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The first time you watch Ōshima Nagisa’s “In the Realm of the Senses,” it might seem like more of a horror movie than a love story. Even now, when American viewers coming to the film for the first time might be inclined to sympathize with a story about two people who self-quarantine to save themselves from their country’s suicidal ideology, it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees and mistake Ōshima’s transgressive 1976 masterpiece for something tawdry or even sinister.

This is, after all, a claustrophobic (and broadly true) saga of erotic obsession from the most hostile of Japanese auteurs; a mad and scandalous work of art that’s full of unsimulated sex, peppered with a massacre’s worth of little deaths, and topped off with a scene of genital amputation so unflinching that it feels like an answer to the eyeball cut in Buñuel’s “Un Chien Andalou.

Editor’s note: The following is an exclusive excerpt from “’Castles of Subversion’ Continued: From the Roman Noir and Surrealism to Jean Rollin” by Virginie Sélavy. This essay is featured in “Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollins,” which is available now. To celebrate the book’s release, curator and editor Samm Deighan will be on hand to introduce a special screening of Rollin’s 1971 film “The Shiver of the Vampires” at the Brooklyn Horror Festival on October 14.

Usually deserted or abandoned, often in ruins or in a state of decay, sometimes captured just before demolition, always bearing the melancholy traces of human presence, locations are key to Jean Rollin’s cinema and often were the starting points for his films. Three in particular recur throughout his work: the famous Dieppe beach (specifically Pourville-sur-Mer), the cemetery, and the castle. The latter two are typical Gothic locations and an...

Ben C Lucas’s innovative rumination on the pitfalls of technology has Hollywood appeal and features a darkly charismatic performance from Jessica De Gouw

It is not uncommon for films about drug users to contain closeup shots of pupils dilating. This is hardly surprising given closeups of eyes have long been fashionable in cinema; the famous opening of Luis Buñuel’s 1929 classic Un Chien Andalou comes to mind. And after a hit of the good stuff, eyeballs look fabulous on screen, as films like Requiem for a Dream remind us.

Australian writer/director Ben C Lucas’s sophomore feature, OtherLife, joins the crazy-eyed canon in its opening moments, peppered with near full-screen vision of a narcotic-infused peeper.

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Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961) is showing June 17 - July 17 and The Exterminating Angel (1962) is showing June 18 - July 18, 2017 in the United Kingdom.ViridianaIt’s impossible to avoid describing the films of Spanish director Luis Buñuel as “surreal,” and yet to do so is woefully insufficient. This is for two reasons. In the first place, Buñuel never made one kind of film. In the second place, even his strangest films deal with social reality.Early in his career Buñuel did associate himself with the Surrealist art movement. Among his first productions were the infamous Un chien Andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930), experimental narratives co-written by Salvador Dali in which bizarre and violent psychosexual incidents connect via absurd dream logic. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Surrealists never meant “surreal” to act as a mere label for the uniquely strange.

After four years Martin Scorsese is back with another six filmic gems from all corners of the Earth. Love struggles in the slums of Thailand and the economic boom town of Taipei; underdog heroes undertake troubled missions in Turkey and Kazakhstan, a Malay storyteller plays cinematic games with basic narrative, and a vintage Brazilian art film is pure visual poetry. They’ve all been rescued by the World Cinema Project.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 2

Blu-ray + DVD

The Criterion Collection 873-879

1931 – 2000 / Color + B&W / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 30, 2017 / 124.95

Directed by Lino Brocka, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ermek Shinarbaev, Mário Peixoto, Lütfi Ö. Akad, Edward Yang

I readily confess that in my patchy history of film festival attendance, I gravitated not toward the really obscure foreign films, unless they promise to be as entertaining as things I’m more familiar with. Based on the results, one of...

You Axed for it, as Forry would say: the grade Z horror movie that launched a thousand bad puns is also an unbeatable party favorite. Idiotic island natives clash with condescending Anglo scientists, when a death curse initiates the hell- spawning of a horrifying, vengeance-seeking pagan demon-monster. Sounds great — but what we get is Tabonga, a walking rubber tree stump with knotholes for eyes and a permanent scowl on its teakwood face. The excellent, flawless scan allows us to appreciate the mighty Tabonga for what it is — absurd, lovable, awful.

From Hell it Came

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1957 / B&W / 1:78 widescreen / 71 min. / Street Date April 25, 2017 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Tod Andrews, Tina Carver, Linda Watkins, John McNamara, Gregg Palmer, Suzanne Ridgeway.

Cinematography: Brydon Baker

Film Editor: Jack Milner

Original Music: Darrell Calker

Written by Richard Bernstein, Dan Milner

Produced by Jack Milner

Directed by Dan Milner

“You say Tomayto,...

Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel died in 1983, but his films continue to inspire many filmmakers today, including Woody Allen and David O. Russell. New York’s Metrograph theater is presenting a series of the surrealist filmmaker’s work from March 30 to April 6 entitled “Buñuel in France” that will feature five of his films. Buñuel directed 35 movies between 1929 and 1977.

Read More: Watch: Was Luis Buñuel a Fetishist? A Video Essay

Here are seven filmmakers who have listed a Buñuel film in their top 10 movies of all time.

Woody Allen

Allen’s favorite Buñuel film is 1972’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” the famous comedy about six middle-class people attempting to have a meal together. Allen wore his inspiration on his shirt sleeve in his 2011 fantasty-comedy “Midnight in Paris,” casting the actor Adrien De Van to play Buñuel in a scene also featuring the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody) and visual...

An experimental film by an Irish playwright, shot in New York with a silent comedian at the twilight of his career? Samuel Beckett’s inquiry into the nature of movies (and existence?) befuddled viewers not versed in film theory; Ross Lipman’s retrospective documentary about its making asks all the questions and gets some good answers.

First there’s the film itself, called just Film from 1965. By that year our high school textbooks had already enshrined Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as a key item for introducing kids to modern theater, existentialism, etc. … the California school system was pretty progressive in those days. But Beckett had a yen to say something in the film medium, and his publisher Barney Rosset helped him put a movie together. The Milestone Cinematheque presents the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s restoration of Film on its own disc, accompanied by a videotaped TV production...

France has a rich history of horror. There’s the sadomasochistic novels of the Marquis de Sade as well as the blood and guts of Grand Guignol theatre. In cinema, the horror lineage runs deep. There’s Georges Méliès’ shorts and trick films (The Haunted Castle [1896], The Four Troublesome Heads [1898]); the eye-slicing of Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929); Georges Franju’s nauseating documentary on slaughterhouses, Blood of the Beasts (1949), as well as his clinical and poetic Eyes Without a Face (1960); there’s Henri-Georges Clouzot’s nasty Diabolique (1955); and the rotting poetry of Jean Rollin’s collective work. Flash forward a few decades, to the mid-1990s and 2000s, where we find the intense and brutal "New French Extremity" films by Philippe Grandrieux, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, Marina de Van, and others. And there are the genre filmmakers creating work around the same time as the more...

Author: Sean Wilson

Arriving on Blu-Ray and DVD on 13th February, provocative and gruesome horror We Are the Flesh is the latest movie from director Emiliano Rocha Minter. Engulfing viewers in a nightmarish and surreal world, whereby two siblings find themselves manipulated by a terrifying stranger, it’s controversial Mexican cinema in every sense of the word.

It also follows a proud tradition of rich, boundary-pushing cinema to have emerged from the country. To honour the film’s release, here are some of Mexico’s finest.

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Few images are seared onto viewers’ minds as vividly as the eyeball being sliced in Luis Bunuel’s groundbreaking surrealist classic (in reality it was a cow’s eye, not a human’s). But in truth the Spanish filmmaker’s trendsetting collaboration with Salvador Dali is filled to the brim with all other manner of striking imagery that left a lasting...

Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999) is a film whose memory has been all but condensed into a single image: a young Asian woman, soft-featured but wearing an unmistakably sinister side-long glance, holding up a syringe. This image was used for the film's promotional materials—posters, DVDs—and accompanied nearly every review and article written about the movie. Like the eyeball being prepped for slicing has for Un Chien Andalou, the image's ubiquity and the implications of the infamous scene have overshadowed the film itself. I gave real thought to using a different still for this article, but ultimately nothing else felt right. And would anyone even recognize it from another shot? For this edition of 10+ Years Later, I wanted to see if I could separate the film...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Will somebody explain the sheep and the bear? Luis Buñuel really knows how to disturb people. This, his most characteristic surreal drama proposes an impossible, irrational situation – which isn’t all that different from the reality we know. Petty social rules, jealousies and bitterness make life hell for group of dinner guests stuck with each other, caught in an existential trap.

The Exterminating Angel

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 459

1962 / B&W / 1:33 flat full frame / 93 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 6, 2016 / 39.95

Starring Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, Augusto Benedicio, José Baviera, Antonio Bravo, Claudio Brook, Rosa Elena Durgel, Lucy Gallardo, Tito Junco .

Cinematography Gabriel Figueroa

Film Editor Carlos Savage

Original Music Raúl Lavista

Based on a story by Luis Alcoriza, Luis Buñuel

Produced by Gustavo Alatriste

Written and Directed by Luis Buñuel

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

That intransigent rebel imp Luis Buñuel never mellowed — after ten or so...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday morning. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?” can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question: What is the best horror film of the 21st century?

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevasse), Freelancer for Rolling Stone, The Verge, Vulture

Everyone knows that the greatest Halloween film of all time is the 1962 nudie-cutie “House on Bare Mountain,” and my slavish devotion to giallo means that personal favorite horror movie of the new century is “Berberian Sound Studio”, but those are both answers to questions nobody asked. The finest horror film of the new millennium is “Cabin in the Woods”, both a dissertation on the history of the American scary movie and a chilling piece of work in its own right. With a fiendishly clever narrative hook,...

