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Iranian government confiscates passports of “Closed Curtain” crew

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Following the condemnation of Jafar Panahi's "Closed Curtain" and its reception at the Berlin Film Festival, Iranian government officials have seized the passports of the film's co-director, Kambuzia Partovi, and actor Maryam Moghadam.

In 2010, the Iranian government deemed Panahi's work anti-government propaganda and imposed a 20-year ban on his filmmaking. Panahi, however, carefully circumvented the ban in 2011 with his "This is Not a Film" (a nod to Magritte's "This is Not a Pipe") and followed it with "Closed Curtain," a film about a group of people being persecuted by government officials. The movie, largely considered to be a critique of the Iranian government, incensed Iranian officials after it won best screenplay at the Berlin Film Festival. Iranian cinema chief and deputy culture minister Javad Shamaqdari said, "Making these films is illegal," according to the ISNA news agency.

With passports confiscated, Partovi and Moghadam will not be able able to go abroad to promote the film, and Panahi remains under house arrest.

Iran protests Berlin film festival organizers

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:39:00 +0000

Iranian officials are protesting the Berlin International Film Festival for awarding Jafar Panahi and Kamboziya Partovi's "Closed Curtain" with best screenplay; Panahi is currently under house arrest in the Islamic republic and banned from making films for 20 years.

Fittingly, his movie portrays a group of people trapped in a villa, evading government authorities.

"We have protested to the Berlin film festival organisers," Iranian cinema chief and deputy culture minister Javad Shamaqdari told the ISNA news agency. "We believe that the Berlin fest organisers should correct their behaviour. Everyone knows that making a film and sending it outside the country needs permission." He added that, "Making these films is illegal, but so far the Islamic republic has shown patience towards such illegal acts."

How Hitler made Hollywood

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:12:00 +0000

BERLIN, Germany — Two months after Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor in 1933, Jews working in Germany’s groundbreaking film industry were warned there would be no place for them under the new Nazi regime.

“We will not even remotely tolerate that those ideas, which Germany has eradicated at the root, are able to make their way either openly or surreptitiously back into film,” Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels announced that March. The powerful UFA studio canceled contracts for most Jews working there the following day.

Thus began the greatest rupture in German film history, marking the end of the golden age for Weimar cinema. Soon not only Jews, but left-wingers began fleeing the country, followed by others who saw no place for themselves in what would become the Third Reich’s propaganda machine.

Polanski best director at Berlin film festival

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:36:00 +0000

The Turkish film "Bal," or "Honey," won the top Golden Bear award Saturday at the 60th annual Berlin film festival, whose jury also crowned Roman Polanski best director.

Polanski, whose film "The Ghost Writer," debuted at the festival, was unable to attend the ceremony, as he remains under house arrest in his Swiss chalet in Gstaad.

Producer Alain Sarde, who accepted the prize on Polanski's behalf, said the director told him he would not have attended the festival even if he had been free, "because the last time I traveled to accept an award I landed in jail."

Polanski was arrested when he arrived in Zurich on Sept. 26 to receive a lifetime achievement award from a film festival. The Swiss must decide whether to extradite him to the U.S. to face possible further sentencing in a 32-year-old sex case.

A joint Silver Bear for best actor was awarded to the stars of the Russian film, "How I Ended the Summer." Grigory Dobrygin and Sergy Puskpalis played opposite one another as an older and younger researcher who clash at a polar station on an island in the Arctic Circle.

Shinobu Terajima won the best actress for starring as a wife forced to tolerate the tyranny of her husband who returns disabled from the second Chinese-Japanese war in the Japanese film "Caterpillar."

