New York, NY – After two years of planning and pre-production around th globe, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim’s dream to create a global cinema event was realized Saturday with the launch of Pangea Day – a multi-country event designed to bring the world closer together through the medium of film. In a four-hour event broadcast live from Cairo, Kigal, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro, thousands of onlookers watched a program of short films, brief lectures, engaging talks and live-music Pangea Day was born back in 2006 when Jehane Noujaim, who directed the critically-acclaimed 2004 documentary “Control Room,” was…
Author: Tanja Meding
It’s sad to say goodbye to this year’s impressively programmed Tribeca Film Festival, which closed on Sunday. So I’ll delay the inevitable by sharing my thoughts on some of the final screenings and events I attended without – forgive the pun – further adieu.Over at Tribeca Talks series, writer-director-composer Mike Figgis reminded folks of yet another reason to hyphenate him: he’s a technically ingenious inventor as well. Figgis’ “Fig Rig” innovation not only serves as a stabilizing wheel and frame mount for small digital cameras and various accessories, it also serves to stabilize his finances as well. The revenues he’s…
New York, NY — With Tribeca now in full swing, I have blissfully ignored the tedious details of my daily life – the incessant tracking of Obama websites, the weekly hoarding of Arborio rice from my local Gristedes — in favor of the far more compelling dramas playing out on the festival’s screens. Here’s a short run down of what’s been happening in the past few days:Armed with my digital camera and reporters pad, I attended Tribeca’s opening press conference last week, attended by an all-star cast including Tribeca co–founder and producer Jane Rosenthal; the new Governor of New York…
New York, NY — With the Democratic candidates busy beating themselves up, the U.S. economy beating itself down and the price of a night on the town equivalent to a week on the job, New Yorkers have good reason to feel a bit bruised and confused. Which has given me a great excuse to seek the perfect distraction and hike on down (who has cab fare?) to the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs from April 23-May 4. While the polls have barely opened on this one, I can already report that this year’s edition promises to be one of the…
In the new film Juno (directed by Jason Reitman who also did Thank you for Smoking and written by Diablo Cody), the main theme dealt with is teen pregnancy. Yet instead of looking down on Juno (played by Ellen Page) for making a ‘mistake’ by having sex at such an early age (16 years old), the screenwriter chooses rather to empower her and show her strength in this situation. We see her grow as she deals with things some people even twice her age haven’t gotten to yet.We eventually meet the adoptive mother, Vanessa (played by Jennifer Garner) who appears…
My particular interest in “No Country for Old Menâ€, the new Coen Brothers’ film, lies in the invisibility of the female characters throughout the film, which leaves the adventure solely to the men. While I can’t say this film was bad, conversely being one of the best films I have seen in a while, its characters nonetheless seemed rather skewed within the masculine/feminine spectrum. This skew is one of the factors that lead us to placing it among the Westerns like any classic John Ford film or the more recent Eastwood films. Consider the Western genre, and one of its…
When we are exploring the effects of specifically gender-coded characters in the cinema, we are reminded of the very fundamental question about the effect of a movie on its spectator: Is it the movie that dictates the behaviors of society or is it society that dictates the behaviors in a movie? As far as exploring the relationship between gendered characters (i.e. a character who is specifically skewed as either completely feminine or masculine, and has very few androgynous qualities otherwise) we must question the purpose for that skew, as most people are not completely masculine or feminine, but rather a…