Author: Bijan Tehrani

In Brotherhood, Adam Buckley finds himself having to rob a convenience store on the last night of pledging a college fraternity. But when the initiation ritual goes horribly wrong, and every subsequent move proves disastrous, Adam must take a stand to save a friend’s life. Will Cannon, director of Brotherhood is an honors graduate of New York University’s film program. While at NYU, he wrote and directed the award winning short film ROSLYN, which has aired on Showtime, The Sundance Channel, and HBO International. ROSLYN was selected as a semifinalist in Chrysler’s Million Dollar Film Festival where Will traveled to…

Winter in Wartime happens in Nazi-occupied Holland, 1945. In a snow-covered village, thirteen-year-old MICHIEL (Martijn Lakemeier) is drawn into the Resistance when he aids a wounded British paratrooper. Michiel‘s boyish sense of defiance and adventure soon turns to danger and desperation, as Michiel is forced to act without knowing whom to trust among the adults and townspeople around him. Wartime‘s harsh reality encroaches on childhood innocence as Michiel confronts good and evil, courage and duplicity, and his own burden of responsibility.Cinema Without Borders interviewed Martin Koolhoven director of Winter in Wartime last week. Bijan Tehrani: My first question is when…

To learn more about HP Workstations and what they offer to film editors, we had an interview with Travis Humphries is a product marketing manager for the HP Workstations Global Business Unit in Fort Collins, CO. Travis is responsible for the feature definition and lifecycle management of HP Performance Workstations; the current generation of this product is the HP Z400 Workstation. Having developed a proclivity for computer technology while working part-time repairing servers and PCs during his undergraduate years, Travis was always attracted to the reputation and global presence of Hewlett-Packard. Putting this into practice, he secured a position with…

In a Better World, a 2011 OSCAR nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Award, is story of Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) a doctor who commutes between his home in an idyllic town in Denmark and his work at an African refugee camp. In these two very different worlds, he and his family are faced with conflicts that lead them to difficult choices between revenge and forgiveness. Anton and his wife Marianne (Trine Dyrholm), who have two young sons, are separated and struggling with the possibility of divorce. Their older, twelve-year-old son Elias (Markus Rygaard) is being bullied at school, until…

Immigration Tango is the story of Elena, a Russian immigrant studying in Miami and Carlos her Columbian boyfriend realizing that they are running out of legal options for staying in the U.S. Then the couple switches partners with Betty and Mike, an American couple who are also their best friends. All is well until the stress of keeping up appearances to their family members and a savvy immigration enforcement agent eventually begins to take its toll. Here is our interview with David Burton Morris, director of the Immigration Tango.Bijan Tehrani: How did you first come up with the idea of…

God of Love, winner of the Academy Awards’ Best Live Action Short Film, is the story of a lounge-singing darts champion Raymond (Luke Matheny) who finds his prayers are answered – literally – when he receives a mysterious package of passion-inducing darts. The catch is that the one woman he loves – Kelly (Marian Brock), a drummer in his band – is already in love with Ray’s best friend Fozzie (Christopher Hirsh), the guitarist in the band. Romance is in the air in this bohemian charmer.Here is CWB’s interview with writer and director of God of Love, Luke Matheny.Bijan Tehrani:…

Crazy Wisdom, that had its world premire at Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2011, directed by Johanna Demetrakas is about the life and thinking of Chogyam Trungpa.Chogyam Trungpa, the brilliant ‘bad boy of Buddhism,’ fled the invasion of Tibet, studied at Oxford, and shattered Westerners’ notions of how an enlightened teacher should behave.Was it crazy wisdom when he renounced his monastic vows, eloped with a sixteen-year old aristocrat, openly drank alcohol, and had intimate relations with women students? Was it crazy wisdom when he founded a military order to dismantle aggression? Or was it when, to counter the materialism he…

Academy Awards have included Even The Rain, the winner of Cinema Without Borders Bridging The Borders Award in the short list for the Best Foreign Language Movie Award. The following is Cinema Without borders’ interview with Iciar Bollain about making of the Even The Rain.Icíar Bollaín Pérez-Mínguez is a Spanish actress, director and writer. Her father was an aeronautical engineer and her mother was a music teacher. She made her début when she was 15 years old. She is a member of the Academia Española de Cinematografía. She began her work in cinema at the age of fourteen as part…

The 36th annual Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards ceremony will be held Saturday, January 15 at the InterContinental, Los Angeles. To learn more about this event we talked to Brent Simon.A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and current President of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Brent Simon was for five-plus years editor-in-chief and lead film critic of the now-defunct Entertainment Today. Since then, he has been a film critic for Screen International, and has written extensively on film for Los Angeles Daily News, New York Magazine’s Vulture, Magill’s Cinema Annual, CityBeat, IGN and…

This week we had the opportunity to interview James Koenig, director of Scandinavian Film Festival, LA, about the 2011 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 12 year old SFFLA. Of German and Swiss heritage, it was life experience,…