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Vanessa is a novel writer, screenwriter, rep and a film producer. She shares her discoveries and film surprises. :-)
Read her bio on: www.vanessamcmahon.com
 Vanessa in Aruba: AIFF
INTERVIEW with director Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, SOUND OF NOISE (2010)
THE SOUND OF NOISE (Sweden, 2010) screened in competition at the 30th Istanbul Film Festival IFF. Co-directed by directors Johannes Starne Nilsson and Ola Simonsson, this film is a one of a kind experiment of music on film. Many have compared the lively inventive percussionists in the film to the traveling band STOMP but as Johannes explained, ‘well, maybe it’s a bit similar but our band will ...
photo still from film
One of the documentaries highest on my list at this year’s 13th TDF was the film, RAW MATERIAL (Greece, 2011) by director Christos Karakepelis. This documentary left me with chills, not only because of its raw subject about the declining Greek economy but the worsening of the situation of immigrants to Greece and the inhumane lives they lead.
When we follow the lives of three Roma from Albania, two Indians, a Turk and a Greek who subsist on the collecting...
Interview with director Amir of THE TILLMAN STORY (USA, 2010).
First, read more about the film here: http://www.fest21.com/en/blog/vanessa_mcmahon/the_tillman_story_q_and_a
ME: First of all I want to congratulate you on your film which to me is very thought-provoking in terms of the questioning of what makes a myth.
AMIR: Well, thank you.
ME: So, how did you start to make this film and when?
AMIR: Well, we started in 2007 which was right around ...
THE TILLMAN STORY- Q and A.
THE TILLMAN STORY (USA, 2010) by director Amir Bar-Lev is a documentary about the football player Pat Tillman who gave up a multimillion dollar career in professional American football to go to war with the Army Rangers in 2002. He sacrificed personal success to fight alongside his brothers in war, a decision which for him was deeply personal. While in Iraq, Pat was tragically killed by ‘friendly fire’ (his own men). After his death he b...
MY SWEET CANARY (Israel, Turkey, Greece, 2011) opened the 13th Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival to a full enthusiastic audience and standing ovations. Director Roy Sher and two singers featured in the film, Mehtap Demir and Martha D. Lewis, attended a Q and A after both screenings of the film.
In response to a question from the audience of how his fascination with Roza began, Roy explains: ‘My first interaction with Roza was through hearing her and her Jewish...
MY SWEET CANARY (Israel, France, Greece, 2011) by director Roy Sher opened the 13th Thessaloniki Film Festival at the Olympian theater to a sold out audience on March 11th, 2011 and screened again on March 15th. The energy and excitement of the audience began with the presentation of the film by the director and sustained right to the end.
Filmed in Turkey, Greece, Israel and England, MY SWEET CANARY is a purely captivating story about history, love, art, passion and vibrant radian...
PORTRAIT OF A MAN (Finland, 2010) by director Visa Koiso-Kanttila screened in competition at this year’s Thessaloniki Doc Fest to international audiences. It is a beautifully filmed story about the truth of one man’s search for new meaning in his life. While a true story, this has the feeling of a fiction film as it follows one main character and his personal search for truth.
A Finnish man, Kalle Rissanen, is in now in his 40s. His father killed himself at the same age and recent...
IF NOT US, WHO? (Greece, 2010) is a documentary film by Greek filmmaker Nikoletta Papathanassiou about highschool students in Athens in 2006 who occupy their highschool in protest of the worsening education system in Greece which they feel is turning them into robots to serve an Americanized capitalist system rather than to create thinking individuals who serve a collective democratic society.
The students sleep in and live in the school in form of a strike making it impossible fo...
still from the film
HERO OF ALL SEAS (Syria, 2010) is a poignant and heart-felt short documentary film, 27’, about a Kurdish man named Abo Yashar who is one of the few men from his native country to have escaped successfully to Athens, Greece. Thousands of Kurdish emigrants have tried to flee to Europe illegally and have failed, making Abo a kind of local hero for his so-called successful passage as many of these emigrants lost their lives at sea during the perilous passage to Greece...
THUNDER SOUL screened at the 13th Thessaloniki Film Festival last week at the Olympian Theater to an international audience.
Winner of the Pan-African Film festival of Los Angeles 2011, is the documentary film THUNDER SOUL (USA, 2010) about inspiration, heroism, music, the vibrant 70’s and last but not least Thunder Soul… This is the story about a funk/soul band in the 1970s (my favorite decade) that began in the all-American Kashmere highschool, Houston, Texas. This was a tim...
photo stills from the film
Interview with Esther Podemski on THE PEASANT AND THE PRIEST (USA, 2011), a story about two old men in Italy whose ways of life have been unchanged through the centuries from medieval times to present day where the old ways are dying to contemporary forces causing much of what we know as Italy to fade a little more with each march towards modernization and mass globalization.
In Thessaloniki I had the opportunity to sit with director Esther Podemski to...
WHITE AS SNOW (Kar Beyaz)
The film WHITE AS SNOW (Turkey, 2010) by writer/director Selim Gunes screened in Sofia during the 15th Sofia International Film Festival. The film is based on a short story called ARYAN by Sabahattin Ali about a young twelve year-old boy, Hasan, who lives in poverty in Turkey’s cold East Black Sea mountain area. He lives with his mother and two younger brothers while his father is in prison. In order to survive and provide for his siblings and mother, ...
