LOCARNO ~ The Burmese short film “Pyar Pyar Nyo Yaung Maing Ta-lei-lei”  (Cobalt Blue) gets its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival today. Directed by Aung Phyoe, and with a running time of 27 minutes,  the film is entered in the Pardi di Domani (Leopards of Tomorrow) section, one of four sections at this year’s festival.   The Pardi di Domani competition screens shorts and medium-length films by worldwide independent filmmakers or film schoo...

16th Third Eye Asian Film Festival: IV Screenings continued on Day 4, 5 and 6, and two films were memorable. One was a blast from 1956, made by an all-time great, and the other a laudable 2011 effort, shot in his home country, guerrilla style, by a returning prodigy, without permission I managed to attend nine shows out of the 15, which is a reasonable score. But here I will speak of just two films, since there is much to say. Return to Burma, 2011, 84 min So now we know that Ice Poison ...

These two films got big audience responses last week at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles.   “Pina,” a 3-D documentary about the legendary German choreographer Pina Bausch, starts with her re-envisioning of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” as a thrilling discovery of female sexuality. The film jumps—you cannot gently segue away from “Rite”—into other dances she choreographed, along with brief interviews with her dancers. When Wenders voices that this is no...