This is an interview with Darryl Macdonald, Executive Director of the Palm Springs International Film Society about Palm Springs ShortFest 2007. Darryl produces both the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films. Bijan Tehrani: Congratulations for the great ShortFest 2007. How successful festival was for you? Do you think you have achieved the goals you had in mind? Darryl Macdonald: This year’s Festival was hugely gratifying. Attendance took a major jump across the board – audiences, filmmakers and industry came to the Festival in record numbers and the Film Market hit new highs…
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<b>Hossein Mahini</b> , a graduate of filmmaking from Iran, worked as a film director in Iranian National Television until 1986 when he went to live in exile in Sweden. Since then, Mahini has worked as an independent photographer and filmmaker and also as a staff member in West Sweden’s Film Center (Film Centrum Vast). Mahini is the Exile Film Festival’s founder and organizer.Cinema Without Borders: Please tell us about the history of the Exile Film Festival and how you got involved with it.Hossien Mahini: The whole thing goes back to 1993, I actually started this and it was my own…
Milan (a co-production of Germany, Serbia, and Montenegro), Directed by Michael Kezele, won Bridging the Borders Award at the Palm Springs ShortFest International Film Festival and Market. Jury members at this year’s event are actor Bill Pullman; Eileen Arandiga, Festival Director of the Worldwide Short Film Festival in Toronto; Dana Harris, editor Variety.com; Sydney Levine of Film Finders; and Dragan Milinkovic, Serbian film academic and producer. Milan is about a day in the life of a family in the countryside near Belgrade during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Ognjen, maybe 16, horses around with his younger brother, Milan,…
<b>Moon Molson</b> was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and moved more than 15 times before settling in his current “home town” of New York City. He graduated from Dartmouth College where he received a B.A. in English, Film Studies and Philosophy.<br>In fall 2000, Moon entered the M.F.A. program in Film Directing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. In 2002, he won the prestigious Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Student Internship and was flown to Los Angeles to work in television commercials.His thesis short film “Pop Foul” won the REEL Shorts Jury Prize at the 2007 South By Southwest…
At the end of the 1980’s, as director of the Sarajevo Obala Art Center <b>Mirsad Purivatra</b> oversaw the works of numerous theater productions. Many of them, including Tatoo Theatre and Moonplay, were featured in theatre festivals in Edinburgh, Paris, Toronto, New York, Montreal, and London. During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Center organized a great number of exhibitions by B&H; authors that were shown around the world and in Sarajevo. Obala hosted such international artists as Christian Boltanski, Annie Leibowitz, Sophie Ristelhueber, and Peter Waldegg. In 1995, Obala established the Sarajevo Film Festival, which in 12 years has…
<b>Darryl Macdonald</b> is the 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 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…
Shohreh Jandaghian: Please tell about yourself and how you became the director of “Lola Kenya Screen”?Ogova Ondego (Director of “Lola Kenya Screen”): Perhaps the best way to describe myself is that I am a practitioner in the field of arts, culture, and development. I publish ArtMatters.Info, the premier critical website covering arts, culture and lifestyle in eastern and southern Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands. I am the founder and director of the ArtMatters.Info Critics Guild that works with arts and culture journalists in eastern and southern Africa, and founder and creative director of Lola Kenya Screen, the annual international…
Ryo Nagasawa Program Officer, of Japan Society Film Program was Born in 1979 in Yamagata, Japan and she grew up in a family-owned movie theater business in northern Japan. Ryo moved to US in 1998 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Purchase College, State University of New York in 2004.In 2004 and 2005 Ryo Nagasawa worked on two film series, Critic’s Choice: Susan Sontag on Japanese Film, Part II and Otaku Cinema Slam!. She has also worked as a film coordinator on After War, Hiroshi Sugimoto Film Series: The Moving Image of Modern Art and Against…
PhDr. Julietta Zacharová studied German and English languages and American literature at the University of Salzburg, Austria. After moving back to her hometown, Prague, she studied film history and theory at the Faculty of Philosophy. She graduated from the Charles University with a Doctor Degree. In her final diploma work, entitled Cinematography and the State: To the Genesis of the Cinematographical Legislation until the Year 1918, she concentrated on early history of cinema in Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, focusing on the first laws applied to film business. She cooperated with Prague National Film Archive on several research projects that where dealing with…
In three short years, since Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (multiple wins including Un Certain Regard in Cannes, Silver Hugo in Chicago, and several critics awards in 2005) managed to get on scores of 10-best lists, finishing in 2006 as the No. 1 movie in the ndieWIRE Critics Poll of 107 voters, young Romanian filmmakers have made a name for themselves much like the Iranian cineastes did before them. Director of Trafic, Catalin Mitulescu won Palme d’Or for Best Short in Cannes in 2004, then went on to direct his first feature, The Way I Spent The End…