NEWS

Jafar Panahi - leading Iranian director - arrested

7 March 2010

Jafar Panahi, a vocal backer of the opposition movement in Iran, was arrested along with his family and guests during a raid on his Tehran home on the night of Monday March 1st.

Panahi is one of Iran's outstanding and most influential directors. His debut feature THE WHITE BALLOON took the Camera d'or for best first film at the Cannes Festival in 1995l, while his second film, THE MIRROR, was awarded the Golden Lion at the 1997 Locarno festival. In 2000 THE CIRCLE took the Golden Lion in Venice, and in 2003 CRIMSON GOLD was awarded the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Festival. OFFSIDE (2006) won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale.

His son Panah Panahi told Rahesabz opposition website, “About 10 on Monday evening, several plainclothes agents broke into the house.”

Panahi, his wife and daughter as well as 15 guests were arrested and taken to an unknown location, the son said, adding that the agents had searched the house and confiscated personal belongings and computers, reports AFP.

He was briefly detained in summer with his family after attending a memorial at Tehran cemetery for slain protester Neda Agha Soltan and banned from leaving the country in February to attend the 2010 Berlin film festival.

Many Iranian artists, facing tough censorship under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, backed his rival Mir Hossein Mousavi in the June election, which the opposition charged was rigged to keep the hardliner in power.

Panahi's travel ban came after he appeared wearing green and openly backing the anti-government opposition at the Montreal film festival (picture).

Ironically, Panahi had an earlier conflict with rather different authorities when he was chained up and held for several hours by American immigration officers while changing planes at New York's J.F.Kennedy airport.

BERLINALE 60 - February 2010

21 February 2010

The 60th Berlinale did not quite hit the anniversary, since the first festival took place in June-July 1951: the event was not to shift from Berlin’s sweltering summer heat to finger-freezing cold until 1978. In a Berlin then still showing many gaping wounds of the recent war, the festival was started as a distinctly political initiative, proposed by the American Film Officer in Berlin, Oscar Martay. The epithet “International” was then disputable: not until 1974 were any films from the socialist countries of Eastern Europe accepted in the Berlin competition. Even then political tensions might still surface: in 1979 the socialist countries unanimously withdrew their films from competition in protest against the inclusion of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter.

The festival has had only four directors in its sixty years. The first, Dr Alfred Bauer had worked in the Reichsfilmkammer in the 1940s and in the post-war years been an advisor on film affairs to the British military authorities. He was succeeded in 1977 by Wolf Donner, who resigned after the Deer Hunter affair, to be succeeded in turn by Moritz de Hadeln, who retained the office until 2001. The fourth and current director is Dieter Kosslick. The President of the 2010 Jury will be the veteran German director Werner Herzog.

At the start of the festival, media attention inevitably focussed on THE GHOST WRITER written and directed by Roman Polanski, adapted from the novel by Robert Harris and starring Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan and the 94-year-old Eli Wallach. Polanski, under house arrest in Switzerland, was clearly unable to take his Biennale bow. The film itself, in the outcome, was efficient, watchable and unremarkable - although the story acquired a new topicality with Britain's Chilcott Enquiry currently assessing Tony Blair's responsibility in the Iraq war.

Berlin's Golden Bear went to the Turkish BAL (HONEY), which is the kind of film that wins festival prizes. Confused and heterogeneous though juries generally are, they can all see that such a film is Art with a capital A. The images are exquisite, the technical quality irreproachable, the action and dialogue minimalist and measured at snail’s pace. The central character is a beautiful child impeccably trained to go through his moves. Honey, though it emerges last, is the first part of Semi Kaplanoglu’s trilogy of Honey, Milk and Egg, a part autobiographical account of the development of an artist. In this first part, the young hero is around six, clever, observant, but tongue-tied at school where he longs to do well in reading. His father collects wild honey – a perilous business that involves climbing tall and brittle trees, and results in the tragedy that climaxes the film.


PRIZES OF THE INTERNATIONAL JURY

GOLDEN BEAR FOR THE BEST FILM
Bal (Honey) by Semih Kaplanoglu (Turkey)

JURY GRAND PRIX-SILVER BEAR
Eu cand vreau sa fluier, fluier If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle by Florin Serban (Romania)

SILVER BEAR FOR BEST DIRECTOR Roman Polanski for
The Ghost Writer (The Ghost Writer)(France/Germany/UK)

SILVER BEAR FOR BEST ACTRESS Shinobu Terajima in
Caterpillar (Caterpillar) by Koji Wakamatsu (Japan

SILVER BEAR FOR BEST ACTOR
Grigori Dobrygin, Sergei Puskepalis (ex aequo) for Kak ya provel etim letom (How I Ended This Summer) by Alexei Popogrebsky (Russia)

