Most of the greatest artists are also great visionaries and for the past 57 years the Berlinale has seen a lot of them walk on its red carpet. But cinema's glory comes also from the vision of great businessmen that have shaped and are still shaping the movie industry. Taking this into account, Berlin International Festival hosted this year for the first time a new kind of event called Berlinale Keynotes, a series of speeches and panel discussions about the future of the cinema industry...
The Berlinale is coming to a close and the exhibitors at the European Film Market are starting to pack their stuff after one full week of fruitful exchanges between buyers, sellers and institutions. The building that hosted most of the companies, the Martin-Gropius-Bau, is still teeming with life as people are meeting in the huge atrium around cups of coffee, as the weather is so freezing outside, taking time to marvel at the wonderful structure inspired by Italian Renaissance. Watching th...
The MIFF board held a press conference in Hotel Berlin, Berlin on the 12th of February during the 57th Berlinale to announce the details of the 1st Malta International Film Festival. Hisham Abdel Khalek “Festival founder and director”, Charles Frendo “Financial Director”, Gianluca Matarrese “Press and Media Director”, Olivier Delesse “Film Market Director”, Patricia Falzon “PR Director”, Jean Claude Legrand “International Coordination Director”, Anthony Cardona “Communi...
The closing ceremony of Ecocinema 4 th International Environmental Film Festival took place in the National Theatre in the city of Rhodes , Greece , due to a slightly windy weather that could have made the scheduled event in the Rodon outdoor theatre somewhat uncomfortable. Yet the indoor setting perfectly fitted the theme of the evening since the ceremony began with the screening of documentaries on Rhodes filmed by the Istituto Luce between 1924 and 1941. In fact, the theatre was built at the ...
On its fourth and fifth day, Ecocinema International Environment Film Festival in Rhodes (Greece) focused on information films that try to raise our awareness on environmental matters. Here is the review of 3 of these documentaries that drew a special attention.Battle’s poison cloud, by Cecile Trijssenaar from the UK (2003, 53 minutes)The first image sets the tone of the documentary as the camera pans over shelves of jars containing monstrously malformed dead foetuses. The sequence graphically...
The films screened at the 4th edition of Ecocinema International Environmental Film Festival in Rhodes (Greece) cover much more than the only preservation of nature we usually associate with ecology.One of the examples of this diversity is The Corporation by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot from Canada, which deals with corporate responsibility. The multi-awarded documentary, already shown twice on television in Canada where it is the biggest-grossing domestic feature-length documentary ever, was ...
Does knowing where we come from tell us who we are ? This somewhat philosophical question is a token of the diversity of the angles taken by Ecocinema 4th International Environmental Film Festival in Rhodes (Greece) to address the complex relationships between man and his environment. This is also the subject of Motherland : a genetic journey, by Archie Baron from the UK, a 89-minute long documentary that spurred a series of questions among the audience on the second day of the festival.The dire...
Moviegoers rarely have the opportunity to watch short films, let alone when they deal with environment. Ecocinema 4th International Environmental Film Festival in Rhodes (Greece) tries to fill this gap as it offers a wide selection of short films on the environment we could hardly find anywhere else. Here are the reviews of 5 of the short films which were screened there on the first day of the festival.Water journey - Urumiah, by Javad Taheri from Iran (2002, 27 minutes)This episode of the TV se...
The 4th Ecocinema International Environmental Film Festival in Rhodes (Greece) opened on Tuesday evening with the screening of the Whale Rider, a fiction film by Niki Caro from New Zealand, based on a novel by Witi Ihimaera. The film is a poetic evocation of how the indigenous peoples try to keep on transmitting their traditions to their children although they now live in a modern society. According to the Maori mythology, the first human being was brought to earth on the back of a whale a long...
Fiction film sectionOrisel Gaspar, one of the lead actresses of Siete dias, siete noches (Seven Days, Seven Nights), had written a song especially for the closing ceremony of the Festival of the 3 continents in Nantes, western France. She definitely put her whole heart in her voice when she sung her moving lyrics after Cuban director Joel Cano received the Montgolfière d’Or for the film in which she co-stars. The movie, which depicts a week in the lives of three very strong women in Cuba, i...
HistoryThe Katorza Cinema, where most of the festival of the 3 continents takes place, has a long history that makes it play a special role in the hearts of Nantes’ moviegoers. In fact, it was founded on June 4, 1921 by a Jewish immigrant from Tunisia named Salomon Kétorza. This fairground entertainer was at the time quite famous in the City of the Dukes because he had created in 1900 a huge 14-wagon long travelling cinema and 2 brick-and-mortar theatres : the Apollo which opened in December ...
Fiction film sectionOrisel Gaspar, one of the lead actresses of Siete dias, siete noches (Seven Days, Seven Nights), had written a song especially for the closing ceremony of the Festival of the 3 continents in Nantes, western France. She definitely put her whole heart in her voice when she sung her moving lyrics after Cuban director Joel Cano received the Montgolfière d’Or for the film in which she co-stars. The movie, which depicts a week in the lives of three very strong women in Cuba, i...
At first sight, the title of Ryuichi HIROKI’s latest movie refers to sexual misery and loneliness. After all, it’s what a vibrator is about and we cannot forget that the helmer made his directing debut in 1982 in erotic films before receiving the Grand Prix in the video section of the Yubari Fantastic Film Festival for the 1993 film "Sadistic City". Or maybe it refers to the cellphone that vibrates in the inner jacket of 30-year old Rei Hayakawa (played by Shinobu Terashima, Arts Festival pr...
Siete Dias, siete noches (7 days, 7 nights) by Cuban director Joel Cano was warmly received by the audience when it was screened on Sunday evening at the Festival of the 3 Continents in Nantes. Cano, a trained playwright who graduated from the Higher Institute of Art in Havana, had diverse artistic experiences as playwright, stage director and novelist (La Isla de Los Quizas, Se vende, El juego de perder el tiempo). So it’s no wonder that he is the director, writer and DP of his first feature ...
