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Cannes 2023 :: Killers of the Flower Moon :: Martin Scorsese’s Bitterest Crime Epic Martin Scorsese triumphs yet again. A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it.. |
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Berlinale 2023 :: Full Winners List This year’s jury, headed by Kristen Stewart, gave
the Golden Bear award to the French documentary “On the Adamant..” The Silver Bear for
Best Lead Performance notably went to child star Sofia Otero for “20,000 Species of Bees.”
Philippe Garrel's “The Plough” was.. |
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BAFTA 2023 :: ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’
Dominates BAFTA Awards With Seven Wins “All Quiet on the Western Front” dominated the BAFTA Awards in London on
Sunday night with a record-breaking seven wins for a film not in the English languag,
including for Best Director.. |
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Berlinale 2023 :: Golshifteh Farahani :: Talks Role Of
Art In Iran “In A Dictatorship Like
Iran, Art Is Essential, It’s Like Oxygen.” Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, who is at the
Berlin Film Festival as a member of Kristen Stewart’s jury, has talked passionately about the
importance of art.. |
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SIFF 2023 :: Shirin Ebadi :: Until We Are Free
This is the amazing, at times harrowing,
simply astonishing story of a woman who would never give up, no matter the risks. The first
Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi has inspired millions around
the globe.. |
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IFFR 2023 Awards :: 'Le spectre de Boko Haram' and
'Endless Borders' are the victors Cyrielle Raingou’s documentary took home the Tiger Award, whilst Abbas
Amini’s feature won the VPRO Big Screen Award, as the Dutch gathering celebrated its in-
person comeback.. |
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Winners of the 2022 ‘Sepanta Awards’ :: 15th Annual
Iranian Film Festival This year, the
festival presented 50 films from Iran, USA, Italy, France, Luxembourg, Greece, UK, Canada,
Australia, and Denmark…, ranging from fiction, documentary, short, animation…. to the
music video.. |
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Opinion :: Will Venice Protests Help or Hurt filmmakers
in Iran? As the Venice Film Festival
celebrates Iranian cinema — with four Iranian films screening at the 79th Biennale — back
home in Tehran, Iranian filmmakers and artists are facing the harshest crackdown in
decades.. |
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Biennale Cinema 2022 :: Awards Ceremony
Official Awards of the 79th Venice Film Festival.
Announced by the five international Juries, chaired by Julianne Moore, during the Awards
Ceremony that was held on Saturday 10th September at 7:00 pm..
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Coming: 15th Annual Iranian Film Festival! : San
Francisco: Sep. 17-18 This year, the
festival presents 50 films from Iran, USA, Italy, France, Luxembourg, Greece, UK, Canada,
Australia, and Denmark…, ranging from fiction, documentary, short, animation…. to the
music video. We are happy and proud to.. |
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Welcome to Online Film Home! |
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'Fire At Sea' winner of Golden Bear for Best Film
Dir: Gianfranco Rosi. Italy-France. 2016. mins.
The film culminates in astonishing, heartbreaking sequences of Italian navy rescue operations filmed by Rosi, who lived on Lampedusa for a year.
By Lee Marshall
The European migrant crisis has found its cinematic Pietà in Fire At Sea, Italian director Gianfranco Rosi’s powerful, at times shocking but also intensely human documentary about the life of Lampedusa, a small, windswept Mediterranean island of around six thousand people, which in the last twenty years, as a succinct introductory title informs us, has seen 400,000 sea-borne migrants pass through – and off whose coastline 15,000 more have died.
In films like Below Sea Level or his Venice Golden Lion winner Sacro Gra, Rosi turns his camera – literally, as he is his own DoP – on people living in circumscribed spaces, charting their lives and rituals and ways of making sense of the world, allowing pathos and sometimes humour to emerge in a narration-free observational style. Here, however, he’s more angry, more empathetic, but not, in the end, more judgemental.
Rosi’s decision to channel much of the story through the eyes of a cheeky but still innocent 9-year-old Lampedusan kid, Samuele, seems motivated partly by the need to find a sympathetic – often downright hilarious – guide to island life, an access-all-areas mediator between the camera and the island’s sometimes reticent adult inhabitants. But it also acts as an emotional bridge that makes the stronger content of the film’s second half – where crowded migrant centres and harrowing rescues at sea come to the fore – all the more affecting.
In the first part of the film, we see Samuele doing the things nine-year-old boys do in places like Lampedusa – climbing a tree, making a catapult, riding a Vespa with a friend over the island’s rough tracks and rocky terrain. We meet Maria, his grandmother, who is always cooking or sewing or making beds, Pippo, a young islander seated at the console from which he runs the local radio station, and an elderly scuba diver who we follow underwater, in some of the film’s most poetic sequences, as he dives for sea urchins.
There’s also a kind local doctor – the local doctor, it appears – who we first see administering an ultrasound scan to an African woman who is pregnant with twins.
Samuele is the son of a fisherman, but he gets seasick when he goes out on the boat with his dad; he’s a crack shot with his catapult, but turns out to have a lazy eye, and is ordered to wear a patch over the good one. Or is it Europe that has the lazy eye? Samuele’s island could be a different place entirely, we realise, from the Lampedusa we read about and see on the TV news. A radio news report of a migrant boat shipwreck enters the kitchen where grandma is chopping vegetables, and the fishermen seem to have seen more than they will ever say; but Rosi’s portrait of a place on the extreme southern fringe of Europe, though affectionate, is not just about islands, but insulation, about two worlds that barely touch (it’s perhaps no coincidence that gold-foil survival blankets are a recurrent image).
Flagged by desperate recorded messages picked up by the coastguard in the film’s first half, among other premonitions, the world of the migrants who cross from Libya in unseaworthy boats and fragile dinghies muscles its way gradually into the film from around the halfway mark on. It culminates in some astonishing, heartbreaking sequences of Italian navy rescue operations filmed by Rosi, who lived on Lampedusa for a year and was eventually granted difficult-to-obtain access to patrol boats. He also managed to shoot in the main island detention centre – where he films queues for the payphone, prayer sessions and football matches between fiercely competitive teams divided along national lines – suggesting that solidarity and loyalty bubbles are not just a European problem.
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