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DOSTANA, THROUGH THE EYES OF PAINTER: Censorship

Agence France-Presse reports that the radical nationalist Hindu groups Sanatan Sanstha and Hindu Jananagruti have succeeded in getting the International Film Festival of India, held in the old Portuguese territory of Goa, to withdraw Maqbool Fida Husain’s 1967 documentary short Through the Eyes of Painter.
Husain, 93, who has been called India’s Picasso, became enmeshed in the mid-1990s in an ugly uproar over his paintings of nude Hindu goddesses, for which he was sued and received death threats from Hindu fanatics. He currently divides his time between London and Dubai.
The 39th Goa Film Festival — all the poorer for having caved in to censorship forces — comes to a close on December 2.
***
"A single bench [...]

LATTER DAYS Clip: Mormons Vs. Gays

 
Californians will be voting on Proposition 8 this coming Tuesday. Considering how religious beliefs are the engine behind the anti-gay marriage proposition, and that according to numerous reports the Mormon Church has been fighting the fight to make sure that gays and lesbians never have their unions recognized by the state, I thought it only appropriate to post a clip from the 2003 romantic dramatic comedy Latter Days, which stars Steve Sandvoss as a Mormon missionary who — sit tight — is seduced and corrupted by the vile gay lifestyle.
Well, at least that’s how his Mormon family sees the young man’s coming out of the closet. Writer-director C. Jay Cox, a gay man who was himself a former Mormon [...]

SAVE ME: Q&A with Robert Cary

A few days ago, when I read an Associated Press report stating that US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s church "is promoting a conference that promises to convert gays into heterosexuals through the power of prayer," I immediately thought of Save Me.
Directed by Robert Cary (right) from a screenplay by Robert Desiderio, Save Me, which opens in Los Angeles on Friday, September 19, chronicles the inner awakening of three characters at Genesis House, a Christian retreat in New Mexico where gay men undergo something called "conversion therapy" — a treatment that is supposed to cure gay men of their "affliction." ("Pray away the gay," some call it.)
Indeed, there’s lots of healing taking place at Genesis, though not exactly the way the [...]

Oscar 2009: WORLDS APART Is Denmark’s Submission

Via European-Films.net:
"The Danes are the first Europeans out of the gate this year with their announcement of their 2009 Foreign Language Oscar submission. The country will submit Niels Arden Oplev’s religious drama To verdener (Worlds Apart), which was a big hit in Denmark with over 300,000 tickets sold. Based on a true story, To verdener follows young Sara (Rosalinde Mynster), who comes from a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. When she falls in love with Teis (Pilou Asbaek), who is a non-believer, things become complicated."
***
From Alissa Simon’s Variety review: "Based on a true story, this provocative, well-turned drama … raises universally pertinent questions about fundamentalist thinking without portraying Witnesses’ beliefs as inherently crazy or evil."
Niels Arden Oplev also co-wrote the screenplay [...]

Visualizing the Sacred: Islam on Film at UCLA

"What we wanted to say is, if these people [Iranians, Muslims] scare you, look closer: They have parents, they have lovers, they have hope, they have stories." That’s filmmaker and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi, referring to Persepolis, at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
(Top photo: Brick Lane by Sarah Gavron. Right photo: Of Love and Eggs by Garin Nugroho.)
Whether or not following on Satrapi’s lead, this weekend the UCLA Film & Television Archive is launching the film series "Visualizing the Sacred: Islam on Film," which runs Friday, May 9 — Monday, June 9. "Visualizing the Sacred" will show a side of Islam and Muslims apart from terrorist attacks, Mohammed cartoons, or hysterical short films created by far-right Dutch politicians.
"The films in this [...]

Brigitte Bardot Vs. Muslims

Next round of Brigitte Bardot vs. Muslims.
No, Bardot’s animosity has nothing to do with, say, a planned Algerian-made sex melodrama called And Allah Created Woman. Bardot, like millions of others in France and elsewhere, apparently just doesn’t like Muslims, period.
She’s now on trial for the fifth time since the mid-1990s for "inciting racial hatred" due to recent controversial remarks she made about Islam and its followers, five million of whom live in France. (Free speech laws in France are clearly less encompassing than in some other countries.) French anti-racist groups filed a complaint following comments Bardot made about the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha, in which a sheep is usually sacrificed, in a letter to right-wing French president Nicolas [...]

