The Economist: How accurately does your film portray the music scene in Tehran? Are there really young people wearing Strokes T-shirts and Vans backpacks?
Bahman Ghobadi: Yes. I have not changed anything in that film; all people are real, all the locations and clothes are real. I think of Iranian culture as a beauty veiled by the black ugly chador of politics, and in my film I have tried to unveil this beauty.
My full interview, with “No One Knows About Persian Cats” director Bahman Ghobadi, is at the ECONOMIST.
“These films produce knowledge and they form opinions often about the weakest and most vulnerable people in society,” said Patrick Hazard, festival director. “They comment on places and situations that their audience may never come across directly. So we like to unpick these messages, develop them and also critique them.”
The full story, on London’s International Documentary Film festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES.
Thet Sambath nurses hopes that the film will one day be shown in Cambodia. He could make the case that “Enemies of the People” could offer steps towards reconciliation. After a screening before Cambodian refugees in Utah recently, several women told Sambath that they had arrived filled with resentment, but that the film inspired them to want to meet the men who confessed to the killings and hug them for finally telling the truth.
The full interview with Thet Sambath, on the documentary film “Enemies of the People,” is at MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE.
At the London screening I went to, there were plenty of gasps in response to Harris’s more outlandish comments and broadcast moments. Timoner is clearly trying to illustrate the problems inherent in our increasingly personal relationship with the internet. “We Live In Public” left me with an incredibly strong urge to remove myself from Twitter, delete my MySpace page, dump my LinkedIn profile and go completely offline. Unfortunately, the urge didn’t last long. Perhaps an hour later, I felt compelled (think Death Star tractor beam) to check my email and update my Facebook page status.
The full blog post, on the “We Live in Public” documentary film, is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.
More entertaining than the film was watching the crowd listen to and engage with Grey afterwards. (One gushing audience member offered her band a gig at his London club. Another identified herself as a dominatrix and seemed to want to talk shop.)
After Grey admitted that she was shocked that Soderberg asked her to be in the film, and explained her preparations for the role (she interviewed a couple of call girls and read anonymous call-girl blogs), the conversation quickly turned to sex.
The full blog post, on the London screening of The Girlfriend Experience (and actress Q&A), is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.
I’ve seen “Do the Right Thing” many times, and have observed and participated in many debates about its value and meaning. But this particular London screening reminded me of just how well it captures the little things that not only set people off, but also calm them down and even make them laugh. There are incendiary and violent moments throughout the film (based on actual events), but there is also plenty of humour and humanity.
The full blog post, on the 20th anniversary screening of Do The Right Thing in London, is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.
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 filed into a screening room at London’s Barbican Centre for day two of the festival, which took place from September 23rd to 27th.
The full blog post, on London’s 2009 Bicycle Film Festival, is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.
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 and times are tight for many.
The full blog post is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.
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 United Nations report assessed that the amount of Afghan land used for opium is now larger than the corresponding total for coca cultivation in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia combined.
Gordon, a British director, interviews mothers in northern villages who use the drug to calm their crying, hungry babies. She also spends time with long-term addicts in Kabul who seek help from a poorly funded clinic there. One man, who suffered a face-altering gun-shot wound while working as a presidential security guard, started smoking opium when someone in the hospital room with him said it would take his pain away and help him sleep.
The full blog post, on Lucy Gordon’s documentary film, “This is My Destiny,” is at INTELLIGENT LIFE
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 rules against showing skin or wearing makeup in public, left me wondering whether any of them had picked up a newspaper in the last 30 years, let alone looked at a map to see where Afghanistan is.
The full blog post, on Liz Mermin’s documentary “The Beauty Academy of Kabul, is at INTELLIGENT LIFE
