Hermès named a luxury handbag after her and she’s still dictating fashion do’s and don’t’s to “It” girls around the world. Now Egypt’s glamorous festival on the Red Sea pays homage to the late legend by presenting a selection of films that showcase her remarkable life and career.
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Photo by © Brigitte Lacombe, courtesy of the Marrakech Film Festival
Martin Scorsese to attend 20th anniversary edition of Marrakech Film Festival
The beloved Italian-American filmmaker will also be patron, looking over the 6th edition of the Atlas Workshops.
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Stylish should be his middle name: Luca Guadagnino to receive SIAE Andrea Purgatori prize in Venice
From his latest collaboration with Spanish luxury house Loewe, to his latest film which features everyone’s favorite girl Zendaya, the Italian-Algerian filmmaker and fashionista has always proven that cinema and fashion go hand in hand.
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Photo by © Getty Images, courtesy of the DFI, used with permission.
Michael Winterbottom at Qumra 2023: "If you want to have a healthy film culture, you want directors who are making lots of films"
Qumra Master Michael Winterbottom is a critically acclaimed British filmmaker renowned for unconventional narratives and hard-hitting social commentary. In fact, what Winterbottom does counts as much in real life as it does on the big screen.
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John Malkovich talks 'Seneca', acting in the TikTok generation & shooting in Morocco, again
The American actor may have said something during the press conference about his good friend Julian Sands, also featured in the film Malkovich is promoting at this year's Berlinale, but during our interview the tragedy of the actor who has gone missing felt like a looming presence, unspoken and indescribable.
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Julia Vysotskaya in a still from ‘Dear Comrades!, photo by Sasha Gusov, Courtesy of NEON
Watch 'Dear Comrades!'... and some Andrei Konchalovsky wisdom will be your gift in return
So, if I had to explain why Andrei Konchalovsky’s films appeal so deeply to me, what would I say? That his women characters are always the entree in his films and often his male roles seem like the parsley sprinkled around them to enhance the presentation. Embodied often by his real-life wife Julia Vysotskaya, women like Lyuda in ‘Dear Comrades!’ appeal to my sense of womanhood, to my inner strength but also on a very basic aesthetic level. Lyuda is elegant, in her clunky shoes and with her hungry, lean body, as are the men around her. First and foremost Konchalovsky is a true artist, always loyal to the visual — the most important aspect of the seventh art.
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Rufus Sewell photographed by James Van Alden, courtesy of CIFF
Rufus Sewell does his thing at this year’s Cairo International Film Festival: "I’m not nearly as rock and roll as I used to think..."
Since “virtual is the new black” as Cairo Industry Days Head Aliaa Zaky so perfectly pointed out in a Facebook post, I got to interview Rufus Sewell on Zoom while the actor was in Cairo — with the hustle and bustle of a film festival happening all around him. As a journalist who specializes in interviews, I have to say that I’ve never interviewed anyone like Sewell. Funny, insightful, but also ready to steer me in the right direction when I went wrong. While replaying it to write it out, I found the interview fascinating and heard myself not so much in the driver’s seat, as I’m accustomed to during a Q & A, but rather enjoying a passenger’s side ride into the life, love and career of one of the most charismatic actors of our time.
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Lesson in Sincerity: Sir Christopher Hampton receives Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Cairo International Film Festival
Oscar-winning writer Sir Christopher Hampton has the wonderfully modest aura about him. Despite being an awardee of one of the most coveted prizes in the world, a celebrated screenwriter and playwright, the perfect translator of the works of two of the most notable French authors of contemporary times, Hampton is humble.
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PHOTO COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Tilda Swinton on Learning from Her Children, Four-Legged Wisdom and Cinematic Friendships
Today, on November 5th 2020 Tilda Swinton turned 60. Wrap your head around that little boys and girls. Sixty! And she looks absolutely flawless IRL. So, I celebrate her agelessness by posting an interview from Cannes 2017 when I got to sit next to her majestic beauty and fell in awe of her class.
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My ambivalence about Abel Ferrara, this year's Jaeger-LeCoultre Prize Winner at the Venice Film Festival
These days, there is much talk about Abel Ferrara and his collaboration with Saint Laurent. The American filmmaker’s latest is produced by the Maison and will world premiere Out of Competition at the 77th Venice Film Festival. There Ferrara will also receive the Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker 2020 prize, an award “dedicated to a personality who has made a particularly original contribution to innovation in contemporary cinema.”
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A Conversation with Stanley Tucci about his 'Final Portrait'
Sitting down with Stanley Tucci naturally turned into a highlight of my 2017 Berlinale festival experience but I have to say his beautifully shot and sublimely acted film ‘Final Portrait’ keeps finding new nooks and crannies inside my thoughts and now, even a permanent place in my heart.
