“Gloria and I were just talking about the fact that both of us congratulated Jane when we read that she got arrested,” said artist Judy Chicago on Saturday night at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum, where she was being honored at the annual Gala in the Garden, now in its 17th year. Gloria Steinem, that is. The two feminist icons and longtime friends were cheering on Jane Fonda from afar, said Chicago, after news broke that the actress was put in handcuffs on Friday and charged with unlawful demonstration during a climate change protest outside the U.S. Capitol. “God bless her,”…
Author: World Cinema Reports' Editors
COLLISIONS, directed by Richard Levien tells the story of two young kids separated from their mother by ICE forces. When twelve-year-old Itan (Izabella Alvarez), a straight-A-student in San Francisco, comes home from school, she is stunned to find their furniture up-ended, and no trace of her mother, Yoana (Ana de la Reguera), who was detained by ICE. Child Protective Services dumps Itan and her six-year-old brother Neto (Jason Garcia) with their estranged uncle Evencio (Jesse Garcia), a big rig truck driver. Itan can’t stand him. He’s arrogant, unreliable, and possibly a criminal. After a desperate search, Itan locates Yoana in an…
Shahab Hosseini, the star of Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning movies “A Separation” and “The Salesman”, will lead the cast in Finnish-Iranian director Hamy Ramezan’s new project “Oasis of Now”, Screen Daily announced on Thursday. “Oasis of Now” follows a family seeking asylum in Finland, and won the best project award at the Finnish Film Affair, which ended on Thursday. Hosseini was named best actor for his role in “The Salesman” at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. He is also scheduled to portray Shams-i Tabrizi, the wandering sage who later became the mentor of Rumi in the 13th century CE, in…
They say it takes a village to raise a child. And Jeanne Herry’s sensitive second feature, In Safe Hands, illustrates how that proverb is all the more incisive when a newborn is separated from his mother at birth. A glimpse into the intricate anonymous-mother adoption system in France, the ensemble film follows two parallel story lines — that of little Théo, from his birth to finding a home three months later; and the agonizing process of one very determined prospective mother (magnificently portrayed by Elodie Bouchez). In between, the infant moves from hand to hand, through the astonishingly fine-tuned process…
The 23rd edition of the COLCOA French Film Festival, “A week of French Film and Series Premieres in Hollywood,” will take place from September 23rd – 28th, 2019 at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. The Franco-American Cultural Fund announced that “for the first time in 23 years the showcase dedicated to French Films and Series in Hollywood will move from April to the end of September and be part of the inauguration of the new DGA theater complex.” Achieving a 2018 attendance level of 23,000 people, the festival takes its place as one the most celebrated and…
Adapted from the acclaimed novel Neither Wolf Nor Dog by Kent Nerburn the story follows a white author who gets sucked into the heart of contemporary Native American life in the sparse lands of the Dakota’s by a 95 year old Lakota elder and his side-kick. First published in 1994 and winner of the Minnesota Book award in 1996, no other novel is seen to so successfully bridge the gap between white America and the Native American world. It still sells well aided by a wide readership through academic use. Two sequel novels followed to equal acclaim. Steven Lewis Simpson…
MUBI in September streams films and curated series from both emerging talent and acclaimed directors from across the globe. MUBI continues its ongoing commitment to exclusive new releases in this month, with Oscar-nominated Agnieszka Holland’s haunting Spoor and Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s allegory of authoritarianism A Man of Integrity — both featured in the “Luminaries” strand. MUBI also charts the career of Roland Klick – a contemporary of Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose deft exploration of genre makes for an adventurous viewing experience – and the films of Martín Rejtman, whose debut feature Rapado is credited with launching…
Finding Farideh, a feature documentary by Azadeh Moussavi and Kourosh Ataee, is Iran’s entry for Best International Feature Film Oscar 2020. Finding Farideh” is about an Iranian girl named Farideh, who had been abandoned in a holy shrine in Iran when she was 6 months old in 1976, and then she got adopted by a Dutch couple and left Iran to the Netherlands to start her new life. Her parents promised to take her to Iran when she turns 18, but it never happened because they always thought that Iran is a dangerous country to go. Now, she overcomes her fears…
Cold Case Hammarskjöld is a shocking documentary by Mads Brügger. In 1961, United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane mysteriously crashed, killing Hammarskjöld and most of the crew. We had an audio interview with Mads Brügger that we post it here as one of our podcasts: https://soundcloud.com/user-222526075/cold-case-an-interview-with?in=user-222526075/sets/cwb-podcast With Dag Hammarskjöld’s case still unsolved 50-plus years later, Danish journalist, filmmaker, and provocateur Mads Brügger (The Red Chapel, The Ambassador) leads us down an investigative rabbit hole to unearth the truth. Scores of false starts, dead ends, and elusive interviews later, Brügger and his sidekick, Swedish Göran Björkdahl, begin to sniff out something more monumental than anything…
For more than 35 years, China enforced a radical experiment in population control, restricting couples to a single child and imposing harsh penalties on those who violated the policy. In the 2019 Sundance U.S. Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary One Child Nation, Chinese born filmmakers Nanfu Wang (Hooligan Sparrow) and Jialing Zhang dig fearlessly into the past with startling testimony from victims and perpetrators, including members of Wang’s own family, as well as archival footage, vintage propaganda materials and intimate first-hand accounts of the policy’s horrific consequences. A stunning, nuanced indictment of a program that prioritized a national agenda over human life,…