Sophie Fiennes (“The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”), one of the Fiennes brood (Ralph Fiennes, Martha Fiennes, Magnus Fiennes and Joseph Fiennes) and parents Mark Fiennes and novelist/painter Jini Fiennes, all of them artists and filmmakers, attaches herself to Anself Keifer in her comment-free documentary “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow,”Twenty minutes pass before Kiefer addresses the camera. Thirty minutes of cranes shots and reverent tracking shots as Fiennes and DP Remko Schnorr roves through the mysterious labyrinth of Anselm Kiefer’s studio in an old silk factory in the southern French town of Barjac. Winding corridors, looming earthen pillars, stairways leading…
Author: Robin Menken
Robin Menken
Robin Menken Robin Menken lives in Los Angeles. She was the Artistic Director of the Second City Workshops, taught at UC Berkeley, USC, Barcelona\'s Ateneu and the Esalin Institute. She was Roberto Rossellini\'s assistant, and worked with Yevgeny Vevteshenku, Glauber Rocha and Eugene Ionesco. She sold numerous screenplays and wrote the OBIE winning The FTA SHow (touring with Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and Ben Vereen.) She was a programming consultant and Special Events co-ordinator for numerous film festivals, including the SF, Rio, Havana and N.Y Film Festivals. Her first news outlet was the historic East Village Other.
Tomás Lunák’s black and white rotoscoped animated feature “Alois Nebel” (the Czech Republic’s official Oscar entry) joins the emerging genre of dramatic animated features: “Waltz With Bashir”, “Waking Life” and the Sci Fi “Renaissance” and “Scanner Darkly” (also rotoscoped.) Moody deep chiaroscuro compositions add old style dimensional modeling to the story, which looks like old Comic books and is based on trilogy of graphic novels by Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99. The authors of the Czech Republic’s first graphic novel adapted the screenplay.Cartoon cognoscenti know that graphic novels were influenced by the Golden Age of American Comics, which were influenced by…
Co-presented by the Consulate General and Promotion Center of the Argentine Republic in Los Angeles. Sponsored by LAN Airlines, Wines of Argentina and W HollywoodThe 10th annual Argentina New Cinema series returns with another impressive lineup, opening with Argentina box office success and surefire crowdpleaser MY FIRST WEDDING, about one couple’s hilariously disastrous “Big Day,” starring Daniel Handler and Natalia Oreiro. This year’s series is proud to present Argentina’s official Oscar submission for Best Foreign-Language Film, Fernando Spiner’s Western throwback to the brutal glories of Peckinpah and Hill, ABALLAY! Many Los Angeles premieres are also in store: Santiago Mitre’s THE…
The Hungarian Film Festival, organized by Bunyik Entertainment, in partnership with the Hungarian Film Union, is sponsored by The Consulate General of Hungary. Organizer Bela Bunyik is the President of Bunyik Entertainment, the pre-eminent distributor and online source for Hungarian films in the US. CHECKAt a press conference on Saturday, October 15th, 2011, Ambassador Balazs Bokor, Consul General of Hungary in Los Angeles and Bela Bunyik, President of Bunyik Entertainment announced the new platform for this ongoing annual festival of Hungarian film culture. President Bela Bunyik described the avant-garde step the festival has chosen for it’s eleventh edition: all its…
Philipp Stölzl’s engaging “Young Goethe in Love” is a treat from the first bars of Ingo L. Frenzel)’s brisk neo-period score. Stölzl, who directed the alpine drama “Northface”, is equally adept helming a romantic romp, a romanticized bio-pic about Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the poster boy for German Romanticism and Sturm und Drang. Bad-boy Goethe (Alexander Fehling-“If Not Us, Who?”) flubs his Bar Exam orals. His father (Henry Huebchen) a noted Judge, enraged about Goethe’s time -wasting poetry, packs him off to provincial town of Wetzlar. The stern prosecutor Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu-“The Baader Meinhof-Complex”) takes one look at Goethe’s records and…
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will celebrate the year 1911 and its developmental contributions to motion pictures with a program of selected films in “A Century Ago: The Films of 1911, Heroes and Heroines” on Monday, November 7, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Presented on a 1909 hand-cranked Power’s Model 6 Cameragraph motion picture machine, the films will be screened with live musical accompaniment by Michael Mortilla. This is the ninth consecutive year the Academy has presented an evening of films from 100 years earlier.The program will spotlight several of the…
The 5th Annual GERMAN CURRENTS Festival of New Films from Germany plays October 26th through 30th, 2011 at the Egyptian Theatre and Aero Theatre. The series is presented by The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, German Films and The American Cinematheque in collaboration with MFG Film Funding Baden-Wuerttemberg and Lufthansa. The venerable list of sponsors include PORSCHE Beverly Hills, Friends of Goethe, ELMA (European Languages and Movies in America) and Standard Hotel Hollywood. Once again, the annual GERMAN CURRENTS brings the best of recent German films to Los Angeles. The line-up includes “Stopped on Track” by Andreas Dresen, winner of the “Un…
One of the most influential national film movements to emerge in the post-World War II era, Italian neo-realism continues to hold sway over filmmakers and artists worldwide even as its exact definition continues to provoke debate. Most frequently positioned as a response to the propaganda of Italy’s fascist-controlled film industry, neo-realism rejected escapism in favor of politically and socially charged subjects, non-professional actors and a documentary style. This allegiance to material reality, however, was never total. Artifice and interpretation always crept in consciously at the edges. In 1953, after a decade of neo-realist classics, even leading neo-realist figure screenwriter Cesare…
The Art Directors Guild (ADG) Film Society and American Cinematheque will spotlight “Land of the Pharaohs” (1955), with a special screening and panel discussion on Sunday, October 23 at 5:30 p.m. at the Egyptian Theatre (6712 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood.) The epic drama in Cinemascope® tells the stories behind the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.The panel of Art Directors and Egyptologists will discuss the work of Oscar® Winning Production Designer Alexander Trauner.”Land of the Pharaohs” was directed by Howard Hawks ((Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and written by William Faulkner (The Sound and The Fury) Legendary Production Designer Alexander Trauner headed…
The 15th Annual Arab Film Festival, one of the fastest growing festivals of Arab Cinema in the US, completes its four-city run in Los Angeles, October 21st-23rd at the Writers Guild of America Theater, in Beverly Hills. The co-ordinated protests and uprisings of the Arab Spring have toppled three governments and represent a Global sea change of unknown proportions. Celebrate this historic moment of hope in a environment of film culture at the 15th Annual Arab Film Festival.Featuring a broad selection of films that tell stories of romance, humor and unrest in the Middle East, the LA Festival kicks off…