By Ali Moosavi. We’re all carrying so many years of this trauma and so the film for me is really about helping our community acknowledge that this happened but also how we should heal from it.” Ever since 9/11 Islamophobia in the West, in particular USA, has been on the […]
Hearth of Decades: Achal Mishra on The Village House
By Anees Aref. The germination of the idea comes from the house [on location]…. It’s also my hometown, that village, and I’d been photographing that landscape for the last five, six years. I think [the film] came from the photography that I was doing of that landscape across different seasons. […]
On the Edge: Keoni Waxman on The Ravine
By Ken Hall. They would answer his questions but they couldn’t answer why.” The Ravine, “a combination of noir, suspense, and spiritual and fantastic elements,” as I described in my review of the film for Retreats from Oblivion, uses these elements to avoid becoming “an ordinary inspirational piece.” I caught […]
Unpredictable Moments: An Interview with Bijaya Jena on Abhaas (1997)
By Anees Aref. We all are sometimes weak and sometimes strong. I wanted to express how a moment of weakness can shatter your life.” Written and directed by Bijaya Jena, Abhaas (1997) has recently been restored after an initially challenging run finding distribution upon its first release. Set in 1950s […]
Estrangement All Over: An Interview with Niki Karimi on Atabai
By Ali Moosavi. Atabai is about loneliness and the estrangement with environment that we feel all over the world.” My very first contribution to Film International was an interview with the Iranian actress-writer-director Niki Karimi in 2014 (issue 12.3). Since then she has appeared in ten movies and three TV […]
Healing in Nature: Jacquelyn Mills on Geographies of Solitude (Berlinale 2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. I am dedicated to creating films that facilitate our healing process with the natural world.” Geographies of Solitude, screened at the Berlinale Forum 2022, is a breathtakingly beautiful experimental documentary which affectionately portrays the ecosystem on the Sable island, the remote sliver of land in the Northwest […]
More Vulnerable Than Tough: Tarik Saleh on The Contractor
By Ali Moosavi. One thing that I loved about [Chris Pine’s] performance is how vulnerable he is…. He is not just a tough guy running around with a gun, but a real man with real fear and that creates real stakes important in film. The Contractor is the latest film […]
B-Movie Love from Iran: An Interview with Farzad Motamen
By Ali Moosavi. Motamen has dabbled in many genres: noir, comedy, social-drama, romance, thriller. And even Dostoevsky.” Farzad Motamen is one of several Iranian directors who are well-known and respected in their homeland but remain largely unknown outside of Iran. Motamen is a self-confessed American B-Movie lover and fan of […]
Restoring History: Nikolai Izvolov on the 2021 Restoration of Dziga Vertov’s The History of the Civil War
By Tony Williams. Nikolai Izvolov discusses his restoration of Dziga Vertov’s The History of the Civil War in 2021. In his recent review essay, Williams described the restoration as an interesting re-discovery not only for its role as one of Vertov’s early works but also in depicting images of an historical […]
The Surprise of Genre-Blending: Laurent Larivière and Freya Mavor on À Propos de Joan (About Joan)
By Yun-hua Chen. [Blending of genres] was a desire of mine to surprise the viewer, so that the audience does not settle into something and know what’s going to happen.” Director Laurent Larivière’s second feature À Propos de Joan, premiered at the Berlinale Special Gala, is a French, German and […]