Four Documentaries Banned from 2008 Singapore Film Festival

Screendaily reports that four documentaries scheduled for the 21st Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF), which kicked off on April 4, have been banned by local censors.
According to the report, two of the documentaries — Arab-American director Bassam Haddad’s Arabs and Terrorism, about opposing views on political terror, and Mano Khalil’s David the Tolhildan, which follows the son of a former Swiss Federal Supreme Court president who joined the Kurdish armed independence movement PKK — "were ‘disallowed’ on account of their sympathetic portrayal of allegedly terrorist organizations."
"Films which portray terrorist organizations in a positive light by lending support and voice to justify their cause through violence are disallowed under the film classification guidelines," said Amy Chua, chairman of Singapore’s Board [...]

Arthur C. Clarke and God

Ed Park’s "Arthur C. Clarke’s down-to-earth legacy" in the Los Angeles Times:
". . . [Arthur C. Clarke] left explicit instructions that no religious ceremony accompany his death. (For good measure: In what was possibly his last interview, in BBC Focus magazine last December, he said the greatest danger humanity faced was ‘Organised religion polluting our minds as it pretends to deliver morality and spiritual salvation.’) Yet he was one of the genre’s presiding deities, a member of the Golden Age’s ‘Big Three,’ who still cast their shadows across the field. (That trio’s other two members, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, predeceased Clarke.) . . ."
"For all Clarke’s hard-SF bona fides — background in physics and mathematics, chair of the [...]

INCORRECT ENTERTAINMENT: Q&A with Author Anthony Slide

Veteran author Anthony Slide has another book out, Incorrect Entertainment or Trash from the Past: A history of political incorrectness and bad taste in 20th century American popular culture (BearManor, 2007, paperback, US$19.95).
Lengthy title for a highly controversial subject matter. Chapters range from "This Race Business" and "Sex" to "Bodily Functions and Dysfunctions" and "Hollywood’s Fascist Follies." There’s surely something in the book to offend every reader.
Mr. Slide, whose Now Playing was also q&a’ed in this blog, has cordially agreed to answer several questions about his latest tome. Considering his book and its subject matter, Slide’s responses are as controversial as to be expected.
Needless to say, he disagrees with me on a number of topics, from the Production Code’s [...]

JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE PEOPLES TEMPLE, JESUS CAMP: Contemporary Documentaries

Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple and Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Jesus Camp (above) will be screened as part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ 26th annual Contemporary Documentaries series on Wednesday, October 3, at 7 p.m. at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Admission is free.
Religion is the nominal topic of both documentaries, but brainwashing and its ensuing dire consequences — potential or realized — is their actual theme.
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (left), explores the deadly impact of charismatic religious leader Jim Jones.
Jones attracted a multiethnic congregation by preaching about integration and equality. In November 1978, more than 900 members of his church died in [...]

BUDDHA COLLAPSED OUT OF SHAME at the 2007 San Sebastian Film Festival

"As an 18-year-old girl who lives in Iran today and who faces very specific ideological, political and social pressures, I have a lot to say … Even though my film was not made in Iran, it shows my desire to speak of collective suffering, in Iran as well as in Afghanistan."
That’s director Hana Makhmalbaf, whose feature-film debut, Buda as sharm foru rikht / Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, was screened yesterday at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Written by Marzieh Meshkini, the Franco-Iranian Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame is set in central Afghanistan’s Bamiyan valley, where the Taliban blew up two rock-carved giant Buddhas in 2001. The film tells the story of a six-year-old Afghan girl’s struggle to receive a formal [...]

Jewish Film Festivals in Brazil

 
August is the month for Jewish film festivals in Brazil.
The 11th São Paulo Jewish Film Festival is currently taking place in Brazil’s largest city. It’ll be followed by the 3rd Rio de Janeiro Jewish Film Festival (Aug 16-23) and by another Jewish film event in Porto Alegre.

Among the São Paulo screenings are Dror Shaul’s Adama Meshuga’at / Sweet Mud, a kibbutz-set drama that shared with Aviva My Love last year’s Ophir Award for best Israeli film; Miguel Littin’s La Ultima luna / The Last Moon, about the friendship between a Jew and a Palestinian in 1914 Palestine; and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Ein Ganz gewöhnlicher Jude / Just an Ordinary Jew (above), in which the Downfall director tackles the issue of "Jewishness" [...]