“Movie magic” is a perhaps over-used term bandied about for all types of filmmaking techniques, but there’s some genuinely special about a specific type of edit: the match cut. In the span of a split second, an editor can make a leap across space and time, and when done seamlessly, its effect is like few others in cinema. In a new video homage from Celia Gómez, she walks through a mix of some of the most memorable and perhaps lesser-known examples.

There’s, of course, the most iconic in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Graduate, Psycho, and Un Chien Andalou. She also brings in a few examples from Park Chan-wook‘s Stoker, as well as three of Steven Spielberg‘s films, and more to show the wide-ranging uses (although we would have loved the inclusion of a few from Tarsem‘s The Fall). Check it out below,...

A match cut, occurring when the end of one scene is perfectly visually coordinated with the beginning of the next, is a filmmaking technique that can yield serious dividends when executed properly. At its best, this kind of transition can help take an audience from one place and time to another in less than a second, without a jarring disruption of continuity. Video essayist Celia Gómez now pays tribute to this trick of the trade in her latest compilation, “Match Cut: The Art Of Cinematic Technique.” Here are some of the most clever, elegant, poignant, and surprising match cuts in the history of movies. It’s a legacy that Gómez traces back to Luis Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. In the infamous first scene from that movie, a man slices a woman’s eye open with a straight razor. Just as he’s about to commit this ...

Mark, Aaron and Scott Nye kick off the first of a seven episode series about French cinema in the 1930s. We give an overview of the decade and some historical context, and discuss the French silent tradition and how that it transitioned to sound. We also get into detail about two important filmmakers, Jacques Feyder and Jean Vigo. Feyder was an important filmmaker in his time, but his works are not as prominent today, whereas Vigo was nearly forgotten in the 1930s and discovered after the war.

Episode Links & Notes

Special Guest: Scott Nye from CriterionCast and Battleship Pretension. You can follow him on Twitter.

3:15 – Dedication and Thanks

9:35 – Intro to French Film Series

28:15 – From Silent to Sound

46:30 – Jacques Feyder

1:13:30 – Jean Vigo

Criterion Collection: Poetic Realism Flicker Alley: The House of Mystery French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris 1923-1929 Flicker Alley: L’Inhumaine Flicker Alley...

Frank Ocean: musician, visual-album releaser, list-making cinephile. Following on the heels of his latest album finally being made available to the eager public, Ocean has revealed his 100 favorite films. Originally posted on Genius, which has a breakdown of how movies like “The Little Mermaid” and “Eyes Wide Shut” made their way into his lyrics (“I’m feeling like Stanley Kubrick, this is some visionary shit/Been tryna film pleasure with my eyes wide shut but it keeps on moving”), the list contains a mix of familiar favorites (“Annie Hall,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”) and comparatively obscure arthouse fare (“Woyzeck,” “Sonatine”). Avail yourself of all 100 below.

“Atl”

“Un Chien Andalou”

“Blue Velvet”

“Barry Lyndon”

“Battleship Potemkin”

“Eraserhead”

“Chungking Express”

“Raging Bull”

“The Conformist”

“Bicycle Thieves”

“Taxi Driver”

“A Clockwork Orange”

“Mean Streets”

“Gods of the Plague”

“Persona”

“Mulholland Drive”

“Happy Together”

“Fallen Angels”

“Apocalypse Now”

“The Last Laugh”

“Pi”

“Full Metal Jacket...

After a few delays, Frank Ocean‘s Channel Orange follow-up, Blond, has now arrived and, with it, not only an additional visual album, but Boys Don’t Cry, a magazine that only a select few were able to get their hands on. (Although, if you believe the artist’s mom, we can expect a wider release soon.) In between a personal statement about his new work and a Kanye West poem about McDonalds, Ocean also listed his favorite films of all-time and we have the full list today.

Clocking at 207.23 hours, as Ocean notes, his list includes classics from Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Fritz Lang, Werner Herzog, Akira Kurosawa, Ridley Scott, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, Luis Buñuel, and more.

As for some more recent titles, it looks like The Royal Tenenbaums...

Every week, the CriticWire Survey asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday morning. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?” can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question: This past weekend saw the release of “Lights Out,” which is based on a horrifying short film. Shorts can have tremendous value, though even the best of them tend to fly under the radar. What is your favorite short film, and why?

Miriam Bale (@mimbale), freelance

I count this Resnais film about plastics, “La chant de la styrene,” and an industrial film by Les Blank about factory farm chickens, “Chicken Real,” among the best films, and certainly best docs, I’ve seen. And the Safdies’ short “John’s Gone” is probably my favorite of their movies, if not their best.

This is one of those weird videos that doesn't really qualify as a supercut, and doesn't really qualify as a video essay either. But regardless of categorization, editor Jacob T. Swinney's selection of 100 shots — one from each of the past 100 years of cinema history — is very cool to watch. Added bonus: it played at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Hans Zimmer's masterful "Time," from the Inception soundtrack, does a lot of the heavy lifting, but Swinney makes some excellent choices here and this is well worth a few minutes of your time. Find a full list of the movies used below:

A journey through the past 100 years of cinema--the most memorable shot from each year (in my opinion). While many of these shots are the most recognizable in film history, others are equally iconic in their own right. For example, some shots pioneered a style or defined a genre,...

Aliya Whiteley Dec 5, 2016

Hour Of The Wolf is a surrealist horror that gets under the skin. And it's not alone...

There are some terrible images that have been placed in my head over the years by films. They come back to haunt me, and are unforgettable.

The unique jolt of seeing something so strange, so horrifying, on the screen that it cannot be forgotten is a powerful experience, and lasts far beyond the roll of the credits. One that contains more than a few images that have retained their ability to upset and unbalance me since first seeing them is a film that was made by a director who is often thought of as a maker of psychological dramas rather than horror films. I'm talking about Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film, the disturbing and weird Hour Of The Wolf.

Ingmar Bergman's films are perhaps most often thought of as psychological dramas,...

The eyes aren’t just the windows to the soul; they’re the bearer of truth, and the messengers of feelings. It’s no wonder that any director looking for a thoughtful, scrupulous shot focuses there — whether it’s Quentin Tarantino portraying the anger and frustration The Bride (Uma Thurman) feels when she’s being buried alive by Budd (Michael Madsen) in “Kill Bill Vol. 2;” or the subject of a Pixies song, Luis Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece “Un Chien Andalou.” Read More: The Essentials: Satyajit Ray’s ‘The Apu Trilogy’ Indian director Satyajit Ray used captivating glances to exude emotion in his epic coming-of-age “Apu Trilogy,” as well as in 1963’s “The Big City,” another coming-of-age film of sorts, but this time focusing on a married couple each with their own occupational difficulties. And this video essay from Fandor explores his technique. The entire film is told through the way...

We all have predisposed notions about the infamous “romantic comedy.” As with other genres, there’s a large subsection of offerings, giving it a bad name. But, for every tired, cliché-driven comedy, there is another impressive offering that redefines the genre, garners plenty of laughs, and tells an honest story about love and relationships, however warped they may be. In the coming weeks, we’ll take a look at the fifty romantic comedy films that should be seen. These may not all be classic films, but they certainly put a stamp on the industry and the genre we affectionately call “rom-coms.”

#50. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Most of Wes Anderson’s films could be described as romantic comedies, but his 2012 effort stands out, as its central story focuses on young love and the need to find acceptance. In Anderson’s world, while quirks abound, true connections between characters are commonplace. With Moonrise Kingdom,...

** New Update: Two more American films have come to my attention through readers of the blog:

Alison Klayman wrote to say "I know you said at least two films, but I wanted specifically to alert you to the fact that my film "The 100 Years Show" is also playing in the Panorama Documental sections (same as Pj Letofsky's film). "The 100 Years Show" is about 100-year old Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, and was produced with RatPac (Brett Ratner) Documentary Films. I'll be attending the festival too.

Alex Mallis wrote in to say: "Our short narrative, "La Noche buena" (the first American-directed since the embargo) is also screening at the festival.

Original Blog:

At least two films by American filmmakers will screen this year at the Havana Film Festival, whose official name is Festival de Cine Nuevo Latinamericano. As the Centerpiece Film, Bob Yari, producer of almost 50 films, will screen his second directed film “Papa” about Ernest Hemingway. It can be called “the first [official or legal] American film made in Havana in the last fifty years”, though underground films have been made (e.g., “Love & Suicide”). “Papa” is being sold at Afm by Elias Axume’s Premiere Entertainment.

Doc filmmaker Pj Letofsky will also be screening his film “ Tarkovsky: Time Within Time” which just premiered at the Sao Paolo Film Festival.

Many U.S. citizens are now interested in going to Havana. To give an in-depth look at Cuba’s film business, I am publishing a [long] chapter of what I hope will soon be published, my book on Iberoamerican film business. I will also be publishing another [shorter] interview here soon with Havana Film Festival Director, Ivan Giroud.

Cuba (Chapter Seven)

Officially the Republic of Cuba, or in Spanish, República de Cuba, the nation is comprised of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. To the north of Cuba lies the United States; the Bahamas are to the northeast, México to the west, the Cayman Islands and Jamaica to the south, and Haiti and the Dominican Republic are to the southeast.

Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean, and with over 11 million inhabitants.

Cuba is undergoing a transition into a market, entrepreneurial economy under the Presidency of Raul Castro. With this transition, the cinema industry is also undergoing great changes. The state mandated organization, Icaic, which has been running the cinema industry, is now under scrutiny. New legislation concerning the film industry is slowly underway as a result of discussions ongoing within the film community. Hopefully the establishment of diplomatic relations will the U.S. last October will propel changes, though without lifting the embargo, it may not.

