Daryl Hannah Teams Up with Legacy to Engage Film Students in Socially Responsible Filmmaking In an effort to protect youth from the negative impact of smoking in movies, Legacy, best known for its truth® youth smoking prevention campaign, is asking aspiring filmmakers to think twice before using cigarettes as props in film. With the help of actress and activist Daryl Hannah, Legacy developed a six-minute documentary titled Redefining Cool. The short film explores how movies have bee...

Daryl Hannah Teams Up with Legacy to Engage Film Students in Socially Responsible FilmmakingIn an effort to protect youth from the negative impact of smoking in movies, Legacy, best known for its truth® youth smoking prevention campaign, is asking aspiring filmmakers to think twice before using cigarettes as props in film. With the help of actress and activist Daryl Hannah, Legacy developed a six-minute documentary titled Redefining Cool. The short film explores how movies have been used to nor...

Marco Bechis’ Birdwatchers could have gone horribly awry.  Surficially an extinction survival story, pitting a dwindling indigenous people against the encroachment of the outside world that encircles and threatens to strangle, it could have been a treacly morality tale espousing the nobility of the native against the evils of modernity and our collective lost way.  But it is not. What it is, is a take on competing interests making a place for themselves that has echoes of Israel and ...

Following an actor, writer and would-be chanteuse on their solitary quests for fame and glory, Marc Fitoussi’s La Vie d’artiste bristles with sharp observations and unpalatable truths about creative pursuit, artistic compromise and personal disappointment. La Vie d’artiste concerns a singer, an actress and a writer in pursuit of recognition. Are there any parallels with your experiences as a filmmaker? How did you come up with this story? I wrote it when I was not re...

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...