One day before arriving in Sofia, Bulgaria to speak to press about his latest film, MOTHERS, Goran Paskaljevic (above, left) awarded Milcho Manchevski (above, right) the Best Feature award from the 'Europe Out of Europe' section in Belgrade Film Festival March 06, 2011.
Director of newly released in festivals ‘Mothers', Milcho Manchevski explains his film to press in Sofia, Bulgaria at SIFF 2011. March 08, 2011. Because this press conference was given in Bulgarian and ...
photo still from Guanape Sur
Guanape Sur (Italy, 2010. 24’) is a short documentary film about the small island of the same name off the coast of Peru. Humanly uninhabitable, the island is home to hundreds of thousands of birds, resembling something like a Hitchcock film come to life. Despite being an island comprised of rock and bird excrement, two guards live on the island and in the film, two of these guards usher in hundreds of workers to gather excrement in sacks and bring them ba...
photo still from EVERLASTING SORROW, LIFE AFTER THE DEATH PENALTY
Everlasting Sorrow, Life After the Death Penalty (France, 2010), by director David Andre won the award for best film dealing with human rights issues by the Amnesty International. After the awards ceremony, it closed the 13th Thessaloniki Film Festival with the screening of Andre’s film to a full theater.
EVERLASTING SORROW is about Death Row murderer Sean Sellers who killed three people at age sixteen and w...
Kinbaku- Art of Bondage (Finland, 2009), at 13th TDF, Thessaloniki Film Festival
This fascinating short documentary film by director Jouni Hokkanen tells
the story of ‘tight binding’, a Japanese form of art through bondage on women who want to be bound. Apparently, tying things up is a sacred quality in the Shinto religion, and this does not exclude the tying up of people as well. Rope artists who express themselves through bondage are considered to have ‘rope fetishes’ usin...
A FUTURE WITHOUT OIL (France, 2010) by French director Laetitia Moreau is a 52’ documentary about President of Ecuador Rafael Correa and his fight with Ecuadorians against mass exploitation of oil from industrialized countries. An Ecuadorian scientific team goes on a three-year mission to raise multi-millions of dollars from US and Europe for a new form of energy development that would be more profitable than oil itself, according to their scientific studies...
Sofia, Bulgaria hosts its 15th International Film Festival this year on the dates 4-13th March 2011. One of the most important film festivals on the festival map, it features not only top international films but Eastern European and Bulgarian national cinema as well. Various industry professionals from the international cinema world will attend to support and/or present their films in competition at the festival.
The SIFF 2011 festival officially opened o...
Pegasus Etalon d'Or in Burkina Faso, best film of the 2 years in Ouagadougou!
Mohamed Mouftakir's film 'Pegase' (Pegasus) wins Best Picture (Etalon d'Or) in Burkina Faso at FESPACO (Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou). Mohamed's film premiered at the 2011 Dubai Film Festival DIFF and has since won Best Picture (Grand Prix) in Tangier International Film Festival before winning in Ouagadougou.
General delegate of the 22nd Pan-African Film and TV F...
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Red Light Revolution (2010) by director Sam Voutas.
When I met Sam it was at happy hour in in the Blue Agave during the 2011 Santa Barbara International Film Festival. His story intrigued me as it would anyone- He's an Australian living in Beijing who has just directed the first ever ‘Chinese sex-shop comedy' with his Canadian producer Melanie Ansley. What a pitch! That was all the description I ne...
Sound like a RHCP album??? :-) Well, it's not. No, this is the latest film by celebrated Macedonian filmmaker Milcho Manchevski (Before the Rain, 1994). This week he spoke in a press conference at the 2011 Belgrade International Film Festival about his new film 'Mothers' (2010), which premiered at the 2011 Berlinale. I havent seen the film yet but there is a fantastic in depth article on 'Mothers' below: "MOTHERS begins with fiction, indeed with the fabrication of a lie, mov...
This definitely seems to be a year full of films about the ever increasing global situation of international border crossing… from ‘For A Moment, Freedom’ (2009, Iran) to ‘Illegal’ (2010, Belgium) to ‘The Albanian’ (2010, Germany) and the internationally award-winning film ‘Morgen’ (2010, Romania) by director Marian Crisan. While each film shows its unique and gripping personal story, ‘Morgen’ surprises through its expressive simplicity.
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In continuation of my tribute to Persian cinema (previous article) I am still long overdue to review this stellar film of 2009 that I watched months ago and again recently with the intention to interview actor Navid Akhavan; but alas, our schedules rarely coincide to make the time to meet up so in the interim I will take this time to say a few words about ‘For A Moment, Freedom'.
Directed by Arash T. Riahi, ‘For A Moment Freedom' features an ensem...
A tribute to Iranian cinema... From ‘Women Without Men' (2009) to ‘Nader And Simin, A Separation' (2011)
So, seeing how Iranian cinema continues to make leaps and bounds for World Cinema in general let me recall one of my favorite Iranian films of the past year...
‘Women Without Men' by director Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari premiered at the 66th Venice Film Festival on 8 Sep 2009 at the Sala Grande but sadly, I had not yet had the chance to see i...
Zineb: ‘Do you like living this way? ‘
Rihanna: ‘Yes. Because I can feel the ground. Not like me'
Then Rihanna begs to be left alone so she can ‘dream'.
When I met director Mohamed Mouftakir we were sitting next to each other in Dubai at the 7th Dubai film festival during the premier to another North African film. At the end of that film I asked Mohamed if he liked it. He said, ‘no' because it was to...
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McMahon Vanessa 
