Author: World Cinema Reports' Editors

BURBANK, Calif.  – The International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood’s Animation Educators Forum (AEF) has awarded its annual Faculty Grants to Tom Bancroft (Azusa Pacific University), Soyeon Kim (California State University, Long Beach), Kaho Albert Yu (City University of Hong Kong, School of Creative Media), and Zachary Zezima (California University, Los Angeles). The AEF Faculty Grant program is designed to provide support for individuals or groups with reasonable expenditures associated with research, scholarly activity or creative projects in the field of animation, and were open to both full- and part-time teachers at accredited post-secondary institutions. AEF reviewed applicants from all over…

Here’s a pithy pullquote for Godard Mon Amour’s posters and trailers: “Boy, it sure is French!” Its language, of course, is French, as one would expect from a biopic about Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky. Itsideology is French, whether the ideology orbits around politics or cinema. When characters argue about either, they argue with confidence that ignores rationality and passion that defies gravity. Most of all, the film’s emotional temperature runs French, in the sense that happiness and melancholy tend to be virtually indistinguishable from each other and anger is a dialect unto itself. Hell is being stuck in a car…

No Spain’s 18th International De Cine, Las Palmas has announced the festival’s award winners: The Chinese film Xiao Gua Fu Cheng Xian Ji (The Widowed Witch), by Cai Chengjie, receives the Silver Lady Harimaguada; its director, the José Rivero Award for Best New Director and its actress,Tian Tian, the Best Actress Award The Iranian film No Date, No Signature, by Vahid Jalilvand, wins the Audience Award and Navid Mohammadzadeh, its leading actor, the Best Actor Award The co-production Mi amado, las montañas, by Alberto Martín Menacho receives the Best Short Film Award The 18th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International…

The fourth Women & Film festival is dedicated to a woman whose passion for cinema, storytelling and community helped inspire the female-focused project of the Port Townsend Film Festival to be established. “Beloved Marcia,” said festival director Janette Force of Marcia Perlstein, who died Feb. 25, 2018. “She was really the voice of our festival.” And, she was a voice – quite literally. Every year, Perlstein would go through the festival program to find directors, actors and screenwriters to interview on her radio show, “Treasures and Pleasures,” on KPTZ-FM 91.9. “‘I want to meet this person, this person, this person,’”…

Surfing the Facebook page of Kamran Shirdel, a wonderful friend and artist and also pioneer of documentary filmmaking in Iran is always a delight.  On his wall you come across many interesting and sometimes nostalgic stories about cinema. What I share with you here is a latter from the legendary Iranian filmmaker, Amir Naderi that was posted by Kamran Shirdel. B.T. “I never met my father and my mother died when I was five years old, so I consider myself to have been raised by Cinema. I was born with it in my blood, and it is an inseparable part of…

Besides the Oscars, the Cannes lineup announcement probably most feels like Christmastime for cinephiles everywhere. When festival director Thierry Frémaux finally reveals (usually at a painfully deliberate pace) the names of his guests at the most A-list of all festivals, you get – in one go – a pretty solid idea of what the best of world cinema has to offer for the rest of the year. Naturally it’s a moment as fraught with suspense as it is genuinely exciting. And so, before we learn who made the cut at #Cannes71 on April 12, let’s indulge in a little game…

In more ways than one, “Ismael’s Ghosts” immerses us in the headspace of a gloriously undisciplined movie director. At the center of this sad, funny, sprawling and fragmented story is Ismael Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric), an unruly French filmmaker with a very strange family history. His latest picture is a thriller about a globe-hopping spy named Ivan Dédalus, a heavily fictionalized version of the younger brother he hasn’t seen in years. But the more glaring absence in Ismael’s life is that of his wife, Carlotta, who vanished 21 years earlier and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. Complicating matters still…

The political documentary “Kollontai, Notes on the Resistance,” produced by an Argentine team, tells the story of Uruguayans’ fight to end the civic-military dictatorship that ruled their country between 1973-1985, beginning with the founding of the Victory of the People Party (PVP) in 1975 in Buenos Aires. With two years of dictatorship behind them, militants of different political sectors of the left launched the so-called “Alejandra Campaign” in honor of the Russian Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), for the purpose of establishing in secret a new political party from Buenos Aires. The new organization – the PVP – is today part…

Cruising along Highway 192 in Central Florida, Sean Baker came upon the Magic Castle, a seedy bright-pink motel in the outer orbit of Orlando’s Walt Disney World Resort. It was the perfect setting for his next film. The Florida Project would explore the “hidden homeless”—people living hand-to-mouth in cheap motels after losing jobs and homes in the Great Recession. However, a few days into filming, Baker hit a 100-decibel snag. A company selling helicopter rides set up shop right across the street from their location, wreaking havoc with deafening noise at all hours of the day. “At first, it was a nightmare—the…

Given the public’s increased focus on sexual harassment and women’s rights this past year, award-winning documentary filmmaker Jessica Congdon will make a timely visit to SUNY Cortland to show and discuss two of her works: “The Mask You Live In” and “Miss Representation.” Congdon will speak on “Feminism, Film, Men and the Media: Telling our Stories through Film” on Friday, April 20. Her talk will take place from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge. “One of the things that impresses me with Jess’ work is her fight for social justice,” said Andrea Harbin, associate professor of English. Preceding her…