SILVER BEAR FOR AN OUTSTANDING ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT IN THE CATEGORY CAMERA Pavel Kostomarov for the camera in Kak ya provel etim letom (How I Ended This Summer) by Alexei Popogrebsky (Russia)

SILVER BEAR FOR THE BEST SCRIPT
Wang Quan'an and Na Jin for Tuan Yuan (Apart Together) by Wang Quan'an (China)

ALFRED BAUER PRIZE, awarded in memory of the Festival founder, for a work of particular innovation
Eu cand vreau sa fluier, fluier If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle by Florin Serban (Romania)

Berlinale - How I Ended This Summer

19 February 2010

The solitary two actors of Alexei Popogrebski's HOW I ENDED THIS SUMMER shared the best actor prize, while the film received a special award for the photography. The action is set entirely on a bleak, remote Arctic station, where there is nothing but a more-or less abandoned polar research station polar station, which the veteran recorder has manned alone for years. He is joined by a young high-school intern, and endeavours to restrain his irritation with the boy’s inexperience and inattention. While the older man is on a fishing trip, the boy takes a radio message of tragic news for his companion, but emotional fear and timidity prevent him from passing it along. From this incident their relationships deteriorate in unexpected ways. Popogrebski first attracted attention with Koktebel, co-directed with Boris Khlebnikov. The stage actor Sergei Puskepalis, whose young son played in Koktebel, played the leading role in Popogrebsky’s second film Simple Things. Grigori Dobrygin, who plays the younger man is a debutant, after training in dance and drama. The two actors handsomely filll their roles, competing with the bleak and dramatic landscape of Chukotka, at the Arctic tip of Russia, which actually housed a weather station.. Popogrebsky’s own story was inspired directed by the story of Sedov’s failed 1912 attempt to reach the Nporth Pole. The stunning camerawork is a vindication of the RED digital technique.

Berlinale - Shahada (Faith)

18 February 2010

SHAHADA (Faith) is the debut work– virtually a student film - directed by the 30-year-old Afghanistan-born but German domiciled Burhan Qurbani, and is a film of exceptional vitality and invention that certainly proposes an exceptional new talent. The film follows the story of three young Muslims finding strains between their sincere faith, their emotions and the social pressures of contemporary Berlin life. The Imam’s daughter is battling to conceal a messy abortion; a devout young man is struggling against his love for another boy; a policeman (in the least satisfactory of the three stories) is emotionally dogged directed by the effects of an accidentis haunted Their good fortune is to have a progressive and human imam, who finds his greatest difficulty is helping his own daughter. Like any first film-maker Qurhani is trying to squeeze too much into his story, but the vigour and technical flair are a good omen for the future.

Berlinale:The Hunter

17 February 2010

THE HUNTER (Rafi Pitts) is a curiously uninvolving film, considering what might be taken as potent references to contemporary Iran. The protagonist, played by Pitts himself, loses his wife and child through cross-fire in a confrontation between police and protestors in Iran. He runs amok, kills two policeman, and flees into a desert terrain where he is pursued by two policemen. For a while it is unclear who is the hunter and who the hunted, but when the police finally capture him, he faces a confrontation between a maverick who simply wants to kill him and a by-the-book cop who aims to keep him alive. The pay-off might be interesting if it were not so confused that it is unclear just what is happening.

Berlinale: A Somewhat Gentle Man/Submarino

16 February 2010

Hans Petter Moldand's wry, free-wheeling criminal comedy benefits from the main performance by an ageing, heavy-set and balding (apart from a skimpy pigtail) Stellan Skarsgard. He plays Ulrik, freed from prison after a 12 year sentence for which he was framed. He finds a job in a garage and lodgings with a gross and homely landlady who stuffs him with food in exchange for regular sexual servicing. He also finds his sexual attentions welcomed by the garage clerk and even his estranged wife. In other respects his past presents less agreeable vestiges. His son is driven directed by his young wife to disown his gaol-bird dad, while an old partner in crime, who has cared for his family during his gaol-term, now demands recompense: Ulric must kill the man who shopped him – now happily married with children. Out of all this Ulric’s positive attitude to life succeeds in concocting a happy end. This is the third collaboration between Swedish Skarsgard and the Norwegian director Moland.

From Denmark, SUBMARINO finds Thomas Winterburg purged of most of his old Dogme obligations. Based on a grim realist novel directed by Jonas T.Bengtsson, it is the story of two brothers, starting from flashback to their abused and violent childhood and separation. The film adopts an odd structure: the first half concentrates on the often violent and dangerous adventures of the older brother, an alcoholic body-builder just released from gaol and reunited with his unappetizing neighbours in a mixed- population shelter. For its second half the film shifts to the younger brother, whose devotion to his young son is dogged directed by drug addiction. It is a fairly dispiriting and unsparing study of hopeless lives.

