Afef Ben Mahmoud in ‘Backstage’
As the Venice Film Festival’s beloved sidebar turns twenty this year, no longer being a cinematic teenager means celebrating those who have left us in this world, but also looking ahead to some groundbreaking cinema.
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‘The Palace’ by Roman Polanski will be world premiering in Venice, out of competition
Watch minds explode as they try to wrap their heads around this impressive lineup just announced by the iconic festival on the Lido, which will also feature the first African American woman filmmaker Ava DuVernay featured in the official competition. Along with much, much more.
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If you watch one film this summer, make it ‘Oppenheimer’.
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The iconic filmmaker definitely has a look. In fact, there are various social media accounts dedicated to the Wes Anderson aesthetic, including “Accidental Wes Anderson” which has 1.8 million followers and “Wes Anderson Planet” with over 250K followers on Instagram.
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Art from Disney Pixar’s Elemental used with permission
We can probably all remember the first Disney film we ever watched….
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On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the birth of the late Massimo Troisi, Martone puts together a documentary homage to a man who changed the landscape of Italian cinema and also influenced filmmakers from the MENA with his groundbreaking vision and irreverent works of art.
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In typical James Ivory style, which we have come to know and love in the beautiful films he has been a part of throughout his career, much of the story of this moving documentary is written between the lines.
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More than just an homage to a beautiful, inimitable woman, Shlomi Elkabetz's film about his sister and collaborator Ronit is a journey to the heart of cinema and a fantastic treasure hunt which, if followed through, brings us to the perfect depth of our human connection.
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'The Whale', which is the film version of the play by Samuel D. Hunter, deals with an obese man's last chance at redemption.
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Ultimately, Jordan Peele's film is about connections, knowing when to turn our gaze away from things we aren't meant to be seeing, and humor -- lots and lots of humor.
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Baz Luhrmann's 'Elvis' is divine. It is a masterpiece of colossal measures, featuring stellar acting and framed with sublime clothes, settings and music.
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Let’s get this out of the way: everything about Nadav Lapid's latest film is spellbinding.
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The Mehdipour family in a still from Hamy Ramezan’s ‘Any Day Now’, photo courtesy of Aamu Film Company, photo by Sami Kuokkanen
It was hard for me to fully wrap my head around the fact that ‘Any Day Now’ is Hamy Ramezan’s first feature film. This 80-some minutes story of an Iranian boy and his family, awaiting their fate as refugees in Finland is so profoundly perfect that I imagined a seasoned filmmaker at its helm.
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At the center of the story by the Greek native is a troubled father/daughter relationship, revisited when the father Paris, played with stunning vulnerability by Lazaros Georgakopoulos, develops Multiple Sclerosis or MS. The daughter Artemis, a force of nature in the masterful hands of actress Sofia Kokkali, ends up becoming his full time carer and in the process not only discovers something about her father she never knew, but also ends up finding herself.
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A still from ‘Liborio’ by Nino Martínez Sosa
Two films play at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam that will make you yearn to a visit to an island. Any island…
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In ‘The Cemil Show’ the film’s namesake leading character, played to perfection by Ozan Celik whom you may remember from ‘Sivas’ in 2015, is someone much like my friend and me — bad at acting, but still desperate to make it.
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Birgitte Larsen in a still from ‘Gritt’ the debut feature by Itonje Søimer Guttormsen
In her debut feature ‘Gritt’ filmmaker Itonje Søimer Guttormsen, with the help of leading actress Birgitte Larsen, makes Gritt the perfect anti-heroine we will all aspire to be, once we’ve watched her quiet masterpiece.
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Dr. Martin Luther King in Sam Pollard’s ‘MLK/FBI’. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release
In a new, stunning archival documentary by Sam Pollard titled ‘MLK/FBI’ the charismatic figure of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is shown against the backdrop of just that America — which we believed long forgotten but which we’ve witnessed first hand in the past four years, while governed by a man with ideas of grandeur.
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Jamal Khashoggi, right, with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman
On October 2nd, 2018 Saudi journalist and Washington Post opinion blogger Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey never to exit it again. What happened inside could have remained a mystery except that the Turkish authorities had put into place an intricate and advanced system of surveillance on the Saudis and Khashoggi’s demise was captured in vivid sounds for all to hear. In a new documentary titled ‘The Dissident’ Oscar-winning filmmaker Bryan Fogel examines the life and death of Khashoggi.
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A still from ‘The Translator’ directed by Anas Khalaf and Rana Kazkaz
While there have been loads of documentaries about Syria and its place in the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, no narrative film has even come close to the way ‘The Translator’ tells the story. A complete story that goes as far back as the first Syrian revolts in 1980 under Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez which resulted in the Hama massacre in 1982. The filmmakers telling this spellbinding story are husband and wife team Anas Khalaf and Rana Kazkaz, both multi-hyphenated nationalities but at the center of it all, Syrian. Because let’s face it, there are currently many more Syrian living spread out around the world than in Syria itself.
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