Author: World Cinema Reports' Editors

Angelena Bonet, founder and CEO of her companies Crystal Heart Productions and Crystal Heart Records, has won another two prestigious Awards of Recognition from the IndieFEST Film Awards. One award was given for Bonet’s biopic sequel documentary feature film “Angelena: Heart Of The Matter” in the Liberation/Social Justice/Protest category and Best Music Video for “Break The Chain.” “Angelena: Heart Of The Matter” (“A Time Of A Revolution”) is the second documentary feature film in her trilogy series. Continuing on from where “Angelena: Change The World” (A True Story) left off, Australian-born Bonet interviews high profile women’s rights leaders around the world such as President Obama’s Women’s Equality…

GUANGDONG, South China — For three centuries, quiet Zurong Village at the southernmost tip of China’s mainland hasn’t had much to offer visitors, aside from tropical fruit. But that all changed when a local businessman decided to make the small town the center of a nationwide film festival. For the past three years, the village has hosted the Zurong Dialect Film Festival, China’s first to celebrate the country’s dialects. The country is host to over 130 languages with countless regional variants, according to the Ministry of Education. However, dialects differ so greatly that Chinese speakers often cannot even understand them. In Zurong…

World cinema has a great presence at the 2018 AFI FEST and international cinema film fans will be able to see some of the best films of current world cinema at this festival. Here are five films that we recommend to see from this series: 3 FACES (SE ROKH) Chinese 2 11/14/2018, 6:15 p.m. Country: Iran Year: 2018 Director: Jafar Panahi Screenwriter: Jafar Panahi Producer: Jafar Panahi Director of Photography: Amin Jafari Editor: Mastaneh Mohajer Cast: Behnaz Jafari, Marziyeh Rezaei, Narges Del Aram, Jafar Panahi, Maedeh Erteghaei Running Time (minutes): 100 Language: Persian https://youtu.be/OJ-MXnF8qz0 Eight years and four films into…

The Whisky Robber, directed by Los Angeles-born filmmaker of Hungarian descent, Nimród Antal, won the Audience Award at 2018 Hungarian Film Festival of Los Angeles. The movie is an adaptation of the real-life story of Attila Ambrus, a “gentleman criminal” often compared in Hungary to Sándor Rózsa, the country’s version of Robin Hood. Antal starts the film with a stylishly staged robbery that the moustachioed, Ray Ban- and leather jacket-clad hero pulls off in a bank. Then we go back to his childhood, and we soon realise that Attila (first-timer Bence Szalay), or the titular Whiskey Bandit, has been arrested and is now…

Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival, set in the heart of Mallorca’s buzzing and culturally rich center of Palma, has announced its line-up of screenings and events for the festival’s 7th edition. The six-day festival will take place, October 25th – 31st, 2018, and includes in-person Gala tributes to actress Marisa Paredes, actor Mads Mikkelsen, Academy Award winning actress Melissa Leo and Academy Award nominated filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, a Gala Opening Night event, narrative and documentary competition sections, a Drive-In Cinema section at Port Adriano, a Kids section co-curated by the Andorra Kids Film Festival, and Virtual Reality and collaborative sections…

Among other things, the film showcases how the campuses in Tamil Nadu are widely demarcated among the student population based on caste. Pariyerum Perumal (God Who Mounts a Horse) is a very strong film. It invites a society, which is entrenched with casteist prejudices, for a debate and asks people to rethink these extreme forms of incivility. It takes us through the highly emotional struggles of a scheduled-caste youth who aspires to become a spokesperson of dignity and human rights for his community. He thus wishes to become like his role model, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, an unparalleled revolutionary leader of modern…

Tribeca and CHANEL continue to provide extraordinary opportunities to propel women filmmakers forward with the fourth annual THROUGH HER LENS: The Tribeca Chanel Women’s Filmmaker Program. The mentorship program was created to provide a balance of industry support, artistic development, and funding for new and emerging U.S.-based female writers and directors of short-form narrative films. Presented by Tribeca and CHANEL, in collaboration with Pulse Films, and facilitated by Tribeca Film InstituteÒ (TFI), the multi-faceted program has selected five short film projects from women storytellers to receive project support, and take part in one-on-one mentorship and master classes over a three…

Social Justice Film Festival opened tonight at Seattle and will run until October 15th. Justice in Immigration – Undeterred October 5 @ 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm If hope is a discipline and democracy our foundation, we must face the inhumanity of separating families and dehumanizing communities. Join us for discussion and films documenting the changing lines that demarcate identity, immigration, and institutions. Centered around feature film Undeterred, this evening is about how Hope and Democracy transcend borders. Undeterred is a documentary about community resistance in the rural border town of Arivaca, Arizona. Since the creation of NAFTA, 9/11 and through the Obama and Trump…

The newest of the fall festivals wraps up today, and the Los Angeles Film Festival has announced Tom Shadyac’s powerful and inspiring true story Brian Banks as winner of its Audience Award for Fiction Feature Film and the acclaimed Stuntman as Audience Award choice winner for Best Documentary Feature. As the Toronto Film Festival annually proves, it is the Audience Award that often gets the most attention and is most representative of a particular film’s success at many of these fests. At its world premiere screening Saturday afternoon, Brian Banks received five standing ovations by my count as the key creative team and actors were brought up on stage…

The director of Rafiki, Wanuri Kahiu, sued the Kenyan government to lift a national censorship that rendered the film ineligible for the Academy Award’s Best Foreign Language Film accolade. Kenya’s LGBTQ community is celebrating after the Kenyan High Court temporarily lifted the ban on the queer drama Rafiki. The critically acclaimed film, based in Nairobi, navigates the romance between two women in a country where homosexuality is illegal, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. After months of protesting the strict criminalization and censorship of the film, hundreds attended its initial, celebratory screening. In April 2018, the Kenya Film Classification Board banned the…