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Sending healing vibes to Khaled El Nabawy -- The Actor and the Activist
Back in 2012, I met Egyptian superstar Khaled El Nabawy at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. He was there with an Arab-American co-production and we sat down with his director and co-star during a sun filled afternoon, in an empty coffee shop inside the Emirates Palace hotel. It was an otherworldly moment that heralded the start of a beautiful friendship.
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Sir Patrick Stewart at the Dubai International Film Festival, photo by Getty Images courtesy of DIFF
The Ultimate Sir Patrick Stewart: To boldly go where no journalist has gone before
It is obvious upon first meeting him that Sir Patrick Stewart is a man of contradictions. The young boy born in Mirfield who grew up in a poor household in Jarrow fraught with domestic violence is now an elegant gentleman at once stoic and kind. His proper Queen’s English is what one notices at once, making all attempts by this journalist to sound intelligent in his presence invalid. And yet Stewart admits that in his youth “you wouldn’t have understood me if you heard me talk, I spoke with not just an accent — we had a dialect, so we used other words as well.” He proceeds to make an example which of course, sounds like he’s speaking a foreign tongue, not even English anymore.
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Angels and no regrets: An interview with Lebanese Oscar-winning composer Gabriel Yared
In 2016 I caught up with Academy Award winning composer Gabriel Yared. This year, at the Rome Film Festival, I was awed by his background music for ‘Judy’ — the film which might garner Renee Zellweger an Oscar. His notes take us, the audience, through the later part of Judy Garland’s life and into her inner struggles. They are subtly unobtrusive, just as a background score should be. And that’s the genius of Yared’s work. Please read on for the original interview, published in the HuffPost.
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Rachid Bouchareb at Berlinale 2016: "Peace Should Be a Subject Taught in Schools"
I find that there is a leitmotif running through three-time Oscar nominated filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb’s work. It’s the idea that peace is fragile, no matter how idyllic the setting of your life, there could always be something threatening to invade it, to destroy the status quo.
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Olivier Assayas at the Rome Film Festival -- Photo by Ernesto S. Ruscio/Getty Images courtesy of the Rome Film Festival
The Fascinating Olivier Assayas at this year's Rome Film Festival
Olivier Assayas is a filmmaker who also happened to have been a film critic. He's a French auteur who also spoke to journalists in perfect Italian while at the recent Rome Film Festival. He is a man born in the mid-50's who looks and dresses like he could be 40-something, as well as a revered name in world cinema who admits that film students today have created their own relationship with movies thanks to the internet. He makes for a fascinating read.
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John Travolta, photo courtesy of the Rome Film Festival
Five questions for John Travolta at the Rome Film Festival
Earlier last week, onstage, John Travolta appeared at ease, elegant and way younger than his 65 years. I mean, all newly bald headed and such, still how does he do it?? Maybe it was the leather jacket, maybe his calm demeanor and philosophy of life or maybe just his contentment at being a superstar — and obviously loving it! There is none of that tormented famous person attitude, or apologizing for having become a household name so young. No, Travolta is the actor and the actor is the superstar — no apologies needed or required.
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Photo by © Stephane Cardinale, courtesy of the Marrakech International Film Festival
Can't get better than this! Robert Redford at the Marrakech International Film Festival
There is one actor who has been able to give me goosebumps throughout my life and his career — it’s Robert Redford. And the love I have for his work doesn’t stop at him as screen star either. As a not-quite-yet teenager in Florence, Italy I went to watch ‘Ordinary People’ 14 times at the movies. I remember because my parents thought it had been enough on number 13 but I didn’t want that number looming over my viewing and threw a tantrum until they finally drove me to watch it the 14th time. I dragged a few of my friends, and each drew the line at the second viewing. But to me, that film represents part of the cinematic soundtrack of my youth.
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Dissecting the movies: Ethan Coen at the Rome Film Festival
It was all hush hush. Rome Film Festival artistic director Antonio Monda came to greet us at the press screening of the opening film, Edward Norton’s ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ where he told us Ethan Coen didn’t want to give a press conference prior to his encounter with the public. Why? Because the subject and theme of his conversation was a secret worthy of, it seemed, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
So, I waited. I wondered and imagined that Coen, one half of the wondrous brother duo that makes those incredible films full of humor and human tragedy — I’m talking about Ethan and Joel Coen of course — would make the wait worth while and introduce us, the audience, to something utterly wild. And when it came time for his public talk, he did.
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Ralph Fiennes to receive Outstanding Achievement Award at this year's Cairo Film Fest
Most who know me have heard by now what a big fan I am of the recently elected president of the Cairo International Film Festival, Mohamed Hefzy. To learn more about this great cinematic personality and wonderful supporter of film in and from the Arab region, you can read my interview with Hefzy on The National.
But perhaps not as many people know what a huge fan of Ralph Fiennes I am. I mean, the man redefined acting for anyone who frequented the movies from the 1990s onward. One word, or actually two — ‘Wuthering Heights’ — and with Juliette Binoche. I gotcha right?
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