Author: CWB News Department

Breakfast With Giraffes – A Comedy by Soroush Sehat will be screened in  Los Angeles & Orange County https://youtu.be/NTXo6NDYnt4?si=mgrYyJkPEHBuJK1- Pouya, Shahin, and Mojtaba have been invited to Reza’s wedding. Reza, the groom, has been trying for years to get the approval of the bride’s family, and he has finally succeeded in organizing the wedding tonight. The bride’s family is traditional, and Mojtaba, who is a close relative of the groom, has been advised by Reza not to drink alcohol tonight. However, his friends, seeking to have a good time, turn to drugs like cocaine and offer some to Mojtaba and…

“Flow,″ a wordless cat parable, won the Oscar for animated feature at Sunday’s 97th Academy Awards. The win gives Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis his first Academy Award. “Flow” was made with Blender, a free, open-source graphics software tool using computer generated animation. The result is a dreamy aesthetic paired with a peaceful, yet post-apocalyptic, fable about a black cat, dog, capybara, ring-tailed lemur and secretary bird trying to survive a catastrophic flood. The film has no dialogue and forces viewers to be mesmerized by the unlikely relationship and understanding between the species trying to escape the rising waters. https://youtu.be/edcULvPtKDs?si=TC11kQNWxfzUYK6V “I think you…

I’m Still Here, wins the OSCAR for the Best International Film https://vimeo.com/1061897644 I’m Still Here (Portuguese: Ainda Estou Aqui ) is a 2024 political biographical drama film directed by Walter Salles from a screenplay by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s 2015 memoir of the same name. It stars Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro as Eunice Paiva, a mother and activist coping with the forced disappearance of her husband, the dissident politician Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), during the military dictatorship in Brazil. Soon after its release in Brazilian theaters on 7 November 2024 by Sony Pictures Releasing International, the film was the target of an unsuccessful boycott by the Brazilian far-right, which denies that the dictatorship was tyrannical.[5][6][7] Grossing $29.9 million…

Andre Anderson can still recall the feeling of watching Ava DuVernay’s 13th for the first time. The Preston-raised African Nova Scotian actor—and now filmmaker—had been so moved by the 2016 documentary on the US prison-industrial complex that he screened it for his classmates at Saint Mary’s University. Then again at the Marquee Ballroom. Anderson says he “told everybody” he knew about the Emmy-winning film and felt so inspired by the stories he watched on-screen that he picked up a camera of his own. “I felt that if somebody could really impact me that deeply that it caused me to take…

Sudbury Indie Cinema is screening award-winner Analogue Revolution on March 5 in honour of International Women’s Week. Director Marusya Bociurkiw will be in attendance at the 7 p.m. screening. Bociurkiw is a storyteller, theorist and professor of media theory at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she teaches courses in media studies, social justice media and documentary production, and conducts research in the areas of feminist/queer archives, affect theory, media activism, and migration studies. She is also an award-winning filmmaker and author. She has directed 10 films, and is author of six books including, most recently, Food Was her Country: The Memoir of a Queer…

The Academy Awards represent the screen industry’s biggest annual global recognition for the very best of moviemaking. And in these troubled times, many recognise the power of documentaries to transform the world for the better. Like last year, the 2025 nominations for Best Documentary are international in their scope, continuing an Academy trend of placing more emphasis on voices outside of the United States. This year’s nominations feature a few milestones: it’s the first time a Japanese filmmaker has been put forward, and the first time an Indigenous North American filmmaker has been nominated in Oscars history. All exhibit outstanding craftsmanship while exploring intense themes. The…

A teenager rescues and defends an infant creature whose species the surrounding adults have condemned as vicious and predatory. Another adolescent battles injury and other hurdles in a quest for basketball stardom. A small child in Mexico contracts polio but finds solace in the world of art. And an 11-year-old Kurdish immigrant arrives in Berlin, ultimately relying on soccer talent to feel at home again. These young people, protagonists in works that will be shown in the 2025 New York International Children’s Film Festival, are all fierce, fearless and — perhaps most striking — female. This year’s festival, which begins a three-weekend…

It’s easy to forget how, once upon a time, North American audiences weren’t fucking with Abbas Kiarostami. Of course, stateside cinephiles have collectively declared Kiarostami as one of the gods of Iranian cinema. Although he passed away in 2016, his influence can be found in movies made in his native Iran (like Mohammad Rasoulof’s Oscar-nominated The Seed of the Sacred Fig) as well as films made around these parts (like Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s latest quirkfest Universal Language). But back in the early ‘90s, the films of Kiarostami and his Iranian New Wave elite were hard to find. Unless you were attending film…

The 75th Berlin International Film Festival has wrapped its first year under new director Tricia Tuttle – and it was an extremely promising start. Now that we’ve had time to make our peace with the results, forget all about the dire opening film, and pray we’ll never get cloned, it’s time to round up our favourite films from this year’s edition. These are the soon-to-be-released titles you should be keeping an eye out for this year. O Último Azul (The Blue Trail) The Blue TrailBerlin Film Festival – Canva Gabriel Mascaro’s Brazil-set dystopian film The Blue Trail is without a doubt this year’s Competition standout. While it…

In the Shadow of the Cypress has ridden a challenging road to being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Made in Iran out of the pockets of directors Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani, the duo found themselves having to deal with the limitations of their budget alongside a lack of governmental support, sanctions imposed on the country and the devaluation of the Iranian currency. Despite these challenges, In the Shadow of the Cypress is a beautiful film that uses gorgeous, geometric 2D animation to chronicle the relationship between a father and daughter as the former suffers from PTSD. Skwigly caught…