I know, I am super late. Toronto, Venice and Telluride have already begun and I have not written about this year’s Cannes, which was like no other; and no other will be like this year’s again.
I actually could get every festival ticket I wanted. I had nice long discussions with friends and new friends about the movies and our thoughts about them. I had time to spare and yet saw twelve films. Not so many perhaps but after 18 months of lockdown, seeing movies in audiences was intense. Everything was more intense and more gratifying.
Sahraa Karimi, the Afghani director of the 2019 Venice premiering film, ‘Hava, Maryam, Ayesha’ and the current President of the Afhan Film Organization, the state’s film company, and its first female president, pleads with the world to stand against the Taliban’s rule which will eliminate the voice of women and all free expression.
To All the #Film_Communities in The World and Who Loves Film and Cinema! I write to you with a broken heart and a deep hope that you can join me in protecting my beautiful people, especially filmmakers from the Taliban. #Share it please, don’t be #silent.
It is enjoying a BIG expansion in NYC, Los Angeles, AND Canada in theaters this weekend.
See it and spread the word!
Film Threat: “…an inventive, charming, feel-good comedy…”
Deadline: ‘Tango Shalom’ Dances Into Arthouse: Taps ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ Pedigree, Woos Older Demo With Postcard Marketing — Specialty Box Office
The problem is that the over-35 crowd of moviegoers is fearful of entering cinemas. Wearing a mask, sitting in your own cluster with seats empty around you creates a safe space. In Berlin, we were so happy to re-enter theaters and were so well entertained. I even went to the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht’s theater, and saw THE THREE PENNY OPERA live! And finally caught Dominic Moll’s Fabian, or Going to the Dogs in our favorite theater at Hackescher Hof. And we were safe! …
Sunday, September 12, 2021 at 11am — 12pm PDT, 2pm — 3pm EDT, 8pm — 9pm CET. Watch ‘Styx’ by Wolfgang Fischer and join us for a discussion!
KINO! Film Salon. Each month we choose a German film or series currently available to stream, watch it independently, and come together for a hosted conversation with other fans of German film.
Our film for September is Styx, directed by Wolfgang Fischer. Successful doctor Rike plans to use her vacation time to fulfill her longtime dream of sailing out to Ascension Island alone. But after a storm, she sees a badly damaged — and severely overloaded — refugee boat nearby and is forced to face the refugee crisis head-on in this tense moral thriller.
Telescope gives you links to the…
A Tale of Love and Desire
From the very first moment I entered the lecture halls of the Sorbonne on the first day as a freshman student alongside our two protagonists, I was an empathetic viewer. How it reminded me of my first day at university as a freshman and also the first day I attended the Sorbonne two years later as a junior.
A Tale of Love and Desire was the closing film of the Critics’ Week and surprisingly has not yet been picked up for North America. It is a beautiful example of cross cultural understanding and misunderstanding taking place in a boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl story, told with such subtle reminders of how cultures and foregone conclusions are so different in fact from what we initially believe.
On their first day at the Sorbonne, he texts his friends in the ghetto that all the girls are blonds and redheads …until he meets Farah, an astoundingly self assured beautiful…
Within the activities of the 74th Cannes Film Festival, the Arab Cinema Center (ACC) has announced that the recipients of its Achievement Award for Film Critics this year are Lebanese Film Critic Mohammed Rouda & American Film Critic Sydney Levine for their inspiring careers in film criticism in the Arab world. The Arab Cinema Center (ACC) also dedicated a section that sheds the light on Mohammed Rouda and Sydney Levineâs careers, within the new edition of the Arab Cinema Magazine.
Held within the events of the 74th Cannes Film Festival, Arab Cinema Center announced the winners of the 5th Critics Awards for Arab Films. This year, the international jury panel encompasses 160 film critics from 63 countries. The jurors reviewed the Arab films that have been produced in 2020 through the digital platform of Festival Scope, the ACC’s partner.
Deborah Young, Manager of the Critics Awards for Arab Films, commented on that saying, “Although last year was hard on everyone, the Arab Cinema managed to provide a high-quality level of fiction and documentary films; making it hard to pick the nominees for this yearâs Critics Awards for Arab Films. My congratulations to everyone who made it this year, and thank you to all the critics of the jury panel for their efforts.”
See footage of the Award Winners here.
Co-founders of ACC, Alaa Karkouti and Maher Diab, commented saying “This year’s edition witnessed a fierce competition among nominees that…
The first ever internationally coproduced feature film co-written and directed by Iraqi women is set to have its World Premiere at Sarajevo Film Festival in Bosnia and Herzegovina in a special program section entitled Dealing with the Past.
Our River…Our Sky (Arabic title: Kalshi Mako) is the narrative feature debut of Maysoon Pachachi, a London-based filmmaker of Iraqi origin. The script was co-written with Irada Al-Jubori, a Baghdad-based writer, journalist and professor of media studies at Baghdad University.
Winner of a $100,000 script prize funded by IWC Schaffhausen and awarded to the director at Dubai International Film Festival in 2012 by Head of Jury Cate Blanchett, the project was filmed in 2019 in Sulaymaniyah (Iraqi Kurdistan) and Baghdad (Iraq) after an extended development and fundraising period which facilitated the shooting of a video pilot in Kuwait in 2015.
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After playing five strong weeks in New York, “Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe” went on to play other cities in the USA and throughout the world in 2017.
A stylishly accomplished and intellectually well thought out character study of a man who was the most popular author in the world in the 1920s and 1930s who, today, is nearly forgotten. This story is told through six windows of 20 minutes each. This unique storytelling technique gives the film an immediacy as each part of Stefan Zweig’s life plays out in real time.
This is the story of a refugee, a tale of losing one’s home and of the search for a new one. It is a visually stunning historic picture about a great artist and, at the same time, a film about a time in which Europe was coming apart.
Having just read his memoir, The World of Yesterday and having been on my own private search for what it means to have to leave your homeland because of its extreme politics (he was Jewish and was one of too many, including Walter Benjamin, who finally ended their own lives because of…