Berlinale: Der Raüber/Greenberg

15 February 2010

DER RAÜBER (director Benjamin Heissenberg) is based on a novel (Martin Prinz) in turn based on a colourful real-life contemporary criminal called Johann Kastenberger The protagonist is a slim and dour young man who combines outstanding gifts as a marathon runner with a compulsive urge to commit bank robberies. The two interests complement nicely, though the Robber’s irrational violence finally betrays him. Heissenberg’s previous film Sleeper already displayed the detachment which here makes this less an exploration of character (which might have been interesting) than a virtuoso exploitation of showy and exciting chases in the favourable location of Vienna: we learn proctically nothing of an apparently already existing and surviving relationship with a Job Centre clerk.
GREENBERG is what one thinks of as a Sundance film: set in the world of the well-heeled professional class, dogged by their neuroses and less-fortunate hangers-on. Noah Baumbach’s film is set in a lavish villa in the Hollywood Hills. While the family are on vacation, their brother – just out of a mental hospital, moves in as dog-sitter. The rest of the film traces the uneasy progress of an affair between Greenberg’s and the family’s young house-keeper, as hopeless in matters of relationships as the snaggy Greenberg himself.

Berlinale - A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop

14 February 2010

Zhang Yimou’s A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP has the light-hearted and spectacular manner of HOUSE OF THE FLYING DAGGERS – with the virtuoso visual feats culminating here in a sequence with spinning noodle dough. Zhang claims the influence on his story of the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, but even the most attentive would not instantly recognize the source. The noodle-shop of the title appears to have no customers, but its proprietor Zhang is nevertheless a rich old skinflint who antagonizes everyone around – his wife, who consoles herself with the handsome young cook, his employees, whom he does not pay, and the sinister police detective whom he commissions to murder his wife and her lover. It is funny, fast and wonderfully spectacular with lines of dark horsemen galloping through the red-hued mountains of the Yellow River region, and with very lively performances, always just bordering on the comic.

Berlinale - Caterpillar

14 February 2010

The veteran Japanese director Koji Wakamatsu, whose career was originally founded in the 1960s with successful ‘pink’ sex films, continues his subsequent interest in socio-political subjects with CATERPILLAR , a fable in which he ferociously demystifies the patriotic and nationalist passion which fired the Japanese during the Second World War. The film is reported to have been shot in twelve days and edited in less than two, which may explain its dynamic economy. The story is adopted from a novel directed by Edogawa Rampo, unsurprisingly banned on its appearance just before the Second World War. A young soldier returns from the Second Sino-Japanese war, without arms, legs or the ability to enunciate, and with his handsome face dreadfully disfigured. His village celebrate him, elevating him to the status of ‘The War God’, and entrusting his wife with the painful privilege of caring for him, and trundling him around the village in a little cart, propped up in uniform and medals. In private the wife’s lot is less glorious. Publicly she must acknowledge that it is her privilege and duty, as a Japanese wife, The stump of a man grunts out his demands for food and sex; and the wife remembers the abuse she suffered when she failed to provide him with the male heir that was the desire of every patriotic Japanese. The man’s memories also begin to torment him: his injuries were suffered at the moment he was raping and killing a Chinese woman prisoner. The script develops the story of this painful marital relationship against the background of the continuing Second World War, ending with the atom bombs and surrender. It is a broad, unsubtle but effective parable, especially notable for the performances of Shinobu Terajima and Shima Ohnishi, who succeeds in an always riveting performance, using only his eyes in a wrecked face.

Berlinale - If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle

13 February 2010

IF I WANT TO WHISTLE I WHISTLE, the first feature directed by the Romanian documentary film-maker Florin Serban was a universal critical favourite, and collected several prizes. The rough realism and flow of this story belie the fact that it is adapted from a stage play directed by Andreea Valean, the script-writer of The Way I Spent the End of the World. The young hero Silviu is on the point of release from reform school, when he learns that his feckless mother is about to take his cherished younger brother to Italy – where he knows she will abandon him and wreck his future as she already did to Silviu. Unable to confide his anxiety to anyone else in the prison or to find a rational solution to his problem, Silviu is driven to desperate measures. His compulsion to fulfil the obligations of love and fraternal concern will condemn him to a life-time of incarceration. The leading role is played directed by a non-professional, the high-school student George Pistereanu who exudes charisma and played the role with a sensitivity and intelligence which would not have made best actor award surprising. Many of the supporting roles are played directed by actual reform school inmates; and the professional and non-professional actors blend faultlessly in the picture of the underground hierarchies that rule a penitential institution.