Tehran, Iran: Last night at the award ceremony of Fajr Film Fesstival, Crazy Castle (Rokh Divaneh) a film directed by Abolhassan Davoodi and produced by Bita Mansouri won 5 awards including Best Film and Best Director. The other Awards received by Crazy Castle are as follows:Best Sound editing by Bahman Ardalan, Best Visual Effects by Vahid Ghotbizadeh and the Audience Award for the Best Film. Crazy Castle had 10 nominations. Crazy Castle screenplay was written by Mohmadreza Gohari, based on a story by Abolhassan Davoodi, director of this film. Crazy Castle is about a few youngsters meeting on the web…
Author: Diane Sippl
Yojiro Takita’s original and thoughtful film, Departures, is the winner of the Best Foreign Language Film for the 81st Academy Awards. I discovered it only recently, at the 20th Palm Springs International Film Festival where, from January 8-19, 2009, 50 of the 65 wonderful films that had originally qualified for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category were screened and Departures, with a pervasive word-of-mouth buzz, won the festival’s Mercedes-Benz Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature. The film is quite beguiling.It’s winter in Yamagata, and traveling over the pristine white landscape of Japan’s northeast, Daigo (Masahiro Motoki)…
The second weekend of the 10th Scandinavian Film Festival Los Angeles offers two chances to see the latest work of two actors who have loomed large on the fest’s screen over the last decade. On January 17th and 18th at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, award-winning writer-director Pernille Fischer Cristensen’s Dancers will feature stunning performances by Trine Dyrholm (P.O.V., The Celebration), memorable from the 2007 SFFLA in Christensen’s A Soap, and Anders W. Berthelsen, seen at the 2002 fest in Italian for Beginners and at the 2000 fest in Mifune. Dancers is the second feature by Pernille Fischer…
It is to the credit of Bunyik Entertainment, presenter of the 8th Hungarian Film Festival Los Angeles, that local audiences — state-side Hungarians, industry professionals, cultural aficionados, and the simply curious — have had a chance to see films that far surpass the crowd-pleasing popcorn movies too many international programmers presume to be in demand in “sunny” southern California. With a stroke of pronounced fine taste, Mr. Bunyik launched the fest with Eszter’s Inheritance, an eye-opener adapting one of Hungary’s most esteemed literary figures to the screen; he followed it with Delta, last year’s FIPRESCI (International Critics) award-winner from Cannes;…
It was the business of the summer’s Los Angeles Film Festival to offer an eagle-eyed view of American culture and politics. Some of the festival’s best faire worked as a kind of “sociometer,” casting a gaze of conscience on various corners of a country riddled with contradictions in the face of historic divides and avid campaigns as volatile as the stock market. Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway, which won the prize for Best Narrative Feature, invested the immigrant’s beleaguered chase after the American dream in the pint-sized performance of a talented and heart-tugging toddler. If this comedy, albeit guerrilla-style, strutted…
Tucked away complacently in his Parisian home where, under the pseudonym “Eric Rohmer,” he is noted for spending years without a phone, a car, or even a taxi ride from time to time, but with family, faith, and a firm devotion to nature, cinema, and its related arts, Eric Rohmer might not mind that I muse over the paradoxes his life presents — to start, that he is by default one of the most enduring auteurs of the French New Wave despite his proclaimed distaste for the very auteurism that put the nouvelle vague on the map. His outpour of…
“I was a rocket scientist,” Mr. Shi tells the passenger next to him on the plane from Beijing to the U.S. But even in his well-practiced English, he couldn’t know the nuances of the term in everyday American conversation — how it “doesn’t take a rocket scientist” to figure out why the daughter he is coming all this way to see will hardly be talking to him. Nonetheless it does take us all of the 83 minutes of this seemingly bare-bones parlor drama to get the picture ourselves. Master minimalist Wayne Wang has crafted another of his signature Chinese puzzles,…
Red carpets ribboned through the week at the 23rd Santa Barbara International Film Festival, spanning oohs and ahhs, yelps and squeals for Julie Christie, Cate Blanchett, Javier Bardem, Ryan Gosling, Tommy Lee Jones, and Angelina Jolie, in that order. And stars shone brightly as well on the faux black-sky ceiling of the 2,000-seat Arlington Theater, walled with real gold and amber lanterns and façades of the old Spanish mission town that the city once was. This site for the endless tributes was nearly as packed for a new film from Kazakhstan by Sergei Bodrov, Mongol. A glorious old-style action film…
An up-to-the-minute romance, a mysterious family drama, and a sober period piece offer fresh vistas of Scandinavian domestic life in Norway’s WINTERLAND, Iceland’s PARENTS, and Sweden’s THE NEW MAN at the Scandinavian Film Festival L.A. where, according to the fest’s Founder and Director, Jim Koenig, “Nordic film culture gives us an entry into the attitudes, issues, and passions of those societies.” With themes ranging from personal predicaments and cultural pressures to searing social polemics that haunt us to this day, the films wrap us warmly in the desires of their characters. And seeing more of their world than they do…
If anyone knows how to warm up a winter, it’s a Nordic filmmaker. Proof is in store for Los Angeles in January. Spanning two weekends (Jan. 5-6 and 12-13) at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills (135 S. Doheny at Wilshire), the Scandinavian Film Festival L.A. will be bigger than ever this year, showcasing twelve new features from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The festival gives the Southland the rare chance to see Scandinavia’s Academy Award contenders and other recent feature films, high-ranked shorts, and documentaries from the prolific film industries of the Nordic region. I met with…