News

By DearCinema Desk

The Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles has announced the IFFLA Film Fund to support Indian filmmakers as well as filmmakers interested in India-centric films. According to IFFLA, “program seeks to help emerging filmmakers realize their feature-length narrative and non-narrative film projects that reflect universal themes inherent within international Indian culture.”

By DearCinema Desk

The Ahmedabad International Film Festival (AIFF) from 25th-28th June, 2009 ended on a euphoric note for the filmmakers and the team. The award ceremony saw 14 awards been picked in divergent categories by young film-makers who perceived cinema differently…

Interview

By Cineuropa

”
I’d been working on the project for over 10 years. My main aim was to look at a group of children who are inculcated with values transformed into an absolute and how they internalise them. If we raise a principle or ideal, be it political or religious, to the status of an absolute, it becomes inhuman and leads to terrorism.”

By Cineuropa

“I didn’t make this little film, which I like very much, for a given audience, but for myself. I don’t have to justify myself, nor apologise. God alone dictates my choices in a way, even though I don’t know if they’re good ones. But I’m the best director in the world. Lots of other filmmakers think this too, but don’t say so. As for me, I feel this deeply, even if it may not be true. To come back to the film, I was suffering from a bout of depression and decided to make it as a form of therapy.”

Hollywood

By Vedavyasa Bhat

After the spectacular 300 (based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller), Zack Snyder returns to the screen with this intense comic hero caper- Watchmen.

Set in the 80s at the height of the USA-USSR cold war and threat of nuclear war, Watchmen is the tale of superheroes who are caught in the conflict of human nature.

The movie commences with the murder of an ex-super hero and then goes on to beautifully take you through time and story of a group of superheroes and how a law enacted by Ronald Regan forces superheros to retire or remove their masks or work for the governmen

By Devang Ghia

Ben Affleck burst onto the scene when he, along with Matt Damon won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting. Since then, their careers as writers have been put on hold, perhaps for more financially rewarding careers as actors. But this is a comeback of sorts for Affleck who not only co-writes but also makes an auspicious debut as a director. The material for the film comes from a book by Dennis Lehane who also was the author behind Mystic River.

World Cinema

By Srikanth Srinivasan

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) isn’t like anything I’ve seen of his other works. Perhaps this is the first time, I’ll replace the word ‘meticulous’ with ‘avant-garde’ when describing his films.

By M. K. Raghavendra

Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her (2002) is hardly little known enough for this column but it is a film that has not been entirely understood and a fresh analysis (rather than a ‘review’) may be appreciated. The reason I have chosen this film is that last week I chose Patrice Leconte’s The Hairdresser’s Husband, also about sexuality/ sensuality and a look at Almodovar’s film may be interesting.

Indian Cinema

By Pooja Sudhir

Shivajee Chandrabhushan’s black-and-white cinematic canvas succeeds in revealing the myriad hues of film making. “Frozen” is a live, accessible and pronounced manifestation of the effect and importance of the camera as a story teller. Shanker Raman makes the audience enter into the cocoon of Karma (Danny Denzogpa), Lasya (Gauri) and Chomo (Sklzang Angchuk) through the silent and frozen shots of snow laden Ladakh. The atmosphere of self engulfing tranquility is effectively translated. However, this stillness is set into motion keeping pace with the progress of the plot and narration. The excessive wide shots capturing nature’s bare naked beauty has a photographic feel to it, almost like travel postcards. Only the movement here makes it more delectable….

By Shekhar Deshpande

K. M. Madhusudhanan’s Bioscope (2008) is a film about the early days of cinema in India. Set in 1921, loosely following the story of Varunni Joseph, who appears to have run a bioscope show in the Southern State in 1907. At once a studied look into the history of early cinema in India, the film is a fictional treatise on the nature of cinema and its incursions into a culture that was so deeply supportive, curious and yet entirely wondrous about the new medium. Judging from what it has become in the country as an art form, a commercial success over the past hundred years, this film offers an indispensable and indelible image of the early days. For to understand the present is to understand how that past has shaped it….

Classics

By M. K. Raghavendra

There have been few filmmakers more celebrated but less comprehended than Sergei Paradjanov who, along with Tarkovsky, is acknowledged as one of the two greatest filmmakers to emerged from the former USSR - at least after the early period of the pioneers (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko etc). The late Paradjanov spent 15 years in Soviet prisons and therefore made only four feature films in his entire career.

By M. K. Raghavendra

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) is a strange film in black and white and set in a small unnamed town. A circus comes to the town in the dead of night and its chief exhibit is the giant carcass of a whale. Also advertised alongside the whale and various other marine wonders is a performance from a mysterious person called ‘The Prince’. The story is told from the viewpoint of a simple postman named Janos who is fascinated by creation and its mysteries….