Red carpets ribboned through the week at the 23rd Santa Barbara International Film Festival, spanning oohs and ahhs, yelps and squeals for Julie Christie, Cate Blanchett, Javier Bardem, Ryan Gosling, Tommy Lee Jones, and Angelina Jolie, in that order. And stars shone brightly as well on the faux black-sky ceiling of the 2,000-seat Arlington Theater, walled with real gold and amber lanterns and façades of the old Spanish mission town that the city once was. This site for the endless tributes was nearly as packed for a new film from Kazakhstan by Sergei Bodrov, Mongol. A glorious old-style action film…
Browsing: Festivals
The Berlinale Special is a part of the Festival’s official programme and presents recent works by contemporary filmmakers whose films the Berlinale would like to honor. This blend of remembrance, information and experiment will screen at two main venues: the Filmpalast on Kurfürstendamm and the International on the Karl-Marx-Allee. This year’s Berlinale Special will present twelve films, including Gegenschuss – Aufbruch der Filmemacher (Reverse Angle – Rebellion of the Filmmakers), which is showing at the Zoopalast as the highlight of a special Berlinale series (see press release: Dec. 17, 2007). Several more films screening for special tributes will complete the…
Palm Springs – January 13, 2008: Today Cinema Without Borders named The Band’s Visit as the winner of its Bridging The Borders Award at the 2008 Palm Springs International Film Festival. The award luncheon for the 2008 Palm Springs International Film Festival was held at Spencer’s Restaurant and Ehud Bleiber, The Band’s Visit’s producer, received the award from Bijan Tehrani, Editor in Chief of Cinema Without Borders. “At a time in which physical, religious, racial, cultural and economic borders divide the population of our planet, efforts to bridge those borders should be appreciated.” said Bijan. “In that spirit, Cinema Without…
An up-to-the-minute romance, a mysterious family drama, and a sober period piece offer fresh vistas of Scandinavian domestic life in Norway’s WINTERLAND, Iceland’s PARENTS, and Sweden’s THE NEW MAN at the Scandinavian Film Festival L.A. where, according to the fest’s Founder and Director, Jim Koenig, “Nordic film culture gives us an entry into the attitudes, issues, and passions of those societies.” With themes ranging from personal predicaments and cultural pressures to searing social polemics that haunt us to this day, the films wrap us warmly in the desires of their characters. And seeing more of their world than they do…
Darryl Macdonald is Executive Director of the Palm Springs International Film Society, which produces both the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films. He is the co-founder of and has been the Executive and Artistic Director of The Seattle International Film Festival since its inception in 1975, where he served in that capacity until assuming the position of Executive Director of the Palm Springs International Film Society in October of 2003. Simultaneously, he served as the Artistic Director of the Palm Springs Film Festival (1989 -1993), the Hamptons Film Festival (1993 -1996) and…
If anyone knows how to warm up a winter, it’s a Nordic filmmaker. Proof is in store for Los Angeles in January. Spanning two weekends (Jan. 5-6 and 12-13) at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills (135 S. Doheny at Wilshire), the Scandinavian Film Festival L.A. will be bigger than ever this year, showcasing twelve new features from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The festival gives the Southland the rare chance to see Scandinavia’s Academy Award contenders and other recent feature films, high-ranked shorts, and documentaries from the prolific film industries of the Nordic region. I met with…
Diarah N’Daw-Spech was born and educated in France where she studied Spanish in high school and English at the university. Mrs. Spech has developed a 15-year long career as an educational administrator in the USA and is currently the Financial Director for the Center for Educational Outreach and Innovations at Teachers College, Columbia University. She holds a BA in economics from SUNY Albany and a MBA from Columbia University in Management and Marketing. In 1993, Mrs. Spech created with her husband the African Diaspora Film Festival (ADFF – www.NYADFF.org). The mission of ADFF is to expand the traditional views and…
For over a decade Celluloid Dreams, as launched and piloted by Hengameh Panahi, has been arguably the world’s foremost sales company for international cinema of an artistic nature and caliber. Tasteful, risk-taking, and shrewd, Panahi has been not only selling films, but developing and producing them as well, East, West, and in-between. At the creative helm in selecting, packaging, and marketing, she has been a welcome provocateur of public sensibility and a shepherd of artists new to the business of cinema. My notebooks are filled with my impressions of films in which she has played a hand. So when I…
With its global showcases, the AFI Film Festival is one of the most influential film festivals in North America. The AFI Festival is held for 10 days each fall in the film capital of the world: Los Angeles, California. Some of the festival’s most important premiers in the past have included: “Annie Hall”, “Cat People”, “Le Cousin Jules”, “House of Sand and Fog”, “Monster”, “Monster’s ball”….AFI programs includes but are not limited to:1. A feature competition limited to first and second-time filmmakers. 2. A Documentary competition.3. And an international shorts competition that embraces documentary, experimental, animated and narrative films. In…
As the 2007 AFI FEST steps in its tenth day, a little girl in a head scarf will be filling the screen at the Arclight Theater in Hollywood, making mischief on the streets of Teheran as she becomes increasingly drawn to punk, Iron Maiden, and her love of self-expression. Her name is Marjane, and she represents Marjane Satrapi, who won the Cannes Jury Prize with PERSEPOLIS, her animated feature based on her four award-winning graphic novels, international best-sellers since they began appearing in France in 2000. In the film, Satrapi’s memoirs carry the voices of Catherine Deneuve, playing her mother,…