Eric Matthies is Producer, Cinematographer and one of the Directors of Ayamye*. Currently he is an award winning producer and director specializing in documentaries, video installations and special features for DVD’s. Between 1986 and 1994, Eric was a cameraman with the seminal production company H-Gun, shooting notable music videos for artists such as Nine Inch Nails, De La Soul, Public Enemy and Soundgarden. As a young director he received recognition from The Chicago International Film Festival for his work with the legendary band Suicidal Tendencies. After many years of helping other directors realize their visions, Ayamye* is proudly his first…
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“The Passion of the Mao” begins by correcting misconceptions about Mao’s early years. Unlike the tyrants with whom he is usually compared, Mao was a successful scholar and businessman before he became a rabble-rouser. By the mid1950s, he had unified China, spurred an impressive rate of growth, restructured the education system, and improved living standards. Then he became a Maoist. Mao devoted the rest of his life to eliminating the centralized Soviet bureaucracy he and his colleagues had built. The film takes viewers back to the 1960s. Successful women and men, some now professors at major universities in the West,…
Nurbek Egen, a filmmaker from Kyrgyzstan, graduated from the Institute of Art in Bishkek and then went to VGIK to study film direction. Nurbek started his career as a film director by making two short films and a documentary. “The Wedding Chest” is Nurbek’s first feature film. Wedding Chest is the story of Aidar who has left his Kirghiz mountain village and now lives in Paris with his French girlfriend, Isabelle. Aidar takes Isabelle for a visit to his home town. Aidar has changed but everything at home has remained the same. The relatives and neighbors are just as he…
Claudia Llosa, director of Madeinusa, was born in Lima in 1976 and now lives in Spain. Her first feature film Madeinusa has been praised in several international film festivals. Madeinusa is the story of a fourteen years old girl who lives in a remote small town. Film starts when this deeply religious town starts to celebrate odd two days holidays. The holidays start on Good Friday at three o’clock in the afternoon (just when Christ dies on the Cross) to Easter Sunday. The whole village believes that the God is dead during those two days and they are allowed to…
An interview with David Abdaladze. Chairman of “Kino Plus”. The Georgian film Producer’s Center David Abdaladze finished his studies in film production at Moscow state institute of cinematography in 1989 and a year later he founded Georgian-British film-centre “Moon globe”. He was the first person to organise a film market in the former Soviet Union territory – the Tbilisi Film Market. He is also the author of “Georgian film Encyclopaedia” which its last part will be published in 2008 at the same time that the 100 year anniversary of Georgian cinema will be celebrated. Shohreh Jandaghian – You are the founder…
Danièle Thompson, the French film director and screenplay writer, is daughter of Gerard Oury, a film director and Jacqueline Roman, an actress. La Grande Vadrouille (1966) was her first movie as a writer. In the seventies, Danièle and Marcel Jullian worked together to write nine screenplays that were directed by Gerard Oury, Daniele’s father. In 1975, she wrote the script for Jean-Charles Tacchella’s Cousin, Cousine together with him and this movie was nominated for an Academy Award. After working on comedies for television in the eighties, she wrote a number of dramas that were directed by Claude Pinoteau. In the…
I did this interview with Rob Nilsson about eighteen months ago. We were supposed to publish our new magazine “Cinema Without Borders” and open it with Rob’s interview. Many obstacles delayed our plans. But reading the review again, I found it very interesting and eye opening. Here is the interview. It is worth mentioning that just a day before I call Rob, his friend Edwin Johnson had passed away. Rob Nilsson, an independent film author has always been in search of finding new languages for filmmaking and innovative ways of filmmaking. We could claim that he belongs to the “Street Filmmaking”…
Born in Iran in 1968, Atousa Bandeh Ghiasabadi works as member of advise committee of Dutch Visual Arts Foundation incentive grants and Artist residency since 2004. She started her studies with Astronomy-physics at university of Tehran and later in the Netherlands at the university of Groningen. Following by a bachelor in painting at Art Academy Minerva, she continued studying Video and Film at Post Academy Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. She has attended on various art exhibitions with her photos and video arts in Holland and USA, and has made two short films which the newest, „My Own 1000 Square Meters”…
“With a poetic nod to early Polanski films like REPULSION, Alanté Kavaïté uses the sublime story to transport the viewer to a mysterious place where realism and surrealism live side by side and can be heard talking to each other. Charlotte is a sound engineer. After Charlotte’s mother is murdered, she returns home to try and find some answers. As a sound engineer, she uses her equipment to carry out her own investigation. While listening to a recording made in the house where the murder took place, Charlotte discovers a strange phenomenon: sounds from the past blend with sounds from…
Bijan Tehrani: My first question is about your first movie Kabul, Kabul I want to know going to Afghanistan, were you really scared? Sedika Mojadidi: Well, when I made my first film I was very inexperienced. I won’t say that I was scared really, I think I was more overwhelmed and disturbed and I think I was more depressed about the situation; You know the state of women and the state of poverty that I saw…and just the state of people’s lives and how miserable the situation was for them there. I think I was more depressed then scared. Bijan:…