Author: CWB News Department

Javier Bardem gave a lengthy and eloquent assessment of Israel’s current military attacks in Gaza this morning during a press conference at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Bardem is in town to finally pick up his 2023 Donostia award for career achievement after he was unable to attend the festival last year due to the US actors’ strike. He began his answer to a question about politics and Israel by saying “What is happening in Gaza is totally unacceptable, it is terrible, it is dehumanizing. I believe that this Israeli government is the most radical government that Israel has ever had.” Bardem continued…

As Heritage Day on September 24 approaches, it’s a perfect time to honour the rich tapestry of South Africa’s cultures – not just through the smoky aromas of a braai but also by immersing ourselves in the cinematic stories created by South Africa’s talented individuals. District 9 (2009):  https://youtu.be/DyLUwOcR5pk?si=J3GGMk_C_r5zqzgz Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is more than just a gripping sci-fi spectacle; it’s a sharp political commentary on South Africa’s history. Released in August 2009 with a $30 million budget, the film imagines a world where the government segregates stranded aliens in the 1980s. Two decades later, as plans are made to relocate…

When C. Tangana meets the flamenco guitarist Yerai Cortés, he is impressed by his music and his uniqueness. He asks him about his project and he tells him about an album. Although it is a guitar album, this album tells his life story, is about his family, and, in particular, about a sorrow, a sorrow that he wants to tell the world about. This resulted in La guitarra flamenca de Yerai Cortés the debut film by        SAN SEBASTIAN 2024 New Directors (better known musically as C. Tangana). Titled like that album, it stars Cortés himself and has been selected as the opening film in…

Carrie Coon is only in London on a flying visit. A very short break from filming season three of The Gilded Age, Julian ‘Downton Abbey’ Fellowes’s hit HBO series set in New York’s 1880s boom years, for which Coon received another Emmy Award nomination and which she was convinced was about to be cancelled. “I told everyone it was over,” she says. Coon welcomes us warmly, jumping up to offer us a glass of water – because you’re never too jetlagged to be polite. She knows Big Issue’s work. “We have something similar in Chicago, though not as substantial as this. And you’ve…

For consistency’s sake, it’s best to stick to one definition of an “international film,” and be similarly hasty with saying what that definition is. Here, it might well be best to go with what the Academy Awards considers an international film, which is nice and broad, being “A feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States of America and its territories with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track.” So, with that, some of the following movies might have some English dialogue, or could be set in the U.S. or other English-speaking countries, but if they’re potential competitors for the…

The ninth edition of the audiovisual music festival will bring together great international figures such as Blake Neely, Sherry Chung and Christopher Lennertz The ninth edition of Movie Score Málaga (MOSMA), an international audiovisual music festival organized by the Málaga City Council through Málaga Procultura, will take place from October 24th to October 27th in an edition in which, in addition to concerts, we will once again enjoy meetings and panels with great composers. MOSMA 2024 will hold a show and three concerts dedicated to audiovisual music, whose tickets go on sale this afternoon (6:00 p.m.) at the Teatro Cervantes…

France’s revamped Oscar committee has selected Jacques Audiard’s exhilarating redemption thriller “Emilia Perez” for the international feature film race. The movie won two major awards at the Cannes Film Festival and earned rave reviews. https://youtu.be/t3HupHq8-eE?si=oZM0GHMmHNEn-Cuk “Emilia Perez” stars Karla Sofía Gascón as a fearsome drug lord who embraces her true self as a woman. The Spanish-language film earned one of Cannes’s longest standing ovations and went on to win the Jury Prize (in a jury presided over by Greta Gerwig), on top of a best actress prize for the ensemble cast, including Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz. The movie was bought by…

French cinema has recently given us some sensationally good courtroom dramas, such as Alice Diop’s Saint Omer and Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, both of which put ideas as well as individuals on trial; race, gender and class. Now, Cédric Kahn has reconstructed – with some fictional licence – the 1976 trial of revolutionary leftist Pierre Goldman, who had previously been convicted of killing two pharmacists in the course of an armed robbery. After publishing his polemical autobiography Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France while in prison – which made him a cause célèbre among the fashionable Parisian classes…

The seventh edition of the AJB DOC Film Festival, which took place from 13-17 September in Sarajevo, wrapped last night with an awards ceremony in the Bosnian Cultural Centre. Georgian director Luka Beradze’s Smiling Georgia [+], which world-premiered at last year’s Karlovy Vary, picked up the Main Award in the 11-strong competition from the jury comprising Deborah London-Harrington, documentary filmmaker and head of Production Management at Dogwoof; Namik Kabil, Bosnian film director and writer; Mila Turajlić, Serbian documentary filmmaker; Francesco Montagner, Italian documentary filmmaker; and Myriam Francois, British journalist and documentary filmmaker. The jury’s statement reads: “This film deals with the subject of justice in an artistic, cinematic and poetic…

Just like Frida Kempff’s debut fiction feature, Knocking , which opened at Sundance in 2021, her new film The Swedish Torpedo [+] has now been launched on North American soil. The movie has world-premiered in the Centrepiece section of the Toronto International Film Festival, and in it, we get to see the Swedish director’s own artistic vision of a courageous swimming celebrity who may have been even braver on land. Cineuropa: The presence of water in your films almost looks like a conscious plan. But surely it isn’t? Frida Kempff: Honestly, no, it just comes to me. Personally, I feel very much at ease in the water,…