BERGAMO FILM MEETING AWARDS JAMES’ JOURNEYThe 22nd edition of Bergamo Film Meeting (13-21 March), one of Italy’s veteran cinema festivals, came to a close, awarding its main prize, the Golden Rosa Camuna, which takes its name from the Northern Italy town’s effigy, to James’ Journey to Jerusalem. First feature by widely-appreciated Israeli documaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, James’ Journey to Jerusalem, which premiered last year at Cannes’ Quinzaine, is an astonishingly subtle and insi...
On Saturday the 29th the competition arena of Nantes’ 3 Continents was haunted by the cinematic ghosts of Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (Bu San) and by the torturing spectres of a dramatic political past in Pakistani Sabiha Sumar’s Silent Waters (Kamosh Pani). Tsai’s sixth feature, winner of the Fipresci award in Venice, pays homage to cinema and to the magic experience of viewing films in movie theatres. Taking an old theatre bound to permanently shut its doors as his actual prot...
As Nantes’ competition has rolled on, the spot has already been occupied by four rather different titles: three of them were coming from Asia, Bar Girls (Gai Nhay) from Vietnam, Min from Malaysia and Ordinary People (Malen’kie Ljudi) from Kazakhstan; the fourth one, The Magic Gloves (Los Guantes Magicos), came instead from Argentina.The competition opened with Le Hoang’s Bar Girls, a film that depicts the life of female dancers and prostitutes in present days Saigon. Girls coming from diff...
The 25th edition of Nantes’ Festival des 3 Continents kicked off on the captivating tunes of rai, Algerian traditional music. Singer Abderrahman Djalti, also the star of one of the documentaries on show, Jamel Fezzaz’s La mélodie de l’espoir (Melody of Hope), unwrapped the opening ceremony singing a song usually performed during circumcision ceremonies.The quarter of a century anniversary of Nantes’ 3 Continents was introduced as an unexpected achievement for a festival that started sma...