History of Cinema of Cuba

Cuba’s elite has always stayed in touch with the latest in culture as it developed in Europe during the Spanish colonial era. Cuba’s tradition of cinema dates back to 1897 when the Lumiére Brothers representative from France stopped in Havana to show their films on a tour of the Antilles Islands, México, Venezuela, and the Guineas. Cuba’s particular style of cinema, called the “Cinema of the Greater Antilles”, evolved from the theater of melodrama and comedy and from the radio dramas of Felix B. Caignet, all of which formed the popular melodramas and comedies we still see today.

Mexican coproductions and U.S. filmmakers escaping the monopolistic Edison came to Cuba as well as to California in the early days of film. Federico Garcia Lorca arrived in Cuba in 1930 with a screenplay, “Voyage of the Moon”, and a print of “Un Chien Andalou” hoping to break from the Paris-Berlin monopoly, but his plans never took shape. Many films from Spain, México, Argentina and Uruguay also played in Cuba. Some leading Cuban actors had a strong presence in México and Argentina. Musicians such as Ernesto Lecuona, Bola de Nieve and Rita Montaner performed in movies in several countries.

Cuba, along with Mexico and Argentina, has the most developed cinema culture of Latin America. At its most prosperous, it had the third largest number of theaters in Latin America until the special period when Ussr withdrew its support. Today it has 39 movie theaters. Three of them, including the Yara in Havana, had been built especially for 3D in the 1950s.

Movie going is one of Cuba’s national pastimes, rating perhaps as high as baseball. The average Cuban sees one and a half films a year. However, the lack of international appeal for most of its comedies and melodramas has held its international growth in check up to today. That is now changing.

The international nature of Cuban cinema was consciously defined after the Revolution of 1959 when the Institute for Cuban Art and Industry Cinematography (Icaic) was created by Fidel Castro and entrusted to his university classmate, Alfredo Guevara. The law creating Icaic was incorporated into the Cuban Constitution itself just three months after the Revolution and was an important part of the Nuevo Cine Latinoamerico, a movement throughout Latin America as the Latin American nations threw off their dictatorships. Film, according to this law, is "the most powerful and provocative form of artistic expression, and the most direct and widespread vehicle for education and bringing ideas to the public.”

Cinema was created for theatrical exhibition, for individuals and groups to share in smaller collectives, and for television.

The law ordaining Icaic to control every cinematographic activity created no further rules about financing, about submitting, reading and approving project proposals or regarding any required time frames. Icaic functions very internally with no outside surveillance.

Actually it is possible to make films without Icaic participation, the point is that without Icaic a film cannot get national distribution.

Over the past decade Icaic has loosened its monopolistic administration. Every sector and every level of cinema is discussing the concept of a new Law of Cinema with the government’s interest in formalizing as law a more inclusive infrastructure with more transparent rules and regulations.

Under the leadership of Raul Castro, the island has been undergoing a gradual economic reform process allowing entrepreneurs to license their own businesses after decades of state monopoly. The measures include the authorization of self-employment in more than 200 small trades and activities. According to the government, there are currently 442,000 registered as “self-employed”. The Castro administration hopes for this emerging sector to absorb over a million state workers to be laid off in the coming years.[ii]

In October 2014, the state closed down many private cinemas which had emerged avowing to the love of cinema of the people. Many were 3D “salons” in homes or in separate rooms in restaurants. Authorities pressed for "order, discipline and obedience" in the growing small business sector. Needless to say, the films shown were pirated and not licensed by the rights holders. Nor was there ever any official licensing to privately owned theaters (yet).

However, these could provide a good source of taxation. It needs to be decided what shall be taxed, how tax monies should be apportioned for film funding, film education, what tax incentives the government might offer, how distribution will be subsidized, how archives may be maintained and presented, how to regulate screenings, dvd, TV and online platforms, what cash incentives might bring in production from the outside, what joint ventures within the Caribbean might be developed and how Icaic is approaching and incorporating the changing environment. The Director of Icaic, Robert Smith de Castro. is facing more challenges than its previous longtime Director, Alfredo Guevera, ever faced when the government provided everything. Now it must find answers from its neighbors and its own internal producers and procedures.

In general, funding a film, renting equipment and shooting in Cuba all need to be approved by Icaic. This has changed somewhat as other players have come to take a role, like Rtv Commercial, which is in fact the production company of Cuban National Television.

Rtv Commercial coproduced the newest Cuban hit, “Conducta” (“Behavior”) with Icaic. It premiered at Ficg 2014 (Guadalajara International Film Festival) and played at Tiff 2014 and other festivals such as the Málaga Spanish Film Festival 2014 where it won five awards.

New Developments in Cuban Cinema

In 2014 there were 14 productions and coproductions made, compared to seven in 2009 and 4 in 2000 according to FnCl and Ocal, databases of Latin American film.

At Cannes’ Cinema du Monde in May 2014 and in San Sebastian’s Coproduction Forum, “ August” (“Agosto”) was one of 15 projects selected to be seen and discussed by the international community of sales, distribution and financial executives. Directed by Armando Capó Ramos and produced by La Feria Producciones’ Marcella Esquivel, it is a coproduction between Costa Rica and Cuba. It will shoot next year in Havana and is now raising funds through crowdfunding. Also featured among the 15 in San Sebastian was “Wolfdog” (“Hombre entre perro y lobo”) directed by Irene Gutiérrez and produced by El Viaje Films, a Spain-Cuba coproduction.

Seeking modes of financing outside of government funding began in 2002 with the Festival of New Filmmakers showcasing projects was created by young people outside the Icaic system. As a result of the 2002 event, five years later, a funding mechanism called Hacienda Cine was created by pulling productions from Icaic Cuban television into centers and foundations that have other areas for audiovisual production. Pitch sessions for each selected entity were set up. The prize for production services worth 20,000 Convertible Cuban Pesos (equivalent to Us $20,000) was set up by Icaic Production. There are currently also smaller groups creating smaller formats, scientific or otherwise who are fomenting alternative forms of financing as well.

Lia Rodriguez Nieto is an attorney who was mentored by and worked fourteen years, until his death, with Camilo Vives, Icaic’s head of production, first as an attorney and then as a producer. She has now taken charge of the industry section at the Havana Film Festival which Vives began in 2009. She and Antonio López, recently produced a Cuba-Panama-France coproduction “ El Acompañante” (“The Companion”) directed by Pavel Giroud. She states that over the last five to seven years, private (not state institutional) productions have co-existed with institutional production. However, it would be important for independent producers to have a more regulated and confident relationship with Icaic in a more normalized fashion in order to have easier access to filming permits, forms of financing, banking relations, coproduction treaties, and a number of other elements which are essential to film production.

Rebeca Chávez is a director and a member of one of the groups pushing for a new cinema law which will, in principle, establish a new system incorporating the democratic participation of all people in the business, including techs, writers, directors, producers, actors, etc. and where all will have a democratically designed access to funds. In1984 she began her career as documentary director and her work has been given different national and international awards. She is the second woman in Cuba who has made feature films. She has taught several seminars on theory and practice of documentary cinema and on the Cuban experience in the genre in different institutions in the United States, Puerto Rico, England and Spain. She has worked as advisor for scripts of documentaries and feature films.

It is most important that the state has the will to make these changes, and it has stated it is open to changing the laws. Omar González who succeeded Alfredo Guevara as the head of the Icaic was replaced in 2013 by 30 year Icaic employee Roberto Smith de Castro who is now faced with reorganizing Icaic and implementing new laws which are yet to be formulated. He is considered to be a patient and attentive man who listens and will work to incorporate the diverse opinions into a new working reality.

The son of the famed director Daniel Diaz Torres whose controversial film “Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas” (“Alice in the City of Wonders”) in 1991 was so critical of the bureaucracy of the government at the time of the Soviet collapse that it caused the resignation of Icaic’s director Espinosa, independent producer Daniel Diaz Ravelo points out that the independent producer is neither legal nor illegal but exists in a sort of limbo, free to produce whatever he or she wants but needing legal sanctions to access necessary permits, equipment, etc. And a filmmaker has no bank account so fiscal responsibility is difficult. One must get a certificate from Icaic but there is no registration rule on how this is to be done.

And it gets more complicated. It is difficult to raise a Us$400,000 budget without networking with filmmakers from other countries and yet travel is not easy for Cubans. They can travel -- Cuba no longer has a problem with that -– but often they cannot get the visa required from the country they want or need to travel to. Daniel’s father had a problem in traveling to find financing for his last film, “La Pelicula de Ana” (“Ana's Movie”), from former producers of his films. It did receive some funding from Icaic and from former funding friend, Icestorm in Germany, and a loan from Ibermedia. Unfortunately Daniel Diaz Torres, Sr. recently died an early death and did not see the fruits of his labor in the 2013 Havana premiere.

The new generation today in Cuba is highly independent; it knows that diversity of film subjects and of filmmakers is key to Cuban cinema today and it is finding diverse sources of financing and distribution. It needs more information as well because everything depends upon contacts. Cineastes traveling to Cuba will find a vibrant group open to coproducing.

2015 marks the eighth year of the Havana Film Festival’s Works in Progress. The Post Production Award, Nuestra América Primera Copia, is an international competition for films from Latin America and from Cuba, with no restrictions; films can be produced by Icaic or independently. For example, in 2013 awards went to four films, one from Chile, “I’m Not Lorena” (“No Soy Lorena”), which premiered at Tiff 2014; one from Argentina, “La Salada”, which premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival 2014 and Tiff 2014; and two from Cuba -- one Icaic film, “His Wedding Dress” (“Vestido de novia”), and the independent, “Venice” which was also Tiff 2014.

