Search Results for: amir ganjavie

By Ali Moosavi. Pendulum is the first film made by Amir Ganjavie, an Iranian diaspora film critic (and a Film International contributor), based in Toronto. Ganjavie is engaged in a wide variety of cinematic activities. He has pioneered the Iranian Film Festival in Toronto, an annual festival showcasing the cream of […]

By Amir Ganjavie. It seems that there is no better subject than the life of Emily Dickinson to attract the attention of Terrence Davies, who is fascinated by questions of patriarchy and fundamentalist religion. Davies could easily find an enormous amount of material to work with in relation to these topics […]

By Amir Ganjavie. Asghar Farhadi’s newest film, The Salesman, recently won prizes at Cannes for both Farhadi’s screenplay and for Shahab Hosseini’s lead performance. The film presents the familiar idea of private space being disrupted and touches upon the question of how violence emerges in society and how a non-violent and peaceful […]

By Amir Ganjavie. Based on firsthand observations from his childhood, Thomas Vinterberg’s latest movie, The Commune, helps us reflect on the difficulties involved in many people living and sharing together in a big house. This take on communal living could be seen as a metaphor for a type of idealized alternative […]

By Amir Ganjavie. The latest film from Kelly Reichardt, Certain Women, centers on topics that define and characterize her cinema. Based on short stories from Maile Meloy’s collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, the film presents a story of four strong, independent women coping with the difficulties of living […]

By Amir Ganjavie. One of the great entries at this year’s Berlinale, Ira Sachs’s Little Men centers on the coming-of-age story of two Brooklyn boys who test their friendship after a conflict between their parents. The challenge of this genre is to avoid the usual boy-meets-a-girl trap that often involves a routine portrayal of budding sexuality. Little […]

By Amir Ganjavie. The central questions in Western philosophy concern what is truth, reality, and right or wrong. Major sources of debate for Greek philosophers, these notions have become very problematic in our postmodern virtual world. As Jean Baudriallrd argues, it is no longer truth that shapes reality but rather reality which […]

By Amir Ganjavie. Louder Than Bombs, Joachim Trier’s third feature, tells the story of an aging schoolteacher (Gabriel Byrne) who grapples with the recent death of his wife (Isabelle Huppert) and tries to find a way to reconcile with his two sons (Jesse Eisenberg and Devin Druid). Quite a bold entry […]