photo still from MIGHTY FINE (2011). Andie MacDowell and Chazz Palminteri
A few weeks ago during the 27th Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) I had the pleasure of sitting with the cast from Debbie Goodstein’s film MIGHTY FINE (2011) where the film held its North American premier. What started as an interview turned into a fascinating discussion about rage from the microcosm of American domestic life to the macrocosm of rage in the world at large. Her...
photo still from MIGHTY FINE (2011). Andie MacDowell and Chazz Palminteri
A few weeks ago during the 27th Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) I had the pleasure of sitting with the cast from Debbie Goodstein’s film MIGHTY FINE (2011) where the film held its North American premier. What started as an interview turned into a fascinating discussion about rage from the microcosm of American domestic life to the macrocosm of rage in the world at large. Here...
Martin Scorsese wins The American Riviera Award at the 27th Santa Barbara Film Festival.. “We have to keep this wonderful life-sustaining conversation going with cinema”.
On the night of January 30, 2012, the legendary director Martin Scorsese, whose latest film HUGO (2012) is nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture, was awarded The American Riviera Award at the 27th Santa Barbara Film Festival (SBIFF) by celebrated actor Ben Kingsley. Before receiving the award, M...
Martin Scorsese wins The American Riviera Award at the 27th Santa Barbara Film Festival.. “We have to keep this wonderful life-sustaining conversation going with cinema”.
On the night of January 30, 2012, the legendary director Martin Scorsese, whose latest film HUGO (2012) is nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture, was awarded The American Riviera Award at the 27th Santa Barbara Film Festival (SBIFF) by celebrated actor Ben Kingsley. Before receiving the award, M...
The thing about movies, we don’t have enough of them that come along and challenge the way we see the world in which we live in. Every year we have any number of movies that would be releases for the express purpose of being entertaining. That is not a bad, thing in fact that is a great thing because that’s what movies are meant to do, show us the grand and an overall escape from reality. Yet sometimes we want to watch movies, to just move us and show us a side of the world that we liv...
In keeping with the tradition of listening to a rather powerful woman just before you’re about to embark on what’s really important – or maybe you’ve already squashed Christmas lunch by the time your attention is perhaps swayed by a certain Elizabeth Windsor – its’ time we took note of another Christmas message – the one being brought to you by another powerful woman (Sheila Nortley) who is fast becoming a regular fixture on the urban independent film circuit. And before we hear ...
I first learned of A SERBIAN FILM (2010) when a distributor friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous) told me about it at this year’s Berlinale 2011. He animatedly described to me what he deemed ‘the worst and most disgusting horrific film’ he had ever seen and had been so repulsed by the film he had shredded the DVD immediately after watching it. ‘Wow!’ I thought. ‘Do tell me more’. So, he described to me what all of those who have seen the film refer to as ‘the ba...
I first learned of A SERBIAN FILM (2010) when a distributor friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous) told me about it at this year’s Berlinale 2011. He animatedly described to me what he deemed ‘the worst and most disgusting horrific film’ he had ever seen and had been so repulsed by the film he had shredded the DVD immediately after watching it. ‘Wow!’ I thought. ‘Do tell me more’. So, he described to me what all of those who have seen the film refer to as ‘the baby scene...
IRON DOORS (2010), a new psychological thriller to make you think. About an investment banker with no name (we never get his name in this film so he’s a kind of Everyman investment banker) wakes up to find himself stuck inside a vault with no way out. ‘No food. No water. No way out.’ We experience his loneliness, hunger, thirst, frustration and even his hallucinations with him as he struggles to stay alive… or we are also left to wonder if he is even alive at all and maybe he has been ...
IRON DOORS (2010), a new psychological thriller to make you think. About an investment banker with no name (we never get his name in this film so he’s a kind of Everyman investment banker) wakes up to find himself stuck inside a vault with no way out. ‘No food. No water. No way out.’ We experience his loneliness, hunger, thirst, frustration and even his hallucinations with him as he struggles to stay alive… or we are also left to wonder if he is even alive at all and maybe he has been ...