Berlin Film Festival: Controversy, art, violence

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:20:00 +0000

I've been brought to Berlin to participate in the Berlinale Talent Campus, a program that brings in young filmmakers, screenwriters, composers, editors and even film critics from around the world for a week of workshops and, of course, moviegoing. During this past week, one subject that's come up repeatedly with my colleagues and with the young professionals who have gathered here is the importance of having a life outside the movies. And still, the other day when I looked at my schedule and realized if I skipped a movie or two I'd actually have time to go to a museum, I hesitated. In two days' time, the whole event would be over, and I'd feel the usual post-festival remorse about all the movies I hadn't seen. Shouldn't I really be checking out that Iceland-Hong Kong-Turkey co-production about the peasant boy who travels to the city and becomes a huge pop star, only to realize how desperately he misses his mother's goat-eyeball stew back home?

Movie News Now: Berlin, Apatow, Spidey and more

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:18:00 +0000

Reviewers at indieWIRE are so unenthusiastic about the Berlin International Film Festival that they're deeming it a "two-star" festival. According to Shane Danielson, "There were some good films, though not a lot. But then, there weren’t many outright stinkers, either. The market hummed along without seeming to achieve much, either in terms of major sales or -- to use that all-purpose industry index -- 'buzz’."

Variety reports that Judd Apatow and Paul Feig, the duo responsible for the much-celebrated "Freaks and Geeks," are set to produce a new film starring Kristen Wiig of "Saturday Night Live," who also co-wrote the screenplay. Apatow will handle producing duties, while Feig will direct the movie rumored to be about "women competing to plan a friend's wedding party."

In other movie-collaboration news, it turns out Scorsese and von Trier are not discussing plans to make an updated version of "Taxi Driver." The gossip gaining strength throughout the hype-incubator known as the Internet is "unequivocally false," said Scorsese’s publicist, Leslee Dart.

Berlin Film Festival report: Noah Baumbach returns!

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:40:00 +0000

Berlin is a city that's deeply and painfully in touch with its past: I'm here for the 60th annual Berlinale, and across the street from my hotel is a block's worth of scrubby gray brush known as the Topography of Terror. This is the site of the former Gestapo and SS Headquarters, both largely destroyed by Allied bombs. (The buildings' ruins were destroyed after the war.) A bricks-and-mortar museum on the site has been in the planning stages for years but keeps stalling out: This is a city that treats the horrific aspects of its history with grave seriousness and a great deal of deliberation. The spot is currently the site of an outdoor museum consisting of placards outlining the grim history of the area, but the chill that hangs over the place needs no narration. I've never seen this landscape in the summer, when I assume these now-desolate, snow-iced trees actually have leaves on them, but I can't imagine that warmth and sunshine would make it any cheerier.

French lovers and Iraq vets

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:27:00 +0000

Berlin is a city of many enchantments -- for example, the little supermarket around the corner from my hotel, which is hardly super and barely a market. I'm sure there are lovely, softly lit, well-stocked supermarkets in Berlin, with canned music ringing through the aisles and cheerful clerks in logo-embroidered polo shirts. But this place -- a ways down the street from the Potsdamer Platz, which is where most of the movies in the Berlin Film Festival are shown -- has to be among the ugliest, dimmest, most somber and depressing shopping establishments I've ever set foot in, and I love it anyway. Its proper name is Aldi Markt, and I affectionately call it the GDR Mart, not because it's literally a GDR remnant (it's actually part of a large German chain), but because its no-frills decor and service make it seem like a relic of an earlier time. The place is clean but not cheerful; if you don't bring your own bag, the cashier will glare at you. This year the city is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, and now, on both sides of that gone-but-not-quite-forgotten division, you can find all sorts of sparkling American fast-food and coffee chains, as well as their German or European equivalents. But there are no cheerful logos outside the GDR Mart, and you'd better bring your own bag, or else. Then again, some habits are worth preserving -- or resurrecting.

Searching for Clive Owen

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:48:00 +0000

I came to Berlin in search of movies, Clive Owen and wild boars, though maybe not necessarily in that order. In my four days here, I've seen no wild boars -- more on these elusive fellows later -- and, sadder still, no Clive Owen. But now that I'm about halfway through the 59th Berlin International Film Festival, or the Berlinale, I can say I've seen quite a few movies -- although, as I've found to be the case with any film festival, I'm haunted by the feeling that I'm not catching the right ones, or the best ones.

