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.

Res-o-lu-tion. It rhymes with Rev-o-lu-tion. Rhymes with, but not jives with. And that’s just it. As poet-activist Audre Lorde once put it, “You can’t dismantle the Master’s house with the Master’s tools.”Paolo Freire knew this. At a cocktail reception for him at UCLA after he addressed over a thousand students, he stood with his head tilted back to munch off the bottom of a cluster of grapes and remarked to me, “You can’t tell someone who owns three cars that he doesn’t need one.” The wiry, pint-sized Brazilian revolutionary of pedagogy whose books were theories-turned-field manuals for professors and farm…

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Owl and the Sparrow is a tiny tale, as low-to-the-ground as the little girl who searches for a family she can call her own. Pham Thi Han, who plays ten-year-old Thuy, describes her character as “down on her luck.” So she runs away from her uncle’s bamboo factory, where her work is never good enough, to the big city. A flower girl on the streets of Saigon, she discovers two other castaway hearts, in a man who takes refuge as a zookeeper (Le The Lu) and a flight attendant (Cat Ly) who’s looking for love.Like a modern-day Pip in Vietnam,…

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Two filmmakers made impressive breakthroughs this year at Cannes. As the festival celebrated its 60th anniversary, the jury gave the top prize to <B>Cristian Mungiu</b> for <b><i>4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days</i></b>, making it the first time a Romanian won the prestigious Palme d’Or. It also gave the Jury Prize (in a tie with <b>Carlos Reygadas</b> for <b><i>Silent Night</i></b>) to an Iranian woman, <b>Marjane Satrapi</b>, and her co-director, <b>Vincent Paronnaud</b>, for <b><i>Persepolis</i></b>, an animation film based on Satrapi’s graphic novels about growing up during and after Iran’s 1979 revolution. Considering the awards they bestowed, two observations can be made…

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For his fourth feature film, Life Is All About Friends (UNNI), a French/British/Indian co-production of Patou Films, Flying Elephant Films, and Maya Films, writer-director Murali Nair cast four boys in the main roles — Master Ajith, Master Sarath, Master Likhil, and Master Noble. They are all students at Sree Krishna High School where he himself once studied. When the camera takes us to Alathur village, to the film’s location in southern India, we discover the boys pulling pranks on their teachers and classmates, spying on girls, ditching class, and boxing or wrestling at every opportunity. But we also find them…

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