Interview with director Amir of THE TILLMAN STORY (USA, 2010).
First, read more about the film here: http://www.fest21.com/en/blog/vanessa_mcmahon/the_tillman_story_q_and_a
ME: First of all I want to congratulate you on your film which to me is very thought-provoking in terms of the questioning of what makes a myth.
AMIR: Well, thank you.
ME: So, how did you start to make this film and when?
AMIR: Well, we started in 2007 which was right around w...
Interview with director Amir of THE TILLMAN STORY (USA, 2010).
First, read more about the film here: http://www.fest21.com/en/blog/vanessa_mcmahon/the_tillman_story_q_and_a
ME: First of all I want to congratulate you on your film which to me is very thought-provoking in terms of the questioning of what makes a myth.
AMIR: Well, thank you.
ME: So, how did you start to make this film and when?
AMIR: Well, we started in 2007 which was right around ...
THE TILLMAN STORY- Q and A.
THE TILLMAN STORY (USA, 2010) by director Amir Bar-Lev is a documentary about the football player Pat Tillman who gave up a multimillion dollar career in professional American football to go to war with the Army Rangers in 2002. He sacrificed personal success to fight alongside his brothers in war, a decision which for him was deeply personal. While in Iraq, Pat was tragically killed by ‘friendly fire’ (his own men). After his death he b...
THE TILLMAN STORY- Q and A.
THE TILLMAN STORY (USA, 2010) by director Amir Bar-Lev is a documentary about the football player Pat Tillman who gave up a multimillion dollar career in professional American football to go to war with the Army Rangers in 2002. He sacrificed personal success to fight alongside his brothers in war, a decision which for him was deeply personal. While in Iraq, Pat was tragically killed by ‘friendly fire’ (his own men). After his death he b...
photo stills from the film
Interview with Esther Podemski on THE PEASANT AND THE PRIEST (USA, 2011), a story about two old men in Italy whose ways of life have been unchanged through the centuries from medieval times to present day where the old ways are dying to contemporary forces causing much of what we know as Italy to fade a little more with each march towards modernization and mass globalization.
In Thessaloniki I had the opportunity to sit with director Esther Podemski to...
photo stills from the film
Interview with Esther Podemski on THE PEASANT AND THE PRIEST (USA, 2011), a story about two old men in Italy whose ways of life have been unchanged through the centuries from medieval times to present day where the old ways are dying to contemporary forces causing much of what we know as Italy to fade a little more with each march towards modernization and mass globalization.
In Thessaloniki I had the opportunity to sit with director Esther Podemski to ...
From the highly acclaimed director of The Constant Gardner and City of God comes the compelling post-apocalyptic thriller BLINDNESS. This must-see chilling thriller has an all-star cast including: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover and Gael Garcia Bernal. BLINDNESS is released to buy and rent on DVD on 30 March 2009 from Pathé Distribution Ltd.As a city is ravaged by an epidemic of sudden blindness, its victims are quarantined in a derelict hospital where a women (Moore; Children of Men...
Interview with David Sington Let me begin with your film, The Shadow of the Moon. The film deals with an important event not just in the American, but also world history. You managed to gather together the surviving crew of the Apollo missions and also showed previously unseen NASA footage. You are also a self-taught filmmaker… All that means is that I didn’t go to film school. When we went to Sundance, I had to fill in this questionnaire ‘Where did you learn filmmaking?’ Well, ...
Press conference with Christopher Walken on Dubrovnik International Film Festival 2005Moderatated by Daniel Rosenthal editor of Variety International Film Guide “the best annual guide to world cinema”*Daniel Rosenthal: “Good evening everybody last night we had an exquisite honor to award Mr. Christopher Walken with a Statue of Libertas, for an extraordinary contribution to his lifetime work. We talked last night about most recent films “Man of Fire”, “Welcome to the jungle”, “Ste...