And yet three of my favorite movies of 2008 -- Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky," Johnnie To's "Sparrow" and Fernando Eimbcke's "Lake Tahoe" (which, after sitting in limbo for too long, is scheduled for a limited released stateside in March) -- played the Berlinale last year. This is the second year I've attended the festival -- once again, I'm here as a guest of the festival, participating in the Talent Press division of the Berlinale Talent Campus, where I'm spending a week coaching young film critics from around the world -- and now that I have a better sense of the festival's low-key but adventurous character, I can't help seeing it as a hopeful barometer of the year ahead in movies. The Berlinale, which runs through next Sunday, most definitely begins and ends in winter, and yet somehow opens out into the more hopeful world of spring.

Strangers in a strange land

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:55:00 +0000

Courtesy of The Cinema Guild

Thavisouk Phrasavath in "The Betrayal."

Cinematographer Ellen Kuras is a filmmaking veteran whose work goes back to the late '80s. She's shot arty independent films ("I Shot Andy Warhol" and "Swoon"), Hollywood hits ("Analyze That") and combinations of the two ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Summer of Sam"). Given that record, it's surprising it took her this long to direct her own film. Then again, the film took more than 20 years to shoot.

Made in collaboration with Thavisouk Phrasavath, a Laotian-born writer and film editor, "The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)" could be described as a family documentary. But that phrase doesn't do this beautiful picture justice, in a variety of ways. Over the course of its 96 minutes, "The Betrayal" does indeed tell the story of how 12-year-old Phravasath escaped from Laos in 1979 -- by swimming across the Mekong River to Thailand -- and eventually brought his mother and seven of his nine siblings with him to an ambiguous new life in New York.

Ich bin ein Berlinaler

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:59:00 +0000

The Berlinale is the crocus of the big international film festivals: Midwinter in Berlin may not be as warm or as sunny as spring in Cannes, but there's something optimistic about the way the Berlinale -- now 58 years old -- flourishes in the cold (or, in these days of global warming, semi-cold) for some 10 days each February.

With more than 200 films being screened, including some 20 pictures in competition, this is a fairly sprawling festival, and yet it still manages to come off as intimate and friendly. The surroundings aren't necessarily the big draw: Most of the screenings and events take place in a complex of reasonably attractive but unmemorable buildings around the Potsdamer Platz, some of which have been built expressly to accommodate the festival. The Berlinale Palast is the most gallant structure in the complex, and the one where most of the big red-carpet events take place. Even though those events are never my thing, standing on those steps one afternoon I did happen to catch a few moments of a press conference with Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan (here with his '70s-Bollywood spoof "Om Shanti Om") televised on a giant screen: While I would have loved to see Khan in person, his goofy expressiveness is no less charming even when his face is broken into a bunch of little dots.

Trans America

Fri, 26 Feb 1999 18:47:00 +0000

On New Year's Eve, 1993, two young men drove to a farmhouse in rural Nebraska and killed the three people inside. Their victims were the farmhouse's residents, a 24-year-old single mother and a 22-year-old man, and a 21-year-old drifter who was taking refuge at the house following recent trouble in nearby Falls City.

The drifter was a slight, muscular, short-haired woman named Teena Brandon. The two men who shot her, Tom Nissen and John Lotter, had known her as a slight, muscular, affable young man named Brandon Teena until a week earlier, when, upon discovering her true gender, they drove her out to the Nebraska countryside and raped her in the back of their car on Christmas Eve. When Brandon pressed charges, the two men, both ex-convicts, decided to kill her.

Documentary filmmakers Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir learned about the case through a wire story from the Omaha Gazette headlined "Dressed to Kill." Both the nature of the crime and the local press's treatment of the story intrigued the New York filmmakers. So when Muska was offered the chance to go to Falls City with a writer from the Village Voice who was covering the story, she brought her camera along. (The story also attracted the attention of filmmaker Christine Vachon, who is currently producing a fictionalized account, "Take It Like a Man.")