Author: Diane Sippl

With a PhD in Comparative Culture from the University of California, Irvine, Diane Sippl has taught 100 courses in film, theater, literature, writing, and culture studies for the University of California Los Angeles, the University of California Irvine, Occidental College, and California State University Los Angeles. She has also published over 70 researched articles and reviews as a critic of contemporary world cinema for journals such as CineAction, Cineaste, and FilmMaker and as an arts and culture critic for magazines and newspapers. Dr. Sippl also curates and writes on American independent cinema and has prepared materials for IFP and Film Independent on films screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival. She has critiqued scripts for the Story Department at Paramount Studios. Since 1994 Dr. Sippl has served as a program adviser for the International Film Festival, Mannheim-Heidelberg in Germany and also as a festival planner, panelist, and jury member at the Locarno International Film Festival and Cinéma tout écran in Geneva, both in Switzerland; the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival; and the Houston Pan-Cultural Film Festival. She has lived and worked in Hong Kong and Germany and has traveled extensively throughout Asia, the Russia, Europe (east and west), and the United States.

The Poetry of Everyday Life: Picture Virgil and Horace spooling their lyrical dramas and tales a millennium later on the streets of Rome. Once telling of mortals sacrificing their children to the gods and carrying their fathers on their shoulders across the seas surrounding Italy or feuding with jealousies and infidelities of their own, the eloquent verses take to city traffic and crank themselves out in mid-20th-century images. The betrayals and crimes, loyalties and desires, are still there, and so are the ashes of war; but the gods are fascists and the mortals are men on bicycles riding to work,…

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A film about war without bullets, bombs, or bloodshed — it’s difficult even to be convinced of “the enemy,” although Alexandra was shot on location in Grozny in the midst of the real war between Russia and Chechnya. But this we know mostly from what we’ve heard, because in the barren dust and heat, we could be in Afghanistan or elsewhere, since precious little happens in terms of action or plot that would pin down a particular time and place. Yet what matters is exactly what we see, and how Alexander Sokurov lets us experience it. Owing to the classical…

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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…

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The top prize for narrative filmmaking at the 2007 AFI Fest went to Lee Isaac Chung for his first feature, MUNYURANGABO, about two young men, one Hutu and one Tutsi, on a journey through Rwanda’s haunted countryside. Upon earning a BA in Biology at Yale as a pre-med student, Isaac Chung took a chance on his side-passion for cinema and earned an MFA in Film Studies at the University of Utah in 2005. Once Dept. Chair Kevin Hanson pointed him in the direction of the films to see, he approached cinema “monastically,” viewing ten or more films a week and…

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MIRUSH, a new film from Norway, is the third feature by director Marius Holst. After studying at the London International Film School, he made the prize-winning CROSS MY HEART and HOPE TO DIE. Then he started a production company with three colleagues and made DRAGONFLIES. He has also established himself as one of Norway’s foremost directors of commercials. On October 21st MIRUSH was awarded the top prize of the 56th International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg in Germany and it has been showing at numerous other festivals.“Hold me,” Mirush mutters out of the side of his mouth to his big brother, but…

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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,…

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In a series of connecting “tent-palaces” housing two 1,000-seat theaters on the banks of the Rhine in Mannheim, Germany, and simultaneously in the historic center of Heidelberg, the university town half an hour up the Neckar from Mannheim, this 56-year-old festival of art-house cinema prides itself in launching newcomers. It announced its laureates on October 21 after twelve days of Competition and Discovery screenings, with an homage to Ingmar Bergman as well, and a wide showcase of New Chinese Cinema. Presiding on the International Jury this year were Hanna Lee, producer of the award-winning Korean films, Turning Gate, Woman Is…

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In two lines from Persian poetry, Rumi tells us, “I am the polo stick; you are the ball. Wherever I hit you, you will go; but wherever you go, I have to follow you…” It’s not a perfect translation, but filmmaker Ramin Bahrani gets it right in transforming our pre-fabricated notion of the “pushcart man” into “Man Push Cart”This one-of-a-kind cameo illuminates for us that there is something worse than the disappointment that life promised more, or the burdens that keep a person grinding onward as the days pass from one bad cycle to another. And that is the even…

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When <b>Julie Gavras</b>, writer-director of <b><i>Blame It on Fidel</b></i>, was ten years old, her family was vacationing in Mexico while her father, Costa-Gavras, Oscar-winning filmmaker of <i>Z</i> (1968), was making <i>Missing</i> (1982), based on the true story of an American journalist who disappeared during Pinochet’s coup d’état in Chile. “It was my political awakening,” Julie Gavras has said. “Observing my father on the set, I learned what a military junta was… and I started understanding politics.”So when she adapted Domitilla Calamai’s 2006 novel, Tutta Colpa di Fidel for the screen, she decided to focus the story (originally set between 1968…

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Lauded as one of America’s most gifted filmmakers, Charles Burnett has just completed his largest film ever, Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation. While earning his MFA in filmmaking at UCLA, Burnett made the now classic Killer of Sheep, and on that basis he was awarded the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the “genius grant”) with others to follow from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the J. P. Getty Foundation. He is also the winner of the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award and Howard University’s Paul…

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