Cannes 2007 and Religion

Via 7 Days:
"Iran has protested to France over the screening at Cannes of an animated film about a woman growing up in revolutionary Iran, slamming the movie as a ‘political act,’ local media reported. Persepolis, which stems from a best-selling comic book series by Iranian emigre Marjane Satrapi [right], shows its heroine struggling with the authorities in the early days of the Islamic revolution.
‘The Cannes film festival has selected a film about Iran which presents an unreal picture of the outcomes and achievements of the Islamic revolution,’ said a letter to the French cultural attache in Tehran. The film, to be premiered in Cannes tomorrow, shows Satrapi’s rebellious eight-year-old screen persona watching the downfall of the shah followed by [...]

Saverio Costanzo Discusses IN MEMORIA DI ME

At european-films.net:
Boyd van Hoeij interviews director Saverio Costanzo, whose Private was Italy’s submission for the 2005 Academy Awards. (The ever finicky Academy, however, sent the film back because it was not spoken in Italian. Italy submitted another film, La Bestia nel cuore / Don’t Tell, which did get a nomination. Last year, the Academy changed its rules for foreign-language films. In other words, had Private been submitted in 2006, it would have been eligible for the foreign-language film Oscar.)
Here’s Boyd’s intro to his Costanzo interview:
"Italian director Saverio Costanzo shot to fame with his first film Private, which was filmed in Italy but told the story of a Palestinian family locked inside their own home by the Israeli army. It won [...]

An Evening with Sarah Kernochan: MARJOE, THOTH Screenings

"Oscar’s Docs: An Evening with Sarah Kernochan" will kick off the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s 2007 “Monday Nights with Oscar” series, with screenings of Kernochan’s two Academy Award-winning documentaries, the feature Marjoe (above) and the short Thoth, on Monday, January 8, at 7 p.m. at the Academy Theater at Lighthouse International in New York City.
Hosted by historian and journalist Perry L. van der Meer, the presentation will feature a post-screening chat with Sarah Kernochan.
Thoth spotlights Stephen Kaufman, aka Thoth, a performance artist in New York’s Central Park. The scantily dressed Thoth performs one-man operas, aka “prayformances,” with violin accompaniment, so as to try "to bring divine inspiration and healing to the world."
Marjoe, co-directed by Kernochan [...]

The Passion of the Jews – Christian-Style

Recommended Reading:
At Alternet, Sarah Posner offers a revealing look behind the making of the Biblical epic One Night with the King, released by the 20th Century-Fox subsidiary FoxFaith:
“Although the movie, a lavish production filmed on location in India and starring such well-known Hollywood entities as Omar Sharif and Peter O’Toole, may seem on the surface a tale of political intrigue and romance, on TBN [Trinity Broadcasting Network] and in front of Christian audiences, the filmmakers relentlessly make clear their prophetic intentions. ‘Your destiny awaits!’ proclaims a TBN ticker running across the screen during daily programming. As part of a special ‘pastors’ screening tour’ in September, TBN offered pastors’ testimonials to the power of the film. ‘We have been called for [...]

THE DA VINCI CODE Banned in China, Pakistan

Via The [London] Independent: The Chinese government has ordered theater owners to stop showing Ron Howard’s adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. The Hollywood thriller has been in wide release in China for three weeks. As per the official story, the ban is supposed to make space for Chinese films – except that another Hollywood blockbuster, Ice Age: The Meltdown, is opening in China today.
This marks the first time that a foreign film has been pulled from Chinese theaters. The Catholic Church – whose local leaders have ties to the Communist government – have protested the showing of The Da Vinci Code and have asked Chinese Christians to boycott the film. The boycott, however, didn’t have much of an impact [...]

