfold within the film frame, Bruegel, too, appears as a character—capturing shards of their desperate stories on his canvas-in-the-making. A vibrant meditation on art and religion as ongoing, layered processes of collective storytelling and reinterpretation, The Mill And The Cross is also a feast of stunning visual effects and…
On Saturday September 29 and during the Los Angeles Irish Film Festival there will be a fund raiser event to support The Solas Galway Picture Palace. The Solas Galway Picture Palace is the first dedicated non-profit arthouse cinema built in Galway City in the West of Ireland. The Picture Palace will screen films in the Irish language, documentary films, Irish-made films, independent worldwide features, classic & archival cinema, and retrospectives and will also cater for students, schools, young people and senior audiences.To learn more about this event we had an interview with the Irish international star Fionnula Flanagan.Fionnula Flanagan’s vast…
Tears of Gaza, an internationally acclaimed documentary about impact of the 2008 Gaza bombings on civilians and children, by filmmaker Vibeke Løkkeberg. After watching news reports from her home in Norway, Løkkeberg attempted to gain access to Gaza to report on events there, but discovered first-hand that international journalists were barred from entering the area. The denial of access further impelled her to report on the story, and she proceeded to gather raw footage from Palestinian cameramen and eye-witnesses living in Gaza who recorded bombings on smart phones. The result is an indelible cinematic experience and historical document that has…
In Americano Martin (Mathieu Demy) is a real-estate broker in his thirties living with his girlfriend Claire (Chiara Mastroianni) in Paris. Claire wants to start a family, but Martin can’t seem to commit. When news arrives from the United States that his estranged mother is dead, Martin sets off with dual passports in hand to tie up the loose ends of a rocky maternal relationship he hasn’t addressed since his childhood, when he returned to France with his father in the wake of his parents’ divorce in California.Arriving in Los Angeles, Martin is greeted by his mother’s best friend Linda…
How far would you go to get that dream job? Just what would you be willing to do? Four corporate warriors come together in one room to compete for one senior management position using The Grönholm Method: a system meant to separate the weak from the strong. But the weak may not be as futile as they appear. A wicked comedy that feels like a thriller, it’s a fool’s game of betrayals, reversals and manipulations that will keep you on the edge of your seat.The Grönholm Method is on stage in Falcon Theatre in Burbank. Bijan Tehrani: How did you…