Thanks to an initiative by La Muestra, a group of Cuban production companies (including several independent ones), once a year support is awarded to four or five projects by young filmmakers. The independent film “Melaza” by Carlos Lechuga with the 5ta Avenida Productions premiered on October 3, 2013.

Rubén Padrón Astorga, writing for On Cuba [iii], November-December 2013 [1] writes:

The best prospects for our cinema today emerged like an earthquake in late April of this year, when Kiki Álvarez, the director of “Jirafas”, “La ola” and “Marina” and “Venezia”, initiated a debate on the problems that the country has with two vital filmmaking processes (production and distribution). Close to 60 audiovisual makers responded with a meeting where they formed a Filmmakers Committee to represent the rest of the country’s professionals.

Soon after its creation, the Committee announced that its objectives included ensuring the active participation of Cuban filmmakers in every decision that was made about [our] cinema, and protecting and developing its production at the industrial and independent levels. At this time, they are working together with Icaic and the Ministry of Culture to pass a decree-law defining the autonomous audiovisual creator, which would legitimize filmmakers as a legal concept, with full rights to exercise their profession. However, the decree-law, which was drafted seven years ago and ratified by the most recent Uneac Congress, was rewritten by the Filmmakers Committee so that it is not limited to recognizing audiovisual practice as individual work, but as collective, and so that it legally protects independent producers.

This committee, together with the so-called Ministry of Culture Temporary Working Group for the Transformation of Icaic, is actively participating in drawing up a diagnosis of Cuban cinema’s problems, which will be followed with the drafting of policies and actions for solving those problems. This step will clear the way for the long-term creation of a comprehensive film law. This law, which would involve widening the scope of the law passed in 1959 for Icaic’s founding, or drafting a new one, would include the creation of a film commission that would support production and make it viable; a promotion fund that would be governed by an arts council, and to which all independent and institutional artists could aspire; financial incentives that would promote the support of private and state companies and sponsors; and a general legal framework that conceives of cinema systemically, inspired by the useful experiences that have taken place in other countries in the region, such as Colombia, Argentina, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic.

A convocation of cinema directors was held May 4, 2013 in Strawberry and Chocolate Cultural Center, Havana to address the need to participate in all plans and activities planned for Cuban cinema. The meeting chose a working group composed of Enrique Kiki Álvarez, Enrique Colina, Rebeca Chávez Lourdes de los Santos, Daniel Diaz Ravelo, Pavel Giroud, Magda González Grau, Inti Herrera, Senel Paz, Fernando Perez, Manuel Perez and Pedro L. Rodríguez.

The main objective of this group is to represent the filmmakers at all levels and events, promote and ensure the active participation of the same in all decisions and projects that relate to Cuban cinema, and strive for the protection and development of these arts and industries and their makers, which is our right and duty as protagonists of this art. At its first meeting, the group reached the following conclusions and agreements (verbatim):

1 -. We recognize the Cuban Film Institute and the Film Industry (Icaic) as the rector of the Cuban film industry state agency; born with the revolution and its long history is a legacy that belongs to all filmmakers. At the same time, we believe that the problems and projections of Cuban cinema today do not concern only the Icaic, but also other institutions and institutional groups or independently involved in their production, without whose help and commitment is not possible to achieve meaningful and lasting solutions. For that reason, its reorganization and promotion can not be done only in the context of this organism.

2 -. We understand the Cuban film produced through institutional, independent mechanisms, co-production with third or mixed formulas, and as filmmakers to all creators, technicians and Cuban specialists of these arts and industries that do their work inside or outside the institutions , whatever they may be aesthetic, content or affinity group. Consequently, it is imperative the adoption of Decree Law Media Creator recognition. This decree should be enriched with all additional legal supplements necessary.

3 -. We consider essential enacting a Film Law, whose production and given all participate and to be the legal body to order and protect the artistic and economic activity in the country.

4 -. We consider it important to study and implement a Film Development Fund, to which all authors in accessing equal rights and conditions, and open call to an independent jury whose selection parameter is the quality and feasibility of the whole project.

5 -. At this stage, the filmmakers give priority to the organization and remodeling of the methods of production and realization of works, the concept that these are, first and last instance being essentially the way we express ourselves and connect with the public. Similarly, we propose a systemic boost our activity covering the organization and remodeling of the forms of production, distribution, exhibition and national and international projection of Cuban cinema.

6 -. Start work, reviewing and updating the document "Proposals for a renewal of Cuban cinema", adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Uneac in 2008. As progress is made, they will be sharing all the proposals with the filmmakers.

7 -. Exchanging proposals and views with the State Commission working on the development of proposals for the transformation of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry.

8 -. To express our deep concern for all matters concerning international relations and Cuban cinema projection, which was a revolutionary vanguard movement in the Latin American and global context. We strive for a quick recovery and exchange relationships with filmmakers from Latin America and the world, and the continuity of the Festival of New Latin American Cinema, in its next edition turns 35.

9 -. This representation group performed their work in ongoing dialogue and communication with all filmmakers through regular meetings, which shall have the power to ratify or renew the group members, making decisions of common interest and to identify priorities and lines of job.

Filmmakers Group in the Assembly elected Cuban Filmmakers Saturday May 4 at the Centro Cultural Fresa y Chocolate, after its first meeting on May 8.

Havana, May 8, 2013. This was a verbatim article in Cubarte Magazine. [iv]

Festivals/ Markets

In 1979 Icaic created the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema aka Havana Film Festival as a way to disseminate its ethical convictions about developing film that was nonconformist, irreverent, critical of social injustice and rebellious against the pressures of the market across the continent. The event hosted over 600 filmmakers from Latin America and had as presidents of juries Gabriel García Márquez (Fiction ) and Santiago Álvarez (Documentaries and Cartoons.) The Coral Grand Prize winners were Geraldo Sarno (“Colonel Delmiro Gouveia”, Brazil) and Sergio Giral (“Maluala”, Cuba), in Fiction, Patricio Guzmán (“The Battle of Chile: the Struggle a People Without Arms”, Chile), Documentary, and Juan Padrón (“Elpidio Valdés”, Cuba) in Animation.

However, the contradiction of Icaic’s exercising a central control over maverick innovations is obvious since it controlled the production criteria and the right to decide what type of film was convenient to make and what was not.

An official competition of unpublished scripts for feature films is held by International Festival of New Latin American Cinema for authors from Latin America and the Caribbean for original scripts (no literary adaptations), written in Spanish and with Latin American themes. Scripts whose production rights have been transferred to third parties are not eligible. [v]

Icaic also supports the Festival Internacional de Cine Pobre de Humberto Solas[vi] for low budget films and Festival Internacional de Documentales “Santiago Alvarez in Memoriam”[vii].

Muestra Joven is a festival for Cuban youth with premiere fiction, doc and animated films. It has collateral activities of debates about the films in the festivals, master classes, meetings about contemporary issues and themes in the audiovisual community, workshps and onferences, poster exhibitions and homages.

In April 2014 the Mediateque of Women Directors, based in Cuba formally affiliated with The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in creating the the Caribbean Film Market. The project is also in association with The Foundation for Global Democracy and Development of the Dominican Republic, The Association for The Development of Art and Commercial Cinematography of Guadalupe, The Foundation for New Latinamerican Cinema, The Regional and International Film Festival of Guadalupe and the Mediateque of Women Directors.

Education

Icaic was in charge of training and promotion of talented young people not only in cinema but in other arts like music for which it created the Experimental Sound Group.

Isa

Most of the new independent filmmakers are young graduates of the Higher Art Institute’s (Isa) Faculty of Audiovisual Communication Media and its provincial affiliates. The University of Arts of Cuba - (Isa), Instituto Superior de Arte - was established on September 1, 1976 by the Cuban government as a school for the arts. Its original structure had three schools: Music, Visual Arts, and Performing Arts. At present the Isa has four schools, the previous three and the one for Arts and Audiovisual Communication Media. There are also four teaching schools in the provinces, one in Camagüey, two in Holguín and one in Santiago de Cuba. Isa offers pre-degree and post-degree courses, as well as a wide spectrum of brief and extension courses, including preparation for Cuban and foreign professors for a degree of Doctor on Sciences in Art. Predegree education has increased to five careers: Music, Visual Arts, Theatre Arts, Dance Arts and Arts and Audiovisual Communication Media. In 1996, the Isa established the National Award of Artistic Teaching, conceived for recognizing a lifework devoted to arts teaching.

Eictv

Eictv, the International School of Cinema and Television was founded December 15, 1986 at the Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana with the support of then-President Fidel Castro on the initiative of Latin American cultural figures such as Argentine director, “Father of the New Latin American Cinema”, Fernando Birri, Julio and Gabo and Colombian Nobel Prize winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez who donated his prize money to establish the school.. It is located in San Antonio de los Baños near Havana, on land donated by the Cuban government.

Hundreds of young students from all over Latin America have studied direction, script, photography and edition. Since its founding , 810 students have graduated and it has become one of the region’s most important and well-grounded cultural projects.

Students pay 15,000 euros (about $19,700) to attend for the full three-year program. The fee includes food, lodging and equipment. Tuition income accounts for just 15 percent of the school's budget. Funding comes from international agencies such as Ibermedia; countries including Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Panama; and regional organizations like the Alba alliance of leftist Latin American nations.

For the past eight years, Nuevas Miradas, organized by the Eictv Production Department has held its presentations at the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema for bringing new projects to the attention of international professionals.

