Author: 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,…

Dear readers, Our new year’s resolution was to find a better way to serve our readers across the globe. We are now happy to unveil our new look, and hope that you will be pleased with the results. We have worked for months with web programming experts to find the best platform to run CWB on, and have successfully rebuilt the site on the search engine-friendly Scorpio Informatics system. Now we can reach more readers, and enable interaction with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Based on a survey we conducted in the summer of 2010,…

Darryl Macdonald is the Director of the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Palm Springs International ShortFest and Short Film Market. He is the co-founder of The Seattle International Film Festival, and was its Executive and Artistic Director from 1975 – 2003. He served as the first Artistic Director of the Palm Springs Film Festival (1989 -1993) and the Hamptons Film Festival (1993 -1996) and was the Programming Director of the Vancouver International Film Festival (1988 -1992). He has also served as the Director of the Goodwill Games Film Festival, the Women in Cinema Festival and the Washington State…

GLWIZ.COM visitors and owners of the GLBOX , are now able to watch the Award wining film of Bahman Ghbodai, No one Knows About Persian Cats that has recently been added to the list of Iranian films available on VOD.Cinema Without Borders has interviewed Bahaman Ghobadi about making of No one Knows About Persian Cats.No one Knows About Persian Cats is the story of two young musicians that have recently been released from prison and decide to form a band. Together they search the underworld of contemporary Tehran for other players. Forbidden by the authorities to play in Iran, they…

Paper Birds is the sale of a group of Vaudeville performers caught in a war that has taken away everything they had and left them starving. Musician Jorge del Pino, ventriloquist Enrique Corgo, singer Rocio Moliner and an orphan named Miguel make up an unlikely family of lost souls, struggling to get by one day at a time, sharing their joys and sorrows and their only escape from the misery around them: their music. As it turns out, when bread is scarce, applause can really hit the spot.Living among the victorious and the vanquished, they’re too busy looking for something…

In Undertow, a unique, gay romance and ghost story set on the beautiful Peruvian coastline, a married fisherman struggles to reconcile his devotion to his male lover within his world’s rigid traditions. Miguel (Cristian Mercado), a young fisherman, devoted husband, and beloved community member is about to welcome his first child along with his beautiful bride, Mariela (Tatiana Astengo). But Miguel harbors a scandalous secret: He’s in love with Santiago (Manolo Cardona), a handsome painter, ostracized by the town because he’s both agnostic and gay. When Santiago drowns accidentally in the ocean’s strong undertow, he cannot pass peacefully to the…

An alumni of New York University’s Graduate School of Film & Television, David Schreiber worked as Director of Development and Creative Director for four different production companies, and now serves as director of a digital filmmaking program in Santa Monica, California. Bijan Tehrani: Since we spoke four years ago about international cinema in the United States; what are your opinions on the presence of International cinema in the US. David Schreiber: Well, I would like to be more optimistic than when we spoke four years ago, but unfortunately the economic forces that impact movie production in this country I suspect…