Judging by the musky, sweaty smell wafting throughout the room at a recent Bicycle Film Festival screening, my guess is that many in attendance pedalled their way there. A crowd of 100 or so, often in click-in bike shoes and ripped shorts, with messenger bags slung over their shoulders, grabbed bottles of beer and...
In Jose Eduardo Belmonte’s award-winning 2008 Brazilian film, “If Nothing Else Works Out” (“Se nada mais der certo”), Brazil is not lush and sunny, nor is it filled with soft, warm breezes and rhythmic bossa nova tunes. Instead Belmonte turns his lens on urban Sao Paulo, where skies are often grey, traffic is endless...
Shot by Bahareh Hosseini, the film gets right up close to men, women and children as they smoke, inject and eat the drug, and Hosseini’s camera doesn’t flinch when these addicts run out of opium and reveal their desperation. While opium addiction in poppy-filled Afghanistan is not new news, current statistics are staggering. A...
The American hairdressers add a slightly bizarre twist to this film. It is hard not to be startled by some of their remarks as they grapple with just how different life is for Afghan women. Their slightly judgmental, dumbfounded reactions to local rites and mores, such as arranged marriages, bans on pre-marital intimacy and...
The rationale behind an upcoming Afghanistan film festival in London came about during a trip to Afghanistan in November of 2006. Zahra Qadir and her friend Dan Gorman were there working on a short film called “Circus for Life,” about a therapeutic circus for children in Kabul. While making their documentary, the two filmmakers...
Sofia Snow grabbed the mic, paused, looked out into the audience, took a deep breath and began. In her own unique rhyme and metre she delivered a poem, like a long, lyrical and very personal sentence, about speaking “broken” English. It made for a fitting finish to a screening of “Youth Producing Change”, a...
Costa-Gavras, in his latest film, has distilled such messy subjects as race, class and immigration into something tender and simple, even sexy. When audience members, after a recent London screening, asked about his motivations for the film, Costa-Gavras, who is known for injecting politics into his work, was hardly provocative. He explained that “Eden...
Watching the film “Beautiful Losers” at the 52nd annual London International Film Festival last week felt like a time warp. The film documents a group of artists, film makers, musicians, skateboarders, and outsiders that documented their lives through art; creativity that helped define, articulate, and give an identity to an entire generation of DIY...
One audience member at the San Francisco screening, during an open-mic Q&A, told Guzman he was a “fraud” and that he should be ashamed of himself for taking credit for taking down Pinochet. After the loud “Boos” and hisses (and one or two claps) died down, Guzman said, “You obviously don’t know what you...
Considering that Black’s music was written for a movie about a monster, it felt incredibly safe and tasteful. A more relentless, risky, and scary approach would have really made the night—and the Golem—sing. Read the full review here.