Also in the late 1980s, Cuba created the Third World Film School to train students from various third world countries in the art of filmmaking.

Film Funding

Icaic has been the only body to fund films. How the selection of what films would receive funding has never been a public matter.

There are no instruments for private companies or individuals to contribute to film production in Cuba yet. There are however, international funds that may help finance films, such as Hubert Bals Fund from The Netherlands, World Cinema Fund from Germany, Fonds Sud from France, the Norwegian Fund, Sor Fond, Acp, etc. The best actively kept lists are found in Ocal[viii] and Online Film Financing [ix].

Coproduction with Cuba

As early as 1948 coproductions were common between Cuba and México. During the 70s and 80s Russian coproductions included Mikhail Kalatozov’s classic 1964 film “I Am Cuba” (“Soy Cuba”). Spain has played a role in coproducing Latin American and Cuban films since the 30s but in the 1990s it began to invest more heavily. In 1997 Ibermedia was created for the purpose of promoting coproduction between Spain and Latin American countries. Cuba is one of the fourteen countries involved in this organization.

In addition, Cuba has bilateral coproduction treaties with Italy, Canada, Venezuela, Spain and Chile. So far nothing has resulted from the Chile accord.

Two examples of Cuban coproduced films are Humberto Solás’ 1982 film “Cecilia” (Cuba - Spain) and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío’s 1992 Academy Award-nominated “Strawberry and Chocolate” (“Fresa y chocolate”) (Cuba – México – Spain - U.S.).

In September 2013 at San Sebastian International Film Festival’s 2nd Europe-Latin America Coproduction Forum, “The Companion”/ "El Acompañante" won the Best Project Award sponsored by Spain’s Audiovisual Producers’ Rights Management Association Egeda and carrying a 10,000 Euros (Us$13,000) cash award.

This is the third feature of Giroud after “The Silly Age” and “Omerta”. It is a coproduction of Cuba, Venezuela’s NativaPro Cinematográfica and France’s Tu Vas Voir owned by Edgard Tenembaum who produced Walter Salles’ “The Motorcycle Diaries”. The film also obtained the collaboration of Programa Ibermedia and was selected for Cinemas du Monde.

Pavel Giroud is one of the most promising of young Cuban filmmakers today. “The Companion”/ "El Acompañante" is set in 1988 Havana and tells the story of the friendship which develops between Horacio Romero, a Cuban boxer who fails a drug test and a defiant patient at an AIDS center under military rule for whom Romero must serve as a warden or, in Cuban government parlance, a “companion”. Playing the role of Horacio is Yotuel Romero (Latin Grammy Award-winning and founding member of Cuban rap group Orishas). Orishas is one of the world’s most critically hailed Latin-urban artists. The co-protagonist is Cuban actor Armando Miguel Gómez who has received international recognition for his role in the recent films "Behavior”/ “Conducta" and “Melaza”. International sales are handled by the Brazil-based international sales agency, Habanero, which, coincidently is owned by Cuban Alfredo Calvino and Brazilian Patricial Martin who handle such outstanding films as “Juan on the Dead”, Carlos Lechuga’s “Melaza”, Sebastian Cordero’s “Pescador” and Francisco Franco’s “Last Call”. Habanero also sponsors distribution awards at Ficg and Ventana Sur’s Primer Corte, a showcase for pictures in post-production. All the updated information about these films, including festivals and awards is available at: www.habanerofilmsales.com.

Case Study of the Producer, Inti Hererra

Cuba’s first English language film, “Eating the Sun”, a coproduction with Canada, is being produced by Inti Herrera who also is heading the new night spot of avant garde popular entertainment, La Fabrica de Arte Cubano.

Inti Herrera, formerly of 5ta Avenida Productions and I first met in 2003 through the international sales agent Alfredo Calvino whose then-company Latinofusion was selling Inti’s first fiction feature, “Viva Cuba”, a road movie of two kids traveling across Cuba in search of one’s father.

Inti graduated Eictv and worked for a long time as an independent producer of documentaries.

In 2009, when Camilo Vives, Icaic’s head of production created the Industry Sector of the Havana Film Festival Inti became its director and managed it until 2010. In 2010 when he was still running the industry space he invited me to speak about New Media, and I spoke of Peter Broderick who was then invited to do a workshop at Eictv.

As an executive producer, Inti must raise financing from the development through the completion of film projects. Each project is of course different from the last. He and Alejandro Brugués were originally discussing working on a different sort of film, “Melaza”, but put it on hold and in 2010 and 2011 he worked instead on the commercial film, “Juan of the Dead”, which is the most exhibited film of Cuba.

“Juan of the Dead”, Cuba’s first truly independent movie, a zombie horror comedy was coproduced in 2011 by Spain's La Zanfoña Producciones, where it was post-produced, and Cuba's first independent production company Producciones de la 5ta Avenida which also produced “Personal Belongings” in 2006 and “Melaza” in 2012. The film was written and directed by Alejandro Brugués (“Personal Belongings”). It was executive produced by Inti Herrera, Claudia Calviño and Gervasio Iglesias.

The film was represented for international sales by Latinofusion, a Guadalajara based company sponsored by Universidad de Guadalajara and managed by Alfredo Calvino. It was shown in more than 50 festivals worldwide, winning 10 audience awards and the Spanish Film Academy’s Goya Award of the for best Iberoamerican film. It sold to 42 territories.

“Juan of the Dead” distributors:

Argentina (Condor/ Mirada), Bolivia (Londra Films P&D), Brazil (Imovision), Canada (A-z Films), Chile (Arcadia Films), Germany (Pandastorm Pictures), Hong Kong and Macau (Sundream Motion Pictures), Hungary (Ads Service), Italy ( Moviemax Media Group Spa), Japan (Fine Films), Latin American Pay TV (HBO Latin America), México and Central America (Canana), Netherlands (Filmfreak), Norway (Tromso International Film Festival), Puerto Rico (Wiesner), Russia and Cis territories (Cinema Prestige), Spain (Avalon), Switzerland (Ascot Elite), U.K and Ireland (Metrodome), U.S.(Theatrical Distributor Outsider Pictures, all other rights Focus World)

Today Inti is working with a new director, Alfredo Ureta on the Canadian coproduction and the first Cuban film in English. “Eating the Sun” is about a Canadian-Cuban couple who decides to live in Cuba. Before settling in they make a tour of the country and become involved in a psychological thriller. The Canadian producer is Gordon Weiske of Canwood Entertainment. They are discussing the male lead role with Kris Holden-Ried. The goal is to find new markets for this film, markets which Cuba has not targeted before.

Top 10 Films of Cuba is a selection of my own:

1. “Memorias del subdesarrollo” (“Memories of Underdevelopment”) (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)

2. “Lucia” (Humberto Solás, 1969)

3. “Vampiros en La Habana” (“Vampires in Havana”) (Juan Padrón, 1983)

4. “Soy Cuba” (“I am Cuba”) ( Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)

5. “La bella del Alhambra” (“The beauty of the Alhambra”) (Enrique Pineda Barnet, 1989)

6. “Fresa y Chocolate” (“Strawberry and Chocolate”) (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, 1993)

7. “Lista de Espera” (“The waiting list”) (Juan Carlos Tabío, 2000)

8. “Havana Suite” (“Suite Havana”) (Fernando Pérez, 2003)

9. “Juan of the Dead” (Alejandro Brugués, 2011)

10. “Melaza” (Carlos Lechuga, 2013)

[1] http://www.oncubamagazine.com/magazine/for-independent-and-industrial-cuban-cinema/

Cubacine. El Portal del Cine Cubano. http://www.cubacine.cu/index.html.

[ii] http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=99785#sthash.yCWbyCcU.dpuf

[iii] http://oncubamagazine.com/magazine-articles/for-independent-and-industrial-cuban-cinema/ Cubacine. El Portal del Cine Cubano. http://www.cubacine.cu/index.html.

[iv] http://www.cubarte.cult.cu/periodico/opinion/cineastas-cubanos-por-el-cine-cubano/24423.html

[v] http://www.cinelatinoamericano.org/ocal/direct.aspx?cod=1234

[vi] www.festivalcinepobre.org , www.cubacine.cu/cinepobre

[vii] www.cubacine.cu/festivalsantiagoalvarez/index.html

[viii] http://www.cinelatinoamericano.org/ocal/directorios.aspx?cod=8&par=2

[ix] www.olffi.com/...

Special Mention: Un chien andalou

Directed by Luis Buñuel

Written by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel

France, 1929

Genre: Experimental Short

The dream – or nightmare – has been a staple of horror cinema for decades. In 1929, Luis Bunuel joined forces with Salvador Dali to create Un chien andalou, an experimental and unforgettable 17-minute surrealist masterpiece. Buñuel famously said that he and Dalí wrote the film by telling one another their dreams. The film went on to influence the horror genre immensely. After all, even as manipulative as the “dream” device is, it’s still a proven way to jolt an audience. Just ask Wes Craven, who understood this bit of cinematic psychology when he dreamt of the central force behind A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film intended to be an exploration of surreal horror. David Lynch is contemporary cinema’s most devoted student of Un chien andalou – the severed ear at...

Youth On The MARCHThere are 48 individual films screening in the Wavelengths section of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The relative importance of this section, amidst the vast array of offerings in this relatively huge festival, depends on your taste in movies, of course, to say nothing of your specific objectives. If you’re coming to Toronto to try to score a hot tip in this year’s Oscar race, well . . . I feel sorry for you on a number of levels. But Wavelengths is unlikely to be your jam. Originally conceived exclusively as a showcase for experimental and non-narrative films (hence the section’s title, a direct tribute to avant-garde master and Toronto native son Michael Snow), Wavelengths now encompasses the edgier, less commercial side of art cinema. This is the first of two preview essays, and my aim is to cover everything in the section. These are the...

