The Middle East International Film Festival – Abu Dhabi (MEIFF) today revealed its Closing Night Film, director Paul Haggis’s IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH, which is a story about a war veteran and his wife who are in search of their son, a soldier who recently returned from Iraq but has since gone missing. The Festival also named Nadine Labaki, director of CARAMEL, as the recipient of the Variety Middle East Filmmaker of the Year Award. In support of Emirati filmmakers, the Abu Dhabi Media Company ...
The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa is presenting a retrospective of the acclaimed Malaysian film director Yasmin Ahmad at the Doris Duke Theatre at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. The retrospective will screen all four of her feature films, including MUKSHIN, her latest film, which won two prizes at this year's Berlin Film Festival. The retrospective will also screen Ahmad's "Orked" trilogy, which explores love, religion and race in a multi-cultural Malay...
Bahamas International Film Festival: Second Edition; 8. – 12. December, 2005Readily accessed by the discount airline Jet Blue, the Bahamas International Film Festival on Paradise Island (Cinema in Paradise) is a new kid on the festival circuit and a most promising entry. Location is certainly important as the success of the US American Newport and Hampton International Film Festivals demonstrate, as is broad sponsorship. But artistic and professional skills are vital for the success of a new...
COMEDY STORMS SLAMDANCE: It’s snowing laughs in Park City!Happily married in Park City, Salt Lake, Deer Valley and Provo Comedic tour de force John Leguizamo summed up the typical Park City experience perfectly. “I saw a lot of REALLY depressing movies and then went home.” In the digital era of documentary overload, one Independent voice is quietly laughing back from the grave. For the past 10 years Sundance an...
FRITZ LANG’S “SPIONE”, 1929, RESTOREDA major event of the current London Film Festival was a showing of a listening, newly restored print of Fritz Lang’s 1929 “SPIONE” (Spies). Appearing on the cusp of the sound era this was one of the final monuments of the silent cinema. The film is, to some degree, a reworking of Lang’s earlier “Dr. Mabuse", and is an extremely fanciful espionage story, apparently set in a mythological Czechoslovakia, with Japanese, German and British agents f...
WALTER CRUTTENDEN’S ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPACEThe Great Year features the combination of two documentary genres I’d typically cross county lines to avoid. It’s equal parts somber, Discovery Channel-style science doc and one of those mystical, astrological, hippie dealies of the Chariots of the Gods school. Yet somehow these two genres work surprisingly well together; the film’s seriousness and scientific rigor help to mitigate a lot of the New Age woo-hoo, while the more wacky stuff sp...
