Last Sunday morning, Richard White Auditorium on East Campus was crowded with Duke students and members of the Durham community who came to watch the movie “La Jaula de Oro.” Translated as “The Golden Dream” in English, the movie depicts a Native American boy and teenagers from Guatemala on their journey to immigrate to the U.S. Through the protagonists’ struggles, the movie draws attention to the thousands of Latin American children who try to cross the American border for better opportunities. The screening was part of the 2017 North Carolina Latin American Film Festival, which started at UNC-Chapel Hill 31…
Author: World Cinema Reports' Editors
Clare Stewart is the Australian who has breathed new life into the BFI London Film Festival. Her tenure as festival director has seen the scope of the event broadened beyond Central London theaters to neighborhoods throughout the capital and across the rest of Britain. The festival’s spot on the calendar has also recently turned it into a prime platform for launching Oscar campaigns, as with “Moonlight,” which was in competition in London last year. The 61st edition of the festival opens Wednesday evening with Andrew Garfield-starrer “Breathe” (pictured). Variety spoke to Stewart about what to expect this year and how…
SAN DIEGO (CNS) – The San Diego International Film Festival is scheduled to open today with a screening of “Marshall” at the Balboa Theatre. The opening night biopic about a young Thurgood Marshall in one of his most important cases before he became the first black member of the U.S. Supreme Court — 50 years ago Monday — stars Chadwick Boseman, Kate Hudson and James Cromwell, among others. It is set for general release on Oct. 13. The festival will offer screenings of films through Sunday at the Regal Cinema UA Horton Plaza and ArcLight UTC theaters. Special events will…
Art and Experience Cinematic Group in collaboration with the Brazil Embassy will show seven Brazilian short films, documentaries, and narrative feature films for a week in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz. According to the website of Art and Experience Cinema (aecinema.ir) the Brazilian Film Week will be inaugurated on October 7 in the presence of the Brazilian ambassador, Rodrigo de Azeredo Santos, and acclaimed Brazilian director, Roberto Berliner at the Iranian Artists Forum (IAF) and run through October 13. Berliner, together with Iranian director Shahram Mokri, will also hold workshops on filmmaking in Brazil and joint production during the week in…
When you see eyes glow in the dark, you are probably not among friends. That is one cinema trope that comes to bear in “Spoor,” a new Polish thriller in which a forest becomes littered with the bodies of hunters. But while the mysterious eyes at night and hoofprints in the snow are visible to Janina Duszejko (Agnieska Mandat), an Earth Mother who communes with Nature and lives alone in a cabin in the woods, she has a hard time convincing the local police and prosecutor that animals are tied to a spate of deaths. That’s just too weird. But…
This handsome French/Czechproduced biopic from Stéphanie Di Giusto (adapting Giovanni Lista’s novel) is a sprawling, awkward and melodramatic piece that features a jumbled last quarter. The performances save it, however, with striking star Soko (AKA Stéphanie Sokolinski) shining in a characterisation of great intensity, serious sensuality and what looks like genuine sweat and pain. Marie Louise Fuller (Soko) is introduced living with her showboating French father Ruben (fabulous Denis Ménochet) in late-19th Century American Midwest. When he’s murdered, she retreats to New York and lives for a time with her uptight mother Lili (Amanda Plummer), whose association with the Temperance…
Intrinsically shaped by multiculturalism, Canadian director Ann Marie Fleming has amassed a body of work grounded in her curiosity to learn about cultures geographically distant from her own, but directly linked through a similar artistic spirit. Set largely in Iran, Fleming’s debut feature Window Horses—which follows the more than 30 short films she’s made in the last three decades—is a delicately crafted and heartwarming ode to borderless connections between people via creativity, and a love letter to Iranian poetry. The film had its U.S. premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival back in February, in the midst of the shameful…
At the start of the Slovak drama “The Teacher,” a well-dressed, middle-aged woman enters a classroom with a confident strut and a smile on her face. After a brief introduction, she asks the students to tell the class two specific bits of information: their name and their parents’ line of work. The reason for this question becomes clear early in the film, a well-acted but rather dry and monotonous look at life in early ’80s Bratislava. The city was then in Czechoslovakia; post-Velvet Revolution, it is now part of Slovakia. In 1983, the Communist Party still ruled. Its power was…
Afghanistan has selected “A Letter to the President” as its candidate for nomination in the Academy Awards foreign-language category. Directed by Roya Sadat, the film is a drama about a low-level female public official who has struggled to uphold the law in Afghanistan. When she decides to save a woman from the horrors of clan punishment, the official finds herself arrested. A letter to the president is her only hope of justice. https://youtu.be/hqj-cYalLiU The film played in the Open Doors section of the Locarno festival in August and will next month play in competition at the Busan festival. A law…
For the first time since 2012, RATP, the Paris underground operator, has opened this hidden underground movie set for European Heritage Days. This is the Parisian subway of the movies. Porte des Lilas station was closed in 1929 but since the 1970s more than a dozen films have been shot here every year. For the first time since 2012, RATP, the Paris underground operator, has opened this hidden treasure for the European Heritage Days. “The directors come here for two things: firstly it is comfortable to work here and you can even change the decor if you want, says a guide.…