Dziga Vertov’s experimental silent documentary upends reality in ways that are still dizzying, thrilling and strangely sexy

The spirit of punk throbs in this extraordinary silent classic from 1929, now on cinema rerelease. Dziga Vertov’s experimental documentary essay remains fascinating after all these years, as potent as an exposed fragment of sodium. It shows scenes of city life in Moscow, Odessa and Kiev, and the credits describe it as an “experiment in cinematic communication of visible events”, which doesn’t do justice to its dedication to transforming and upending reality. This film is visibly excited about the new medium’s possibility, dense with ideas, packed with energy: it echoes Un Chien Andalou, anticipates Vigo’s À Propos De Nice and the New Wave generally, and even Riefenstahl’s Olympia. There are trick-shots, split-screens, stop-motion animation, slo-mo and speeded up action. Welles never had as much fun with his train-set...

In today's roundup of news and views: Revisiting Luc Moullet’s Une Aventure de Billy le Kid and René Clément’s Forbidden Games, interviews with Jonas Mekas and George Armitage, another new book on Orson Welles, ranking 52 films by Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien Andalou as a video game, Andy Warhol's Screen Tests in Time Square, a Bertrand Bonello retrospective, remembering René Féret, photographs by Wim Wenders and an outstanding cast for Xavier Dolan's next film: Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Vincent Cassel, Nathalie Baye and Gaspard Ulliel. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup of news and views: Revisiting Luc Moullet’s Une Aventure de Billy le Kid and René Clément’s Forbidden Games, interviews with Jonas Mekas and George Armitage, another new book on Orson Welles, ranking 52 films by Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien Andalou as a video game, Andy Warhol's Screen Tests in Time Square, a Bertrand Bonello retrospective, remembering René Féret, photographs by Wim Wenders and an outstanding cast for Xavier Dolan's next film: Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Vincent Cassel, Nathalie Baye and Gaspard Ulliel. » - David Hudson...

1929 was the end of silent cinema in France, the process of conversion beginning in earnest for the following year's releases. So what height of expressiveness had the French movies reached?

Quite a bit, if Henri Fescourt's epic three-and-a-half-hour-and-change adaptation of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is anything to go by. The novel is a cracking yarn, a bit of a warhorse perhaps but always reliable and dramatic, full of crimes, revenges, outrageous coincidences and spectacular reversals in the best nineteenth-century tradition. One would expect a movie to be, at best, bold and operatic, at worst, staid and stagey. But Fescourt, who had already made a vast version of Les misérables (1925), manages to combine the best of commercial cinema's dramatics with the innovations of the impressionist filmmakers, to create something strikingly modern.

Stop me if you've heard this before: hero Edmond Dantès is maligned by a fellow sailor, snitched on by a romantic rival,...

Sidney And The Sixties: Real-time 1957-1966

Throughout the 1950s, Hollywood’s relationship with television was fraught: TV was a hated rival but also a source of cheap talent and material, as in the case of the small-scale Marty (1955), which won the Best Picture Oscar. These contradictions were well represented by the apparently “televisual” 12 Angry Men (1957), which began life as a teleplay concerning a jury with a lone holdout who must, and eventually does, convince his fellow jurors of the defendant’s innocence. Its writer, Reginald Rose, persuaded one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Henry Fonda, to become a first-time producer of the film version. Fonda and Rose took basement-low salaries in favor of future points, and hired a TV director, Sidney Lumet, for next to nothing because Lumet wanted a first feature credit. Technically, there’s an opening bit on the courtroom steps that keeps this from being a true real-time film,...

The Fall of the House of Usher

Directed by Jean Epstein

Written by Jean Epstein, Luis Buñuel, and Edgar Allen Poe

France, 1928

It’s hard to imagine that the house of Usher actually acts as a “house”. There’s very little in terms of warm, domestic quality about it: the halls are long and foreboding, the rooms are empty and grand, and it doesn’t seem accustomed to guests. Rather, its ornate decorations and intense lighting suggest something more of an Arthurian castle, full of fairy-tale supernatural qualities lurking in its grounds. Villagers shy away and whisper to themselves when someone utters the name “Usher”; a lone dog runs away at the property’s perimeter — the house’s haunted aura pervades anything that even dares think about it.

An unnamed visitor rides to this doomed estate of the demented Usher for little explained reason (not uncommon for the actions from...

10. Altered States (1980)

Directed by: Ken Russell

Is it a horror film? Many of Ken Russell’s films could be argued as such, but there’s enough in Altered States that makes it less horror and more science fiction/psychological thriller. Based on the novel by Paddy Chayefsky, Altered States introduced the world to William Hurt (and also featured the film debut of Drew Barrymore). Edward Jessup (Hurt) is studying schizophrenia, but branches out into sensory deprivation experimentation with a floating tank. Eventually, he travels to Mexico to visit a tribe that provides him with an extract which he begins to take before his trips into the flotation tank, resulting in bizarre imagery and eventual physical devolution, once to a primitive man and to a near primordial blob. Side effects start to occur, causing Edward to suffer from episodes of partial regression even without the hallucinogenic drug. Russell’s direction shifts...

“Eraserhead” (Directed by David Lynch, 1977)

(The Criterion Collection)

Everything Ugly Is Beautiful

By Raymond Benson

One of the many excellent supplements that appear on this disc is a rare video interview from 1979 with David Lynch (and cinematographer Frederick Elmes). For those of us who have aged along with the director, it is a striking glimpse at a young artist at the beginning of his strange and wonderful career. In it, he explains that he is attracted to sometimes harsh, oppressive settings, such as the nightmarish industrial cityscape in Eraserhead. “What everyone else finds ugly, I find beautiful,” he says proudly. And the director has pretty much remained true to his word, hasn’t he?

Eraserhead is a landmark picture, but its original release in 1977 was slow to reach an audience. It gained its must-see reputation only after the film was picked up to run on the midnight movie circuit that...

Throughout the summer, an admin on the r/movies subreddit has been leading Reddit users in a poll of the best movies from every year for the last 100 years called 100 Years of Yearly Cinema. The poll concluded three days ago, and the list of every movie from 1914 to 2013 has been published today.

Users were asked to nominate films from a given year and up-vote their favorite nominees. The full list includes the outright winner along with the first two runners-up from each year. The list is mostly a predictable assortment of IMDb favorites and certified classics, but a few surprise gems have also risen to the top of the crust, including the early experimental documentary Man With a Movie Camera in 1929, Abel Gance’s J’Accuse! in 1919, the Fred Astaire film Top Hat over Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps in 1935, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing over John Ford’s...

A Woman in Trouble and a Man in Need: Forzani & Cattet Return Prove a Force to Reckon With

Directing duo Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani follow-up up their 2009 debut Amer with another hit from the giallo pipe, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, a visual masterpiece that will confuse, confound, and hypnotize you as it’s one of the most visually extravagant explorations of the gaudy and grotesque ever committed to film. Certain to be rejected by mainstream sensibilities, Cattet and Forzani go beyond just another stylistic homage to create a creepshow that actually surpasses its predecessors with its expert level of artistic and technical prowess.

The plot seems to be transparently simple, yet spurts into a labyrinthine odyssey of revolving tangents and alternate perspectives that make it seem anything but. Dan Kristensen (Klaus Tange), a Danish man living in Brussels, returns to his art nouveau apartment from...

Surrealism as a cinematic genre goes further back in time than some people may realise. Although many contemporary films are described as ‘being Surreal’ or as having ‘Surrealist qualities’, the original films go back to the early 1900s and peaked during the 1920s. This was the era when the movement was at its peak and artists including Salvador Dalí and directors like Luis Buñuel were at their most active. The films made during this time have infiltrated popular culture in a variety of ways and, although you may not have seen the originals, you will have likely seen them homaged in works by Alfred Hitchcock, episodes of The Simpsons and films by David Lynch. Surrealism is all around us.

One of the best-known examples of Surrealist cinema is Un chien andalou, the 1928 short film by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel in their campaign ‘for a revolution of the mind’. Indeed,...

As obsessed with bodily fluids as it is with social awkwardness, The Inbetweeners, be it on TV or the big screen, determinedly sets out to make viewers laugh until a bit of lung comes out. And with The Inbetweeners 2 now taking the boys, ahem, down under for more sexual shenanigans in Australia, the gross-out levels are set to soar (or plummet, depending on your viewpoint).

But making audiences squint, wince and fight their gag reflexes has always been a part of cinema. Sometimes it's done for belly laughs (Cameron Diaz styling her hair with Ben Stiller's homemade gel in There's Something About Mary), sometimes to elicit feelings of shock or revulsion (Ray Liotta forced to dine on his own brain in Hannibal). And sometimes it does all of the above at once (an army of zombies being cut to dripping ribbons with a lawnmower in Peter Jackson's splatstick horror...

That Obscure Object Of Desire screens tonight at Bam as part of their Buñuel retrospective, July 11 - August 14).

Pauline Kael may have dubbed David Lynch “the first popular surrealist,” but the honor is more accurately bestowed upon Spanish maestro Luis Buñuel. Though his Salvador Dalí collaboration, Un chien andalou (1929), is regarded as a touchstone of the movement, it was not until later in his career that Buñuel would exploit the very meaning of the surreal, brashly straying from his contemporaries’ aesthetically driven impulses. With the respectively never-ending and never-beginning dinner parties of his elliptical masterpieces The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Buñuel’s breed of Surrealism drew itself so close to the upper middle-class quotidian, it became far more subversive than any old melting clock. The conceptual hysteria of his films is in turn grounded by a simplified mise-en-scène; the surroundings are such that any outlandish yarn appears rooted in reality.

