In Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning drama The Salesman a young couple living in Teheran who are about to perform with their local drama group in a production of Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ find their lives upended after Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) is viciously assaulted by an intruder in their home one evening. Husband Emad (Shahab Hosseini) becomes obsessed with finding the culprit responsible and taking revenge but in doing so draws both of them into a complex web of entanglements which threatens to destroy their marriage. The Salesman will be screened in the Source Arts Centre in Thurles on Wednesday,…
Author: World Cinema Reports' Editors
In a first, for its Oscars 2018 submission, in the foreign language film category, the UK has chosen My Pure Land, an Urdu language feature film. The film marks the debut of director Sarmad Masud. The Hollywood Reporter confirms that the Bill Kenwright Films production will be Britain’s Oscar hopeful, this year. Shot in Pakistan, the story is a true account of events which involves a mother and her two daughters defending themselves against an army of some 200-odd bandits, who are out to capture their house. The two have to ultimately resort to arms, to fight off troops led…
Beginning in 1917 in Munich, the company has gone on to spread its expertise across the globe Like few other companies over the past century, ARRI has helped shape the world of cinema and had an immense impact on the art and technology of filmmaking. August Arnold and Robert Richter were still mere teenagers when they launched their film equipment company in 1917 in a small former shoemaker’s shop in Munich. Their first product was a film printer they built out of a lathe that Richter got for Christmas from his parents. “They were film enthusiasts,” says Dr. Joerg Pohlman,…
Auteur films by famed cinema names and established contemporary directors will attract audiences to this year’s Batumi International Art-House Film Festival (BIAFF) to Georgia’s Black Sea coast starting this Sunday. Opening with George Ovashvili’s latest feature Khibula, the festival will go on to screen around 80 works by directors from 30 countries. The program will feature 10 films in the Feature Films Competition section, with nine works in the Documentary Films Competition section and 25 selections for the Short Films Competition. Beside the three major sections, the event will showcase the Masters Collection section dedicated to films by celebrated directors including Andrey Zvyagintsev…
Reed Hastings, the Netflix CEO who co-founded the company long before “streaming” entered the popular lexicon, was born during a fairly remarkable year for film. 1960 was the year Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho astounded and terrified audiences, influencing a half-century of horror to come. It was a year of outstanding comedies (Billy Wilder’s The Apartment), outstanding epics (Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus) and outstandingly creepy thrillers (Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom—a close cousin of Psycho). But in the vast world of Netflix streaming, 1960 doesn’t exist. There’s one movie from 1961 available to watch (the original Parent Trap) and one selection from 1959 (Compulsion),…
Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin spurs a question that applies to many countries through history, but might echo most pertinently with baffled observers of Trumpland: how much of what is happening in a government is venal, craven self-interest, and how much sheer incompetent bumbling? The political satire is not directed at the US president or any specific leader, though. It extends the world view that Iannucci has applied to British and American political manoeuvres in In the Loop, a black comedy about stumbling toward war, and the series Veep, one of the most poisonously truthful satires ever made. He…
The Goethe-Institut will be screening five films by him beginning on Thursday, 21 September, and ending on Saturday, 23 September. The screenings are free with a complimentary serving of popcorn. The films are being screened under the ‘German Weeks 2017’ of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany and ‘Team Germany’ in Namibia. Known as one of Germany’s most successful directors and screenwriters, Akin has won numerous awards including 1998 Best Director – Bavarian Film; 2004 Golden Bear – Berlin Film Festival; 2007 Best Screenplay – Cannes ; 2007 LUX Prize for European cinema by the European Union, and…
The city of Tangier has long been a travel destination that inspires lovers of literature, poetry, and cinema with its impressive landscapes and spectacular architecture. The city is also a favorite of international filmmakers, enjoying close proximity to Europe as well as political stability. Many movies were shot during Tangier’s “golden era” (1924-1956), when it was an “international zone” jointly governed by nine European countries. At the time, the city developed a reputation for international arts and intrigue, home to spies, business men, artists, authors, and playwrights. Younes Chiekh Ali, a local artist specializing in the city’s history, explained to Morocco…
While the Trump era in America has enraged and galvanized feminists here, there’s a women’s liberation movement in India that is still struggling for the most basic rights and freedoms. Of course, India is a very different nation and it has far more misogynistic traditions, patriarchal prejudices and an inert legal system to overcome. The marked prevalence of violence against women there is appalling. Thankfully, there is a tradition of Indian feminism that is now getting a spark by a slate of new films this year, including, “Anaarkali of Aarah,” about a female singer who exacts revenge after being abused,…
Angelina Jolie’s celebrity makes her artistic ambitions easy to mock, but with “First They Killed My Father,” opening Friday at the same time that it begins streaming on Netflix, she proves she’s worth reckoning with as a director — for reasons good and bad. She has made an engrossing, dynamically shot movie that moves with real fluidity and complexity. Yet she also succumbs to familiar ideological pitfalls. The standard complaints about cultural appropriation, point of view and the ethics of aestheticizing war all apply. The movie’s source is Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir of her childhood under the Khmer Rouge, which…