Author: Bijan Tehrani

RED RIDING trilogy is based on factual events and adapted for the screen by Tony Grisoni (FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS) from David Peace’s series of novels. The trilogy follows several characters in intertwining storylines united by the horror wrought by the “Yorkshire Ripper,” a serial killer who terrorized northwest England in the 1970s and ’80s. RED RIDING – 1974 (Directed by Julian Jarrold) centers on a rookie journalist, Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), whose investigation of a series of child abductions and murders leads him to suspect that there’s a terrifying connection between the perpetrators and the upper echelons…

Every Story Has Two Sides: “Tehran: Another Side” is a film of an Iranian-American who returned to his family’s homeland, and discovered another side of the city erased from the narratives of mainstream media. This is his Tehran, but also a Tehran he aspires to offer into the popular American imagination.Sam Ali Kashani was born in New Jersey in 1985, grew up in Los Angeles where he attended film school at California State University, Northridge. He received his B.A. in Cinema and Television Arts in 2006. at 2009 he wrote, directed, and produced his debut documentary “Tehran: Another Side”. As…

Ajami is a powerful crime drama set on the streets of Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood – a melting pot of cultures and conflicting views among Jews, Muslims and Christians – and told through the eyes of a cross-section of the city’s inhabitants: a young Israeli (Shahir Kabaha) fighting a criminal vendetta against his family, a Palestinian refugee (Ibrahim Frege) working illegally to finance a life-saving surgery, a Jewish police detective (Eran Naim) obsessed with finding his missing brother, and an affluent Palestinian (Scandar Copti) dreaming of a future with his Jewish girlfriend. As their stories intersect – and the film’s narrative…

This is our first article in a series of interviews and reviews focusing on Digital Film Editing. Cinema Without Borders proudly starts this series by interviewing Mike Diehl, an expert on hardware from Hewlett-Packard.Mike Diehl is a product manager for the personal workstation business at Hewlett-Packard’s Workstation Global Business Unit. Mike is responsible for the feature definition and life cycle management for HP’s high-end workstation platforms. During his 24+ years at HP, Mike has had a diverse set of assignments in both R&D; and Marketing. He was a lead architect and engineer in HP’s workstation R&D; lab. This included the…

The official Danish selection for this year’s Academy Awards and winner of 7 Robert Awards (Danish Oscars) including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay, TERRIBLY HAPPY spins a riveting yarn about Robert Hanson (Jakob Cedergren), a Copenhagen police officer who, following a nervous breakdown, is transferred to a small provincial town to take on the mysteriously vacated marshal position and subsequently gets mixed up with a married femme fatale. Robert’s big city temperament makes it impossible for him to fit in, or understand the uncivilized, bizarre behavior displayed by the townspeople.Quickly spiraling into an intense fable, director Henrik Ruben…

DONKEY takes place in the sweltering summer of 1995 as Croatian army forces complete operations that would end the civil war. A troubled relationship is revealed as Boro (Nebojsa Glogovac) drives his irritated wife, Jasna (Natasa Janjic), and their 6-year-old son, Luka (Roko Roglic), from Zagreb to Drinovci, the remote Herzegovinian village where Boro was born. It has been seven years since their last visit, and when the dysfunctional clan arrives in Drinovci, it becomes clear where Boro’s uncommunicative, patriarchal attitudes come from. Boro hasn’t spoken to his equally stubborn father Pasko in quite some time. Boro’s wheelchair-bound refugee brother…

Letters to Father Jacob is story of Leila, a life sentence prisoner who has just been pardoned. When she is released from prison, she is offered a job at a secluded rectory and she moves there against her will. Leila is used to taking care only of herself, so trouble is to be expected when she starts working as the personal assistant for Jacob, the blind priest living in the rectory. Every day the mail man brings letters from people asking for help from Father Jacob. Answering the letters is Jacob’s life mission, while Leila thinks it’s pointless.Leila has already…

After the Black Tie Awards Gala of the Palm Springs International Film Festival, I interviewed Darryl Macdonald, the director of the festival, about the event and the upcoming festival in January 2010. It is our strong belief at Cinema Without Borders that the Palm Spring International Film Festival is among the best film festivals of the world in regards to the introduction of international cinema.At the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Cinema Without Borders offers its Bridging The Borders Award to the best international film which helps bring the people of our world closer together. Bijan Tehrani: Please tell us…

A love story of survival, SAMSON & DELILAH is a coming-of-age story of two 14 year-olds from a sleepy Aboriginal community who escape their lives to discover the world outside. “Samson and Delilah” triumphed at the recent Australian Film Industry Awards. The film won Best Film, Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay and Marissa Gibson and Rowan McNamara jointly won Best Young Talent.The film is Warwick Thornton’s his feature debut, and is considered to be a major breakthrough in Australian cinema in a local industry dominated by non-indigenous filmmakers; some have said that “Samson & Delilah” it is “the first Australian…

“Delhi-6” (the zip code for the medieval heart of Old Delhi) is the story of an American-born Indian, Roshan, who takes his ailing grandmother back to her neighborhood in Delhi to spend her last days. Roshan falls in love with a beautiful local girl and finds himself at the cross roads of ethnic and religious conflict. Director Mehra’s third film blends themes from classic Hindi cinema with those of the modern day emigration and grapples with a host of issues: caste differences, superstition, communal rift and middle class dreams. The story is told against the backdrop of the ancient walled…