Several hundred Gazans will be able to go to the cinema on Saturday for the first time in more than 30 years, albeit for one night only. The Samer Cinema in Gaza City, the oldest in the strip but closed for decades, will host a special screening of a film about Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The Islamist Hamas has ruled Gaza for 10 years and there are currently no functioning cinemas in the Palestinian territory where two million people live in cramped conditions under an Israeli blockade. Ghada Salmi, an organiser, told AFP the one-night showing was “symbolic” of wider…
Author: World Cinema Reports' Editors
MY father brought home a defective cathode-ray-tube TV set when I was in sixth grade, a hand-me-down he procured from a repair shop. It was bulky but more advanced compared to its contemporaries, except that its speakers didn’t work. I sat in front of the screen day in and out, imagining whatever dialogue was taking place based on context. Then I stumbled upon silent films, a world dominated by the likes of the great mime Charlie Chaplin. Naïve as I was back in the day, I learned that there really are actual movies that could convey messages without a need…
Hollywood is abuzz about the success of “Girls Trip.” The bawdy comedy starring Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, and breakout star Tiffany Haddish is the first movie written by, produced by, directed by, and starring African-Americans to earn more than $100 million at the box office. The success of “Girls Trip” should be celebrated. However, the film’s historic achievement also highlights the limitations faced by Black women in Hollywood. Tinseltown still has a considerable amount of work to do to create a space where Black women’s stories can be told. A movie or television show begins with a…
The Toronto Film Festival said Thursday it will screen the world premiere of the new Lady Gagadocumentary “Gaga: Five Foot Two,” a cinema verité look inside the life of one of the world’s biggest pop stars. Gaga is also set to perform after the docu bow, which is set for Sept. 8 at the Princess of Wales Theatre. The Netflix original documentary will bow on the streaming service September 22. The fest runs Sept. 7-17. https://youtu.be/MO9oPItLjWY Chris Moukarbel directed the docu, which follows Stefani Joanne Germanotta (aka Gaga) to give viewers unfiltered, behind-the-scenes access as she spends time with close friends and family members,…
KARACHI : Visuals have a way of taking one through a place, city or an entire country with or without narratives support. Travel films have a narrative of their own: they possess the power to make one want to explore new horizons. And considering Pakistan’s tourism industry is still nascent, such films can be very helpful. An initiative by Family Films is doing exactly that. Arz-e-Pakistan, a four-minute travel short- film directed by Ali Sohail Jaura takes us on an all-Pakistan tour, capturing the beauty of its seen and unseen areas. The project was done by film students and graduates from different…
Growing up in Gatineau, Magali Simard never paid much attention to Canadian cinema, or at least not to ROC (rest of Canada) cinema. “I certainly had a grasp of Québécois cinema,” said Simard, who is in her third year programming the Canadian selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs Sept. 7 to 17. As usual, Quebec is more than well represented, with nine features among TIFF’s 28 Canadian titles. As a native Québécoise, Simard is well placed to strike the necessary balance. “I’ve lived in Toronto for 13 years,” said the University of Toronto cinema studies graduate, who…
After just three features, the filmmaker Lucrecia Martel had left her indelible stamp on the rarefied heights of art cinema. Her 2008 film “The Headless Woman,” about a bourgeois Argentine involved in an apparent hit-and-run, was praised as a “brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle” by The New York Times. A retrospective of Ms. Martel’s films at the Harvard Film Archive pronounced her “a dominant figure in contemporary world cinema and one of its great stylists” for her psychologically acute and sensually immersive filmmaking. “The Headless Woman” (which followed “La Cienaga” and “The Holy Girl”) received berths at festivals and slots on…
The University of California, Irvine (UCI) is organizing the Celebration of Iranian Cinema, which opened yesterday and will continue until tomorrow. A lineup of five movies, including “Daughter” by Reza Mirkarimi, “Life+1 Day” by Saeid Rustai and “Breath” by Narges Abyar, has been selected to be screened at the three-day celebration. The acclaimed documentary films “Starless Dreams” by Mehrdad Oskui and “Hey, Humans” by Rakhshan Bani-Etamed will also be reviewed.
Public broadcaster PBS will premiere a new documentary next month about the life and art of Chinese-American artist and Bambi production designer Tyrus Wong, who passed away last year at the age of 106. The film, directed by Pamela Tom, first premiered on the festival circuit in fall 2015. It uses interviews with Wong, his family, colleagues, and admirers, as well as movie clips and archival footage, to trace his remarkable story from a farming village in the Guangdong Province of China to Hollywood and beyond. Besides developing the gentle atmospheric beauty of the Disney classic Bambi (1942), Wong worked…
“Bench Cinema” by the Iranian director Mohammad Rahmanian is competing in the Marco Polo International Film Festival in Korcula, Croatia. The film is about Nasi who, after being released from prison, spends months watching films and memorizes all the lines. He then travels around to perform the films as a one man show on a bench. Gradually he forms a theatre group called Cinema Bench. https://youtu.be/73zGayauywk The festival, which will come to an end on August 27, intends to promote, build and present cinematography dealing with the Silk Road, which helped a dialogue among different civilizations during the ancient times.…