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 series of nine short films by young filmmakers around the world, which had its British premiere at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in London.

The full blog post, about youth-produced films at the Human Rights Watch film festival, at INTELLIGENT LIFE

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 is West” was loosely based on his own experiences moving from Greece to France after finishing high school, about 50 some odd years ago. He wistfully joked that the main character’s good looks were modeled on his younger self.

As a modern tale of immigration, “Eden is West” lacks a certain rawness and immediacy. But as a story of one man’s odyssey, it is vivid and touching, finessed by someone who understands the journey into the unknown.

The full review of Costa Gavras’ film, “Eden is West,” at INTELLIGENT LIFE<