My fifth and last day at the cinematic wonderland that is DIFF consisted of three documentaries. The films are very diverse - two were made by Western filmmakers and the third one is by an Iranian who was stopped from filming his latest film and this doccie was smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive hidden in a cake! I kicked off my day with Semisweet: Life in chocolate that focuses on 4 different stories about chocolate - the top chocolatier in France, a spiritual couple's chocolates fro...

FINAL SELECTION OF IN RETROSPECT: 60 YEARS OF FESTIVAL FILMS 5 – 11 MARCH Perth Festival is delighted to announce the final selection of In Retrospect: 60 Years of Festival Films. In celebration of our 60th Festival we have selected seven films from those which have screened at the Festival since its beginning in 1953. One film from each decade was selected to screen for one night only from Monday, 5 March and one Australasian film will screen on Sunday, 11 March. Perth Festival Arti...

Lars Von Trier       Jafar Panahi  The 64th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is now history, but two standout personalities on opposite poles of the spectrum have defined this year as one of the most unusual in memory. In one corner, we have the Danish filmmaker provocateur Lars Von Trier whose verbal missteps about Nazism at his press conference led...

Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, currently subject to legal proceedings in Iran which earned them a sentence of six years in prison and a 20-year employment ban, to which they have appealed, will be in Cannes with two films made in semi-clandestine conditions and which reached the festival in recent days.   « The reality of being alive and the dream of keeping cinema alive motivated us to go through the existing limitations in Iranian cinema » Jafar Panahi sai...

  International reaction is building as news emerges from Iran that Jafar Panahi, one of that country's most internationally respected film artists, has been sentenced to a lengthy prison term. The Berlin International Film Festival is the first of many film institutions around the world to sharply condemn the harsh sentences handed down to the renowned Iranian director Jafar Panahi and his directing colleague Mohammed Rasulof. Accused of spreading “propaganda against the system”,...

Iran has sentenced two prominent filmmakers to six years in jail each on vague charges of working against the ruling system, their lawyers said Monday. One of the two, the renowned filmmaker Jafar Panahi, has won awards at the Chicago, Cannes and Berlin film festivals. His films have been screened at various film festivals in India. He was invited as chief guest at the recently concluded 41st international film fest in Goa (IFFI) but was not allowed to leave the country. Iran has ...