Author: World Cinema Reports' Editors

“Naila and the Uprising” a film by Julia Bacha is scheduled to screen at New York Human Rights Watch Film Festival on June 16th. Naila and the Uprising: When a nation-wide uprising breaks out in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a young woman in Gaza must make a choice between love, family, and freedom. Undaunted, she embraces all three, joining a clandestine network of women in a movement that forces the world to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination for the first time. Naila and the Uprising chronicles the remarkable journey of Naila Ayesh and a fierce community of women at the frontlines,…

“Blockage”, an acclaimed drama by Iranian director Mohsen Qarai, will be competing in the 36th Munich International Film festival – Filmfest Munchen, which will run from June 28 to July 7. The film, which shared the best film award in the New Currents category at the Busan International Film Festival with “After My Death” by Kim Uiseok from South Korea in 2017, will be screened in the International Independents competition, the organizers have announced. https://youtu.be/gXHbO7IcFYA The film is about Qasem, a young man who is working at Tehran Municipality and his job is to prevent vendors from selling their merchandise…

Pera Museum begins the summer season with the “On the Beach” movie program. With movies from 1951 to the present day from Turkish and world cinema, the program offers a wide selection of examples from classic and current cinema. Addressing the beach as a space, “On the Beach” is being held in parallel with “Istanbul’s Seaside Leisure: Nostalgia from Sea Baths to Beaches.” It focuses on the transformation from the sea bath to the beach in the 1870s and the 20th century at the Pera Museum and Istanbul Research Institute. The movies shown within the scope of the program indicate…

Channel24’s Rozanne Els attended the screening of the South African short film slate at the African Film Festival in New York. New York – From stories about contemporary dance in South Africa to deeply moving and tragic tales about love, resentment, anger, and redemption – this year’s South African short film slate at the African Film Festival in New York (NYAFF) entrenched itself in history. The same is true of South African actor Atandwa Kani’s performance as Philemon in The Suit, one of the five short films to be showcased this year. Kani, speaking to a packed theatre at the Brooklyn Academy…

Where Cannes 2018 was light on red-carpet celebrities, the Official Selection offered many stars in the form of potential foreign-language award contenders. Each country has its own arcane rules for submitting films for the Foreign Language Oscar, but distributors scrambled to scoop up available titles and hope for the best. Cate Blanchett’s jury had plenty of strong auteurs to assess, from Best Director Pawel Pawlikowski’s follow-up to Oscar-winner “Ida,” the bittersweet period romance “Cold War” (Amazon Studios), starring incandescent breakout Joanna Kulig, and Kazakhstan’s “Ayka,” which won an acting award for Samal Yesyamova, to two poverty-row melodramas, Hirozaku Kore-eda’s “Shoplifters”…

At the end of Eva Husson’s “Girls of the Sun,” a female peshmerga fighter enjoins a French journalist: “Write the truth.” The problem, unrecognized by Husson, who also wrote this pedantically commonplace drama, is that there are multiple ways of telling the truth: One brings to life three-dimensional people who respond to based-on-fact situations in ways that reflect the messiness of being human. “Girls” could be used as a case study for the other type of truth telling, the kind that studies real events and then packages them for mass consumption in ways that, while mimicking the facts in their barest…

Putin.Obama.Orphan Hostages.Murdered Russian Lawyer.Billionaire British Investment Banker.The Accidental Death of an Innocent Child.A Loving American Family Caught in the Cross-hairs. This entire story is told by provocative Hollywood filmmaker, Susan Morgan Cooper, in her latest documentary To The Moon and Back. Already creating international political waves, the film is available in-stores and on demand in it’s national release by top distributor Gravitas Ventures on Tuesday, May 22nd. From the reports of Trump Jr. meeting Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, Billionaire Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Sanctions, to Miles Harrison – the innocent father that was personally targeted by Putin — the public…

The mixture of plot twists and moral shading, the focus on flawed characters and irresolvable pasts: Fans of writer-director Asghar Farhadi have come to cherish these trademark elements in his films. But when you become known for your topsy-turvy stories—for intimate dramas often embedded with startling surprises—the challenge becomes trying to outdo your previous narrative shockers (which risks pushing your movies further and further into implausibility) or simply repeating yourself (which risks becoming known as a dramatist of diminishing returns). Everybody Knows wrestles with this dilemma, ultimately successfully, while perhaps acknowledging that the two-time Oscar-winner can’t knock us off balance the way…

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda won the Palme d’Or at the 71st Cannes Film Festival for his film “Shoplifters,” a moving portrait of an self-made family scraping by at the bottom of Japanese society. Spike Lee won the Grand Prix for “BlacKkKlansman,” using his time at the microphone to describe the current moment in American politics as “the year of living dangerously,” accepting the prize “on behalf of the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, New York.” Lebanese director Nadine Labaki earned the Jury Prize for her film “Capernaum,” a wrenching neorealist portrait of a Beirut street urchin who sues his parents for bringing him…

Ali Abbasi’s genre-bending Nordic puzzler “Border” won the top prize in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard competition. It emerged victorious in a varied international field of 18 titles from newcomers and established festival favorites alike, with Sergei Loznitsa’s “Donbass,” Meryem Benm’Barek’s “Sofia,” João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora’s “The Dead and the Others” and Lukas Dhont’s “Girl” completing the list of prizewinners. https://youtu.be/an6ABIC5EK0 The second feature by Iranian-born, Danish-based Abbasi, the classification-defying film — based on a short story by “Let the Right One In” author John Ajvide Lindqvist — centres on a Swedish customs officer with an uncanny sense…