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Seems times are changing at last - for the better, and fast. After all these years of scouring the film festivals and pirated DVD shops (unless we have deep pockets to splurge on the highly-priced original DVDs of foreign films), it seems 2008 is bringing some happy tidings for us, the lovers of world cinema (that is, anything that comes from outside the country minus Hollywood).

Suddenly, Indian companies have started taking marketing rights for a large number of world cinema and at least two dedicated channels to telecast cinema of that kind are readying for launch. And, trust the French to do it - more and more French films are being screened, at least in Delhi and Mumbai, screened mostly free of cost through tie ups with multiplex chains, to introduce the casual moviegoer to the variety that rides with their cinema (hope other countries would also have as …

Name:
SAAD NAWAB (Vadodara, India)

Email:
saadnawab [at] gmail [dot] com

Cinema for the ages - Federico Fellini’s “La Strada (The Way)”

Federico Fellini’s “La Strada (The Way)” is a done to death plot of cinema till now. But some films are, well, made to be different, to last. A simpleton girl, Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) is sold by her widow mother for 10,000 Lira to a travelling artist with a rickety caravan pulled by a motorcycle, Zampano (Anthony Quinn). What follows are the choices and the consequences of a carefree and what people have called a chaplinesque girl who thought that patience and following her heart would account to what she wanted. Zampano treats Gelsomina like a slave, even if he refers to her as his wife. He teaches her what he knows and she becomes his assistant in their travelling show. One day Gelsomina, tired of Zampano’s ways runs …

The second Rome Film Fest, which runs Oct 18-27, has announced its full programme.

World premieres in the Cinema 2007 programme include:

* La Recta Provincia (Raul Ruiz)
* Youth Without Youth (Francis Ford Coppola)
* August Rush (Kirsten Sheridan)
* Hafez (Abolfazl Jalili)
* L’Abbuffata (Mimmo Calopresti)
* And The Spring Comes (Chang Wei Gu)
* The Three Robbers (Hayo Freitag)
* The Private Man (Emidio Greco)
* Let’s Say (Francoise Maire)
* Have Dreams, Will Travel, (Brad Isaacs)

The festival also announced that Oscar-winning No Man’s Land director Danis Tanovic from Bosnia will serve as head of the jury, which is comprised of 50 international cinema-goers.

FULL LINE-UP

Premiere section
Across The Universe by Julie Taymor (UK/US)
The Dukes by Robert Davi (US)
Elizabeth: The …

IFFLA 2008 Announces Call for Entries
The Sixth Annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) seeks narrative, documentary, music videos, experimental, children’s and animated films of any length and format. IFFLA will run April 22-27, 2008 at ArcLight Hollywood, a state-of-the-art facility located in the heart of Los Angeles. Jury and Audience Choice Prizes will be awarded for Best Feature, Documentary and Short Film.
IFFLA 2007 had over 6,000 attendees and screened 36 films from 8 countries. In addition to the high-quality of presentation of their work, filmmakers in attendance gained access to an eclectic mix of professionals from the Los Angeles film industry.

Check out what our past filmmakers …

At the heart of the human condition lies a vast emptiness. An emptiness that we try to fill with the things of life….actions,events,people,memories…. Here on the physical plane, the closest manifestation of that endless expanse is the desert, where shamans, mystics and truth seekers of all persuasions have gone since the beginning of time to be one with all that is and all that will be. Somehow the desert has an uncanny power to merge all vestiges of the past, present and future until it is simply beheld as an absolute. ‘The Sheltering Sky’ manages to capture this ephemeral and intangible quality in a way that has seldom been seen before.

The legendary director-cinematographer team that gave us seminal and historic works like ‘Il Conformista’, ‘Last Tango in Paris’ and ‘The Last Emperor’ , in the early nineties created a lush Moroccan dreamscape adapted from a …

Recently saw two movies. somehow similar. dont move and talk to her. one spanish, the other italian.

am not big fan of those hi-fi, sci-fi, mind-blowing, mind-fucking movies. just give me a good story. human drama where characters involve me in such a way that i just want to listen to them, be part of their stories for next 2hours. these two films turn about to be the same. there is no joy like discovering a good movie. And if its during the weekend, you cant ask for more.

Talk to her. Its Hable con ella in spanish by pedro almodovar. to be honest, whatever i have seen, m not big fan of his films. in my dictionary, i call them “kinky” films. m big follower of all kind of kinky movies but dont connect with them always. may be its the stories or those settings or the problems that his characters …

(reconstructed from bits on my mind and pages of a scratchpad from a film appreciation workshop I recently attended)

It has been 3 days since the workshop got over and I got stuck yet again in the mundane inanities of credit card debit card salary reimbursements short of funds broke and the works. But I rewind to Friday and see this cloudy morning when I am lost somewhere asking for IISC, where the Film Appreciation workshop was happening. To my great less-sleep-getting-late morning luck, I didn’t get any help from anyone, and was pretty much lost in mind as in ways. Things kept getting worse- I was running on the streets like some family-drama trouble-stricken protagonist asking random people, “ye IISC kahaan hain, koi to bataao…ai bhaai …ye IISC kahaan hai ….”

The IISC campus was another Crystal Maze, like those IIT forests (I call them forests because colleges or the ones …

Received from Worldwide Film Distribution yahoogroup… Please spread the word!

Let me take this opportunity to introduce you about me and social activities of our organization. …

I am working with a government organization, one of the most important & entertainment department called “NATIONAL FILM CIRCLE” is given to me and I am looking for your help to expand the membership.

What is “NATIONAL FILM CIRCLE” ?

The National Film Development Corporation Limited (NFDC) is a Government of India Enterprise set up with the objective of fostering excellence in Indian Cinema. It provides film enthusiasts in Mumbai an opportunity to see good meaningful World-Class Films throughout the year through the “NATIONAL FILM CIRCLE”.

For the past twenty-five years, National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) has produced/co- produced more than 200 films in 15 languages, including English. Amongst these all several internationally acclaimed films like Gandhi, The Making of Mahatma, Mirch-Masala, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Sardar, Parinda and …

Lagging quite behind on my movies seen over the last few weeks… I’m still having trouble assorting my iTalkies queue which doesn’t have the movies I wanna see and instead I’m filling it up with movies “I think are good” and in turn end up being crap… for one I’m highly disappointed with Shankar’s “Boys” that I had heard a lot about…

Shift focus to my Netflix queue… listing a few of the “many” I have been watching over the 2 week sick time… some interesting, some experimental… left out the ones I didn’t connect to…

Pirates… Dead Man’s Chest

Umm… not big on the Pirates series… but have to admit it’s fun. Plus seeing Johnny Depp do something which isn’t dark and brooding is a welcome change. Orlando Bloom is just about ok while Keira Knightley jumps, hops, hits, fights, kicks, leaps, swims and all that.

Great fun with kids on …

It seems that there is a film festival of some sort happening every week in Miami, this is a city that loves film! Last week was the Italian Film Festival, and as it turns out my hostess in Miami last week is friends with one of the volunteers, who had passes to see Mater Natura and the Mater Natura after party. I was excited to see this movie after reading the blurb on the Web page, especially because since there was a comparison to the movies of Pedro Almodovar. But the biggest social event of the year was held Saturday night in Miami, and by Sunday no one was feeling well enough to see a 9:00 movie, and we decided to see the 7:00 film so it would be an early night.

I didn’t care to see this particular film, but I did want to see a film at the festival …