Nothing Lasts Forever is a 1984 sci-fi movie with Zach Galligan and Bill Murray that disappeared. Yet it's resurfaced.

Feature

I love a good quest. There’s nothing that drives a plot quite like it, from Jason setting out to find the Golden Fleece to Indiana Jones’ determination to track down the Ark of the Covenant. Along the way there is always action, and adventure, and some friends to meet and enemies to defeat. Because that’s how a quest works.

Quests don’t have to be about objects. They can also be about finding your place in the world, and Nothing Lasts Forever tells the story of Adam Beckett, a young man who wants to be an artist, even though he has no idea of what an artist actually is. His quest takes him to a strange, totalitarian Manhattan where wannabe artists must sit a practical exam, and eventually to some very surprising places,...

Entertainment Geekly is a weekly column that examines pop culture through a geek lens and simultaneously examines contemporary geek culture through a pop lens. So many lenses!

Should we start with the music videos? Does anyone in college or younger understand why music videos were important? There was a significant portion of the ’90s spent agonizing over how cinema would be forever altered by the onrushing influx of young-turk hotshot music-video auteurs, and the quick-cut glitter-grit really-just-too-much style they brought along.

Now it’s 2014 and music videos are dead, unless you’re a bygone spiffy-clean tween star nakedly straddling a spheroid metaphor.

The world is all out of whack: multiple Dutch tilts are on display in Voyage sans espoir (1943), an unbelievably glossy poetic realist proto-noir from Christian-Jaque: the film actually begins with railway tracks viewed from the front of a speeding train, upside down, as the camera drunkenly rolls upright and titles come flying towards us, slapping flat across the frame like flies hitting a windshield.

The plot is convoluted but crisp—chance encounters tie together Jean Marais, fleeing his job at a bank to see life and settle in Argentina, with an escaped jailbird of psychopathic demeanor (Paul Bernard) and his girlfriend, the radiant Simone Renant. There's also a likably crooked ship's captain carrying a torch for Renant, a sinister ethnic-type sailor (Ky Duyen), and a pair of hard-drinking but eternally sober detectives who resemble nothing more than the Thompson Twins from Tintin. The French had a nifty way with...

It is one of Beckett's most famous – and most startling – images. But what inspired the half-buried woman in Happy Days? His friend and biographer James Knowlson tracks down the first Winnies

Samuel Beckett was a passionate lover of art and a friend of many painters and sculptors. He loved Dutch and Flemish painting in particular – and art almost certainly inspired some of his most memorable theatrical images. Even his earliest plays, such as Waiting for Godot or Endgame, recall the old masters: the character Lucky in Godot may well remind you of a Brueghel grotesque; Estragon and Vladimir's physical antics echo scenes in Adriaen Brouwer's paintings ("Dear, dear Brouwer", Beckett called him); Hamm in Endgame appears to share genes with some portraits by Rembrandt, staring out at the viewer – Jacob Trip in his armchair, perhaps.

As for Beckett's late miniature works – recently revived by the Royal Court with a tour...

We all have predisposed notions about the infamous “romantic comedy.” As with other genres, there’s a large subsection of offerings, giving it a bad name. But, for every tired, cliché-driven comedy, there is another impressive offering that redefines the genre, garners plenty of laughs, and tells an honest story about love and relationships, however warped they may be. In the coming weeks, we’ll take a look at the fifty romantic comedy films that should be seen. These may not all be classic films, but they certainly put a stamp on the industry and the genre we affectionately call “rom-coms.”

#50. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Most of Wes Anderson’s films could be described as romantic comedies, but his 2012 effort stands out, as its central story focuses on young love and the need to find acceptance. In Anderson’s world, while quirks abound, true connections between characters are commonplace. With Moonrise Kingdom,...

Magnolia Pictures

Morbid movies have been a feature of cinema from its earliest days, with films such as Nosferatu, Un Chien Andalou, L’age d’or and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. They were frowned upon by our moral guardians for being unwholesome, but it didn’t stop their proliferation down the decades. By the 1960s, many taboos of cinema – like nudity, gore and graphic sex – had been busted wide open, leaving filmmakers all over the world free to engage in an all manner of previously off-limits subjects.

The 1970s were flooded with morbid films, though – Straw Dogs, The Devils, Last Tango in Paris, Last House on the Left, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (just to name a few). These films gave the censors the run around, but they set a precedent for subsequent writers and directors to attain new heights of ghoulishness. There are no sacred cows left today...

Today’s film is the 1929 short Un Chien Andalou. The film is created by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, the latter of whom also directs. This short marked the first foray into film for Dali, who is known primarily for his paintings in surrealism. This film was also the directing debut for Buñuel, who went on to become a revered filmmaker on the international stage, many of whose works are considered classics. This short does contain graphic content in the form of human body mutilation.

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The post Sunday Shorts: ‘Un Chien Andalou’, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali appeared first on Sound On Sight.

Cinema, as Jean-Luc Godard wrote, is truth 24 times a second. Documentaries both prove and disprove the point; but the truth is their strongest weapon. Here, Guardian and Observer critics pick the 10 best

• Top 10 arthouse movies

• Top 10 family movies

• Top 10 war movies

• Top 10 teen movies

• Top 10 superhero movies

• Top 10 westerns

• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s

10. Man With a Movie Camera

To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium...

Orson Welles' Too Much Johnson, screened for the first time to a full house at Pordenone Festival of Silent Cinema, comes trailing clouds of mystery like so much else in the life and work of its maker.

We know Welles shot the film in 1938 with a newsreel cameraman, intending it as a series of insert sequence within a play he was producing with the Mercury Theater. For various reasons, the three sequences, intended to carry the exposition in William Gillette's 1894 farce, were not ready or could not be projected when the play opened, and as a result the show was not a success.

Now George Eastman House has restored what it describes as Welles' cutting copy, apparently discovered in a warehouse in Pordenone itself. It consists of several reels of loosely ordered material with multiple takes, and was presented without any alteration apart from the preservation necessary to make the material projectable.

Growing up in Culver City, I always saw the MGM studio near us as a place of make-believe where I could collect autographs of famous movie stars. I knew they made the movies there that I watched every weekend. But it was home, and home was a place of safe daydreams without ambitious goals associated with it.

When I became a teenager and saw Un Chien Andalou, I began to see Movie Mecca as New York and Paris, but now I see they have nothing on us.

Los Angeles this past month had so many events that I could see the world without leaving town. Just a sampling here: German Film Currents,Polish Film Festival, So. African Arts Fest, Satyajit Ray Restored, Pure and Impure: The films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gabriel Figueroa Retrospective and The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema which this weekend showed Roberto Gavaldon’s Macario an Oscar-nominated 1959 surrealist Mexican fable. Also showing this weekend alone were A Century of Chinese Cinema at UCLA, the Cambodian documentaryA River Changes Course, Ida’s free documentary series, sci-fi Beyond Fest at the Egyptian Theater, Henri-George Couzot’s La Verite at Red Cat, not to mention Classics from the Cohen Film Colletion: The Rohauer Collection and finally, the early press screenings for the Foreign Language Submissions for the Academy Awards.

Today I write about Africa, West Africa in particular, but even more so Chad, because that is where Mahamat-Saleh Haroun and his film Grigris (Isa: Les Films du Losange, No. America: Film Movement) originate. Grigris premiered in the Cannes Film Festival this year. Haroun also wrote and directed The Screaming Man (Isa: Pyramide, No. America: Film Movement) which won The Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Grigris is playing as part of the Cameras d’Afrique Series at Lacma which I blogged about earlier Here. This showcase of world-changing films is an initiative of Loyola Marymount University Film School, Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Film Program and Film Independent.

The films offer a unique view of Africa in the comfort of our own town. This series includes the 1963 film Borom Sarret by Ousmane Sembene from Senegal, the first film directed by an African to focus on an African filmmaker’s own people. We all know the name of Ousmane Sembene, but rarely have the chance to see his films, though I will never forget the experience of seeing Black Girl in 1966 at the height of our own Civil Rights struggles. It enlightened me about the rest of the world’s own warped (i.e., colonial) view of the Africans in diaspora, a subject being revived in so many films of today.

My most current education on Africa comes from the annual course I teach about the international film business to festival directors from Africa, Asia and Latin America at the Deutsche Welle Akademie in Berlin. I learn about the problems and issues facing a diverse range of festival directors, many of whom are also filmmakers. For example, in a country with no theaters, the film festival is held in the bush and promoted via cel phones which everyone possesses. I was also made alert to the fact that many Africans themselves find European-funded films showing dusty, poverty-stricken but cute kids in torn t-shirts and running barefoot in dirty streets and men wearing the boubou and women balancing baskets on their heads condescending and imbalanced depictions of Africa today.

Mama Kéïta was present to talk about L’Absence and Gaston Kaboré was there with Buud Yam (followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker). Other program highlights included the L.A. premiere of Mille Soleils (A Thousand Suns), Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 French New Wave–inspired Touki Bouki, Idrissa Ouédraogo’s 1990 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner Tilaï (The Law), and the 2013 Fespaco Golden Stallion winner Tey (Today), followed by a Q&A with director Alain Gomis and star Saul Williams.

Seeing these films gave me a feeling of wholeness, from L’Absence, the tail of a prodigal son, returning too long after he was granted an education in France by his fellow countrymen and family who had expected him to return and contribute to his own country’s wellbeing but instead stayed in France where he basically lost his soul, to Buud Yam, a classic hero’s journey by a young man seeking a healer for his sister. The audience and the filmmakers along with their films had a great opportunity to unveil an Africa about which we know too little

Planning to interview Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, I looked up Chad in Wikipedia and read it is what is called a “failed country”. My spirits dropped. But on seeing Grisgris and meeting Haroun and hearing all he had to say, my spirits soared.

