Author: Bijan Tehrani

South East European Film Festival-L.A. is an annual event where film devotees are able to see the best of South East European films. Fueled by her passion for film and love of introducing new films, Founder and Director of the festival, Vera Mijojlic, has been the driving force behind the event’s growth and popularity. To learn more about SeeFest 2011, we sat down with Vera for an interview. Bijan Tehrani: What is new in SeeFest 2011?Vera Mijojlic: Plenty of new: new web site, new promo, new people on the team….SeeFest is getting better design, and I am very happy with…

DLP Cinema and DLP technology makes Texas Instrument a great player in Digital Film Projection in movie theaters. To have more information about this field, we had an interview with Dave Duncan, is the Manager for DLP Cinema® Products. DLP® is the award winning digital projection technology enabling high quality projection in businesses, homes, professional venues, classrooms and movie theaters worldwide. Dave’s responsibilities include business strategy, product direction, marketing and overall operations for both the DLP Cinema and DLP HDTV businesses. Prior to his current role, Dave spent eight years working with DLP Cinema customers and the entertainment industry to…

When notary Lebel (Rémy Girard) sits down with Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux Poulin, Maxim Gaudette) to read them their mother Nawal’s will (Lubna Azabal), the twins are stunned to receive a pair of envelopes – one for the father they thought was dead and another for a brother they didn’t know existed.In this enigmatic inheritance, Jeanne sees the key to Nawal’s retreat into unexplained silence during the final weeks of her life. She immediately decides to go to the Middle East to dig into a family history of which she knows next to nothing.Simon is unmoved by their…

When the USSR broke apart in 1991, a generation of young people faced a new realm of possibilities. An intimate epic about the extraordinary lives of this last Soviet generation, Robin Hessman’s feature documentary, My Perestroika, tells the stories of five Moscow schoolmates who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain, witnessed the joy and confusion of glasnost, and reached adulthood right as the world changed around them. Through candid first-person testimony, revealing verité footage, and vintage home movies, Hessman—who spent many years living in Moscow—reveals a Russia rarely ever seen on film; where people are frank about their lives…

Conception is a sexy romantic comedy that follows nine couples in different stages of their relationships on the night they conceive. We see a long-married couple who have recently added having sex to their chore wheel; a bickering twosome can barely stop trading barbs long enough to have passionate sex in the shower; teen sweethearts strike a bargain: she’ll have sex with him if he gives up meat; a sleep-deprived mom scarcely has the energy to nurse her newborn, let alone make love to her neglected hubby; a woman on a semi-disastrous blind date quickly opts for intimacy so she…

City of Lights, City of Angels (COL•COA) was created in 1996 by The Franco-American Cultural Fund, a unique collaborative effort of the Directors Guild of America, the Motion Picture Association, the Writers Guild of America West, and France’s Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music (SACEM). COL•COA is also supported by l’Association des Auteurs-Réalisateurs-Producteurs (ARP), the Film and TV Office of the French Embassy in Los Angeles and UNIFRANCE.COL•COA is committed to promoting new French films in Hollywood and to showcasing the vitality and the diversity of French cinema: comedies and dramas, box office hits in France and novelties,…

The famous BilL Cunningham has been roaming the streets of New York for over fify years. This Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends and high society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns “On the Street” and “Evening Hours.” Documenting uptown fixtures (Wintour, Tom Wolfe, Brooke Astor, and David Rockefeller— who all appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between, Cunningham’s enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. In turn, Bill Cunningham…

HP is coming up with new TouchSmart desktop computer models, desk space saving systems for independent filmmakers that are working out of small studios. To learn more about TouchSmart computers, we interviewed HP’s Dipankar Bhargava. Dipankar Bhargava is a Product Marketing manager for Commercial All-in-One PCs within HP’s Personal Systems Group (Americas). Dipankar is responsible for the feature definition, lifecycle management and roadmap strategy for the HP Corporate Enterprise All-in-one PC category in the Americas Region. The product category consists of the new HP TouchSmart 9300, its predecessor – the TouchSmart 9100 and the HP Compaq 6000 Pro AiO that…

Cerified Copy, the latest Abbas Kiarostami film will be on US screens soon and to learn more about this film, we interviewed William Shimell, the actor of the film. William Shimell made his screen acting debut alongside Juliette Binoche in Abbas Kiarostami’s Copie Conforme (Certified Copy), in competition at Cannes Festival 2010. Born in 1952, he is one of Britain’s most accomplished operatic baritones and has earned himself an international reputation in the world’s leading opera houses. William is well known for his interpretations of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which he first sang in Britain for Welsh National Opera and ENO, and…

Desert Flower follows the true story of Waris Dirie, who escaped Somalia at the age of 13 and spent her adolescence as a maid in her country’s London embassy. A regime change forces her onto the streets of London where she is soon discovered by a famous fashion photographer. This scared, homeless runaway evolves into a glamorous runway superstar. While her beauty and courage open doors to an exciting career, her life is even more transformed by her tenacity to fight against the poverty and cultural traditions that had forced her to run away from her home and family. Her…