THE DA VINCI CODE d: Ron Howard

The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Direction: Ron Howard. Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman; from Dan Brown’s novel. Cast: Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Paul Bettany, Alfred Molina, Jürgen Prochnow, Jean-Yves Berteloot
 
FALSE TRUTHS Vs. TRUE LIES
Paris, middle of the night. An old man is walking alone in a darkened gallery in the Louvre. He approaches a painting. Another man — the evil twin of Rutger Hauer’s Blade Runner robot — shows up. Hauer’s twin demands to know The Secret. The old man refuses to tell him. For his uncooperativeness, he gets a bullet in the stomach.
I could swear I saw the old man get shot in the head, but despite the killer’s Dirty Harry-esque determination, his aim clearly left a [...]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and SUBMISSION PART II – Gays and Islam

According to numerous reports, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who has become a Dutch Member of Parliament for the conservative Liberal Party*, has announced plans to produce a film about gays and Islam. According to Hirsi Ali, she and director Theo van Gogh co-wrote the screenplay of the upcoming film, to be called Submission Part II, in the summer of 2004. On November 2 of that year, van Gogh was brutally murdered by a Muslim fanatic who had been outraged by the television broadcasting of Submission Part I, a 12-minute short about the mistreatment of women under Islam, which van Gogh had directed from Hirsi Ali’s screenplay. (The short also outraged both moderate and female Muslims, who found it [...]

TWIST OF FAITH: Q&A with Kirby Dick

Audio interview with director Kirby Dick, whose Twist of Faith was nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Academy Award in 2005. Twist of Faith tells the story of a man who claims he was molested by a Catholic priest. Dick’s film tries to show how the Catholic Church does its best to refute the man’s accusations.

Jane Fonda, John Mills, Kay Walsh, MEET THE FOCKERS

Spring 2005 Film News, including Kingdom of Heaven at the box office, brief John Mills obit, Jane Fonda and her book My Life So Far, Tango Charlie’s controversy in India, Gandhi screened to Palestinians, Huntley Film Archives unearths 1910 live-action Snow White, David di Donatello 2005 winners, Jo Bole so nihaal bombings in Delhi

SUBMISSION on Italian TV

Italy’s state-run Rai Due channel will be showing in its Thursday night news magazine four to five minutes of murdered director Theo van Gogh’s 11-minute film Submission: Part 1, a highly critical statement against the treatment of women under Islam. Submission, which consists of a series of images of a woman wearing a see-through burka, her body covered with words from the Koran, was shown on Dutch television last year and is believed to have been the cause for van Gogh’s murder at the hands of a Muslim fanatic last November.
According to the BBC, politicians from the leading Italian parties urged Rai to show Submission in full in order to combat intolerance and support artistic freedom, but the station [...]

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST and Anti-Semitism

Via the Toronto Globe and Mail
According to a new report from B’nai Brith Canada, the number of anti-Semitic incidents with direct religious connotations in February of 2004 — the month Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ opened in Canada — matches the figure for all of 2003. The spike continued into the spring.
The actual number of reported religious-motivated incidents is small — 32 in 2004, up from 9 in 2003 — but Frank Dimant, the head of the Canadian branch of B’nai Brith, estimates that the actual number of such incidents may be 10 times higher.
A highly controversial scene in The Passion shows a Jewish mob saying (in Aramaic) that the blood of Jesus should "be on [...]

THE BIG QUESTION d: Francesco Cabras and Alberto Molinari

The Big Question (2004)
Direction: Francesco Cabras, Alberto Molinari
Screenplay: Francesco Cabras
Cast: Greg, the Dog
Interviewees: Mel Gibson, Monica Bellucci, James Caviezel, Rosalinda Celentano, Maia Morgenstern

 
It is unfortunate that The Big Question, an intelligent and thought-provoking documentary about faith, was made before the December 2004 tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean. Filmmakers Francesco Cabras and Alberto Molinari could then have asked one more pertinent question to their dozens of subjects on the set of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: if there is a God (or Goddess, or gods, or goddesses), how could such a horrific, unimaginably destructive tragedy take place? Answers would surely have been as thoughtful, stupid, funny, mean-spirited, wacky, and/or illuminating as those provided [...]

Theo van Gogh

Provocative Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the great-grandnephew of painter Vincent van Gogh, was shot and stabbed to death on an Amsterdam street on November 2. Following a shootout, the Police arrested a 26-year-old man of Moroccan-Dutch nationality, who is supposed to have ties to radical Muslim groups. Van Gogh was 47 years old.
The director had received death threats because of his English-language short film Submission: Part I, a critique of the treatment of women under Islam. The film, which was aired on Dutch television in August, was reviled by the Netherlands’ Muslim community, including some Muslim women’s groups.
Among van Gogh’s other films are Luger (1982), starring Thom Hoffman; the drama Blind Date (1996); the [...]

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