Browsing: News

India Express is reporting that the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI), slated to begin its annual International Film Festival on March 6th, will present Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura with its International Life Time Achievement award. The award , the first of its kind to be handed out by the festival, will be presented on March 13th, as the festival commences. Additionally, Saura, who holds directing credits in over forty films, will have eight of his films screened throughout the festival. In its tenth year of existence, The MAMI International Film Festival will screen over 100 films from 40…

Read More

CWB’s International Editor James Ulmer recently returned from the 58th Berlin International Film Festival, where he filed his exclusive series of Berlinale Unbound columns and on-the-scene videos. Missed the original reports? Click here to view James’ complete column and video coverage of Berlinale 2008, from The Rolling Stones’ arrival to a movie from Absurdistan. Belinale Reports was partly sponsored by Atlantic Travel (Travel ATT) Berlinale Unbound, Market Animals Part 1 (Watch Video) BERLIN, Feb. 13 — Angela Hawkins calls it like she sees it, and on a good day she sees the European Film Market as the rough equivalent of…

Read More

Hollywood – February 24 – Tonight The Counterfeiters , directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky from Austria won the Best Foreign Language Film Award. Before the Academy Awards ceremony Stefan Ruzowitzky told Bijan Tehrani, Editor in Chief of Cinema Without Borders: “Even becoming nominated was very important. The Counterfeiters is opening in the US and also in a few European and Asian countries in the past few weeks. The Academy Awards are an important mean in promoting a film. It brings a lot of awareness towards the nominated films. If we get to the stage tonight, it’s a great win, and if…

Read More

Cinema Without Borders hosts a SSG Screening Series on Sunday, February 24th, 12:30 PM at the Fine Arts Theater in Los Angeles. This screening is dedicated to the Best films from the 2007 Palm Springs ShortFest International Festival and Film Market. Here are the seven highlights of Palm Springs International ShortFest that provide some distinctly different perspectives on our world:THE BEST OF SHORTFESTTHE NEXT MOVE Finland, Director: Laura Neuvonen, 13 min.When a young couple moves into their first home, the wife gets a little carried away with the decorating.IT SNOWS IN MARRAKECH Switzerland, Director: Hicham Alhayat, 15 min.A dutiful son…

Read More

Visiting the European Film Market is a bit like going out for pot luck in the neighborhood: you never who or precisely what you’ll encounter, you just pray the food is edible and the diners are bearable. Like any market, this one has its fair share of unappetizing and half-baked movies among the over 400 offerings here. But there’s always good stuff too, for those bothering to play hooky from the festival and head down the street to the Market’s grandiose three-story home, past the gold line in the sidewalk that marks the site of the old Berlin Wall.Like the…

Read More

BERLIN, Feb. 11 — It’s hard to resist the tickle of a good movie title, no matter how the movie itself stacks up. Such was my take on Absurdistan, a comedy screening at the Berlinale’s European Film Market which, absurdly enough, I didn’t manage to see despite the lure of its logline: Two childhood sweethearts in a village in Central Asia find their first night of love threatened when the local women go on a sex strike after the men refuse to attend to the town’s water shortage. Think Lysistrata comes to Borat-ville. “The women say no sex until you…

Read More

BERLIN, Feb. 10 — You would think all the cheers and stomping and paparazzi pandering at yesterday’s Berlinale press conference was for Daniel Day Lewis or another export from Hollywood, but in fact it was for Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. With a fan club that clearly extends beyond Indian shores, Khan was in town to promote his mega-budget musical Om Shanti Om, directed by top Bollywood choreographer Farah Khan and billed as the most expensive Indian production ever made. It’s a candy-colored, adrenolin-injected and gloriously over-the-top tribute to the memory of 1970s Bollywood sari musicals, starring Khan as wannabe…

Read More

She may be relatively unknown in America, but Maria Schrader can excite the paparazzi in Berlin. When we cornered her at the party for the film company X in Berlin, people couldn’t stop dropping by to talk about her new film released in Germany last November, Liebesleben (Love Life), which she wrote and directed and which unspools is here at the Berlinale as part of the German Cinema section. Filmed in Israel, Liebesleben is the story of a “forbidden love,” as Schrader puts it, and continues her with the themes of her other movies as one of Germany’s leading actresses,…

Read More

BERLIN (Feb. 8) – Despite a bitter chill in Berlin, crowds here at the opening night of 58th Berlinale warmed up quickly when all four of the Rolling Stones arrived on the red carpet for the world premiere of Martin Scorcese-directed concert feature “Shine A Light..” Keith Richards bounded out of the limo first, followed by Ron Woods and drummer Charlie Watts. Finally, a huge roar from the crowd met Jagger when he jumped out sporting a long wool scarf and started hobnobbing with a long lineup of TV microphones stuck in his face. And there was Scorcese, darting around…

Read More

Santa Barbara – February 4 – Angelina Jolie took home the Outstanding Performance of the Year award last Saturday at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) for her role as the wife of the murdered film journalist Daniel Pearl in the film A Mighty Heart. Clint Eastwood presented the award at a packed Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara.Released in 2006, A Mighty Heart tells the story of Mariane Pearl and her journey in coming to terms with the death of her husband, who was researching a Wall Street Journal story on the shoe bomber Richard Reid when he was…

Read More