At the inaugural launch of the UK’s recurring Arabic Film Festival, Omar Kholeif, the festival’s director caught up with the Egyptian film director, Khaled El Hagar, after a retrospective screening of El Hagar’s first feature film, Little Dreams (Ahlam Saghira, 1993). Here is some of what Khaled had to say: […]
Just Doing It: an interview with Emily James
By Deirdre O’Neill. Emily James is an independent documentary filmmaker and producer who has worked in both television and film and whose work deals with contemporary political issues. Her latest film Just Do It: A Tale of Modern-Day Outlaws (released in the UK in July 2011) is both an intervention […]
Print, the Legend: Andrew Rossi on Page One – Inside the New York Times
By Matthew Sorrento. In the early 1930s, just after the birth of sound in movies, an older medium was running through the newer one. Newspaper movies, or reporter characters onscreen, regularly appeared to remind viewers that events are only as vital as how they are covered. The great newspaper films […]
Saving The Cinema Museum
By Deirdre O’Neill. Tucked away in an unfashionable part of London, The Cinema Museum is a rather well kept secret even amongst cinema lovers. This museum houses a collection of artefacts and memorabilia that celebrate the cinema-going experience from the 1890s up until the present day; there are cinema seats, […]
Navigating Both Worlds: An Interview with Maryam Keshavarz on Circumstance
By Matthew Sorrento. While adapting Alicia Erian’s novel Towelhead for the big screen, Alan Ball considered using the title Nothing is Private. While the idea now sounds like padding, the alternate title would have suited the film well. The lead role, the thirteen-year-old Arab-American Jasira, comes of age sexually under […]
‘The Zespol System assured a partial autonomy to our cineastes’: an interview with Krzysztof Zanussi
May 1, 2011
By Giuseppe Sedia. According to a decision recently voted by the Polish Senate, the remaining state-owned film studios are due to be privatized by 2013. This provision will affect 11 companies including the studio TOR headed by Krzysztof Zanussi. Since the aftermath of the events of 1989, Poland has not […]
The Room of One’s Own: An Interview with Tommy Wiseau
By Peter Rinaldi. “What’s the line for?” a middle aged man asks me. It’s 11:30pm on a Saturday night in Manhattan. I’m in the middle of hundreds of people waiting to get into the Ziegfeld Theater. “The Room”, I answer. “What’s that?” he says, surprised to be totally unaware of […]
Interview with Maria Schneider
By Moira Sullivan. This interview with Maria Schneider was made in March 2001, when she was the guest of honor at the Créteil Films de Femmes festival. This year’s festival, the 33rd, held between 25 March – April 3 2011, is dedicated to Maria Schneider. Maria Schneider was the Guest […]
If history runs, cinema can’t keep walking: an interview with Tinto Brass
February 24, 2011
By Amy R. Handler. Since the erotic art-house flick Salon Kitty(1975) and, particularly, the infamous Caligula(1979), starring the renowned Sir Arthur John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole and Helen Mirren, the films of Giovanni ‘Tinto’ Brass are considered controversial by most critics and spectators. However, what many may not realize is that […]
Collectivized Creativity: The Rediscovered Films of the CNT
January 31, 2011
Interview with Richard Prost and Andres Garcia-Aguilera by Christiane Passevant. Richard Prost has made four documentary films on the history of left libertarian movements in Spain. The focus of his work is the period of the Spanish civil war and its importance. The outbreak of revolution in July 1936 transformed […]