Do you know for a fact that a film can change the world? I believe it can, does and is changing the world. So many of my colleagues in the film world are in film because of the same ideal.

The African directors at the series spoke of their films and their passion and they too make films to change the world. Haroun was not the only one who spoke at the African film series, but my conversation with him proved it to me. We spent a good hour discussing his films and his thoughts and development which I will try to summarize here.

It has been a long road for Haroun. When he first returned to Chad from France and made Bye Bye Africa, he was inexperienced and afraid of nothing. You see his chutzpah making Bye Bye Africa as he shoots film of everyone, offending some who believed he was stealing their spirits. He meets his past star who played a woman dying of AIDS whose life has been ruined because the people believe the film was real.

For Haroun, acting is like cooking. You do it for someone you love. Chad was such a difficult country for filming his first film, so he could make mistakes. If you fall down, you just get up and keep going. He had no doubts. It’s a question of love. You feel it; you act it. His non-professional actors do their best and their passion carries them through.

Making his second film was different. There was pressure, especially for him as an actor, to make it good. After A Screaming Man he got a call from Brad Pitt who wanted him as an actor in World War Z and who wanted the lead, but not speaking English put an end to that.

Chad is landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west. Because the French colonized it in the 1920s, it is now a “Francophone” country and has more in common with its neighbors in the West and so is considered West African.

Chad had free elections in 2008 and elected President Idriss Déby. The country defeated the Sudanese rebels there. The nation sent troops into Mali and killed Moktar Belmoktar, the Algerian terrorist behind the deadly attack on a natural gas plant in Algeria and withdrew its troops in April of this year saying they were not prepared to fight guerilla warfare. That means money that went to the military can be redirected toward peaceful endeavors. Today they are rebuilding the country which is based on an oil economy which gives it a window of rich opportunity.

Cinema in Chad changed greatly and became a new focal point for the newly elected government when Haroun won the Jury Prize in Cannes for A Screaming Man in 2010 When his debut film Bye Bye Africa (1999), showed the wreck of the country revisited by long-time French exile, he saw theaters which the long civil war and instability had destroyed. He spoke to a woman who swore she would renovate her theater, the Normandie. Bye Bye Africa was a drama but it took place in a documentary setting which looks at the poor state of cinema in the country. After Haroun won the Grand Jury Prize of Cannes, the government allocated $1 million to restore the theater which stands today as a testament to the power of film. It shows 35mm, is digitized and can use satellite transmission. It can buy Hollywood films using digital coding although film distribution rights are still difficult to negotiate. However, the distributor of Django in France arranged for Django to show day and date in Paris and Chad’s capitol city N’Djamena for a minimum guarantee. This was a major event for a country that has gone 30 years without cinema.

The government of Chad began to receive compliments for winning the Jury Prize in Cannes, which is perceived to be as important as the Olympics themselves (It is, in fact, the 2nd largest press event in the world after the Olympics). The world’s perception of Chad and its own perception of itself shifted from being one of the poorest, war-torn and corrupt nations of Africa to one of high stature culturally. And its current Prime Minister Djimrangar Dadnadji, and his government has now allocated $10 million into building a film school which should be finished by 2015. It will be one of the rare film schools in all of Africa and will be the finest in the north, east or west of the entire continent.

The film school is a part of rebuilding the country today. It is also trying to become part of the U.N. Security Council. It is the leading country in Central and West Africa. It is part of the Central African Economic Council (Ceeac).

What these changes mean for Haroun is that he can continue to use film for himself as a platform, the means to objectify and philosophize about conscience and consciousness. As Aimee Caesar was quoted in Bye Bye Africa, Africa needs to articulate its storytelling tradition in new ways and to be visible beyond its own borders. Film shows diversity. Differing points of view and discussions mean the nation can start to play a role on a grander world stage. With the building of a film school, the parliament also voted into law at tax of $.01 per telephone call to go toward artistic activities. This will make a huge difference to the next generation.

When Haroun began making movies he wanted to stop talking about the state of cinema, so he put it into his film, memorialized it and then closed the door on the subject.

You can see Haroun’s own evolution in regards to his treatment of women in Bye Bye Africa to his depiction of them in Grigris. It was not a very flattering portrayal; even in Grigris, the hero does not stand up for the woman he loves when his boss degrades her. However, the film gives a special place to the women in the village as if they were a in a classical Greek Choir. The women change the Story and the two artists’ destiny is changed because of the women.

Grigris is the portrait of a young African artist, but even with talent, the milieu is so difficult and as the eldest, he has to take care of others. This is The Responsibility that kills dreams. Grigris is a cruel portrayal of the young artist. It is a modern story, extending the tradition of oral storytelling.

Although he is not acting in it, it is still an impressionistic self-portrait, as was Bye Bye Africa which was shot in two weeks and won Best First Feature in Venice in 1999. His growth intellectually and emotionally can be measured by watching the two films.

After being selected and awarded at the 66th Festival de Cannes for the remarkable quality of its photography, the film Grigris, by Mahamat Saleh Haroun, supported by the Acp Cultures + Programme, won the Bayard d'Or for best photography at the 28th Festival International Film Francophone de Namur (Fiff) in Belgium. (Read the full list of 28th Fiff Awards : click here.)

Haroun explains that he has many women around him – his mother, his sisters, cousins. In Africa, a man’s role does not include cooking. Cooking is love. But in France he enjoys cooking. Cooking shows trust in those who partake in the making and eating of the meal. No one burns the steak when cooking for one’s mother. Food is essential to Haroun. “If you cook, you can share, you open your doors.”

He told me how he got into movies.

I was 9 years old when I saw my first movie. It was a Bollywood movie and a beautiful lady in it was smiling at the camera. I thought she was smiling at me. The love and happiness I felt watching this made me love cinema.

My dream of cinema was a big ambition. It was not to make small films. I dreamt of expressing an important philosophy of life and of my country in cinema. I did not want to stick just to tradition which is disappearing. But to the eternal which remains. Tradition is not the essential; culture is. For example, in Western society, the meaning of seat number 13 on a plane is not culture, but it is a tradition.

Haroun is leading his generation. In 1965 the civil war was raging in the North. It came to the capital in 1979 and he went to Paris to study cinema in 1981/82. His country was ruled by a dictator who is now in prison to be judged in court for the 40,000 lives taken during the 8 years of war. Reid Brady of the Human Rights Watch and Haroun are now making a documentary about this. Today Haroun travels between France and Chad 5 to 6 times a year. Interestingly, there is not yet a film festival in Chad.

When I asked what was next :

Next is about Indian fashion. Also a young artist. It is based on a true story of a young man in N’Djemena who used to watch Bollywood dvds and has seen more than 1,500 Bollywood films and speaks Hindu as a result. He gets a job at an Indian factory and translates to French and to his African language. He spends eight years there but dreams of becoming an actor in Bollywood. The story brings him to Bombay. That is a good base for a film; a film built on truth and documentary.

I am also making a film in France called A Life in France. I have lived there for 30 years. The film is from the point of view of an immigrant as I am.

Hamoud and I so enjoyed our talk that we are now looking forward to meeting again when he returns here in December! Wouldn’t it be great if his film is one of those shortlisted for the Nomination, or if it actually received the Nomination? Or if it won? How might that then change the world? We will have to wait and see.

About Lmu Sftv

Movie industry moguls helped establish Loyola Marymount University’s (Lmu) current campus on the bluffs above west Los Angeles in the 1920s. By 1964, Lmu was formally teaching film and television curriculum, and in 2001, the School of Film and Television (Sftv) was established as its own entity. Today, Sftv offers students a comprehensive education where mastering technical skills and story is equally important to educating the whole person, including the formation of character and values, meaning and purpose. Sftv offers undergraduate degrees in animation, production, screenwriting, film and television studies and recording arts; and graduate degrees in production, screenwriting and writing and producing for television. The school is one of the few film programs providing students with a completely tapeless model of production and post-production, and Sftv’s animation program is one of the few worldwide that teaches virtual cinematography. Selected alumni include John Bailey, Bob Beemer, Francie Calfo, Brian Helgeland, Francis Lawrence, Lauren Montgomery, Jack Orman, Van Partible and James Wong, among others. Get more information at sftv.lmu.edu or facebook.com/lmusftv.

About Film Independent at Lacma

Film Independent at Lacma is a film series produced by Film Independent—the nonprofit arts organization that also produces the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival—and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) with presenting sponsor The New York Times and premier sponsor Ovation. The Film Independent at Lacma Film Series is curated by Elvis Mitchell and assistant curator Bernardo Rondeau. The program features classic and contemporary narrative and documentary films; emerging auteurs; international showcases; special guest-curated programs, such as Jason Reitman's acclaimed Live Read series; and conversations with artists, filmmakers, and other special guests. For more information, go to filmindependent.org/lacma or lacma.org.

Every year, we here at Sound On Sight celebrate the month of October with 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles. I’ve also decided to publish each post backwards this time around for one simple reason: that is, the new additions appear lower on my list, whereas my top 50 haven’t changed much, except for maybe in ranking. Enjoy!

Special Mention:

Un chien andalou

Directed by Luis Buñuel

Written by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel

France, 1929

The dream – or nightmare – has been a staple of horror cinema for decades. In 1929, Luis Bunuel joined forces with Salvador Dali to create Un chien andalou, an experimental and unforgettable 17-minute surrealist masterpiece.