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Luis Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA Screening

Viridiana, Luis Buñuel’s provocative 1961 Palme d’Or-winning classic proving that life is a bitch and then you play cards, will run at New York City’s Film Forum from Friday, April 24, through Thursday, April 30.
Inspired by a painting of Saint Viridiana kneeling on the floor before a crucifix and crown of thorns (and by Benito Pérez Galdós‘ novel Halma), co-written by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro, and financed by the lead actress’ rich husband, Viridiana stars Silvia Pinal (recently honored with a Lifetime Achievement Ariel Award), as a pious young nun who, before entering a cloister, goes visit her strange and reclusive uncle (Fernando Rey). There, while trying to do Good, she befriends the [...]

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 [...]

SAVE ME Trailer

 
Directed by Robert Cary from a screenplay by Robert Desiderio, with "story" credit going to Craig Chester and Alan Hines, Save Me stars Robert Gant, Chad Allen, Judith Light, and Stephen Lang.
On its website, Save Me is described as "a deft exploration of the controversial ex-gay movement. The story follows Mark (Chad Allen), a drug-addicted young man who overdoses and finds himself at the mercy of his disapproving family. Their solution to Mark’s problems is to check him into a Christian run ministry overseen by Gayle (Judith Light), who believes she can help cure young men of their ‘gay affliction’ through spiritual guidance. At first, Mark resists the efforts of Gayle and her loving husband Ted (Stephen Lang), but soon [...]

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 [...]

THE GOLDEN COMPASS and Catholic Censors

Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter in The Golden Compass

Via Tim Drake’s "U.S. Bishops Withdraw Controversial Movie Review" in the National Catholic Register:
"’The aggressively anti-religious, anti-Christian undercurrent in The Golden Compass is unmistakable and at times undisguised,’ [Denver Archbishop Charles] Chaput wrote in a column in the Dec. 12 issue of the Denver Catholic Register. ‘The wicked Mrs. Coulter alludes approvingly to a fictional version of the doctrine of original sin. When a warrior Ice Bear — one of the heroes of the story — breaks into the local Magisterium headquarters to take back the armor stolen from him, the exterior walls of the evil building are covered with Eastern Christian icons. And for Catholics in our own world, of [...]

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 [...]

FANNY AND ALEXANDER d: Ingmar Bergman

Fanny och Alexander / Fanny & Alexander (1982)
Direction and Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cast: Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Ewa Fröling, Börje Ahlstedt, Jan Malmsjö, Allan Edwall, Gunn Wållgren, Jarl Kulle , Erland Josephson, Pernilla August, Harriet Andersson, Stina Ekblad, Mats Bergman, Gunnar Björnstrand, Lena Olin
 

Bertil Guve, Pernilla Allwin in Fanny and Alexander
 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Why Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s 1982 final ‘filmic film,’ Fanny och Alexander / Fanny & Alexander bears the appellation it does is a mystery — one of many in the film — since the first titular character, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) is at best a third- or fourth-level supporting character. In fact, in the three-hour theatrical version she is not even mentioned by name for nearly an hour [...]

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 [...]

Oscar 2006: Deepa Mehta’s WATER Submitted

Deepa Mehta’s Water, starring Lisa Ray, Seema Biswas, and John Abraham, has been chosen as Canada’s entry for the 2006 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award.
Set in the Indian holy city of Varanasi, the Hindi-language Water is now eligible as a Canadian entry for the foreign-language Oscar because of recent regulation changes enacted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences earlier this year. Prior to the changes, countries could only submit films containing a large chunk of dialogue in one of their official languages. Now, any language is acceptable as long as most of the dialogue is not in English.
Water, about the plight of a group of widows forced into poverty in Varanasi, was nominated for nine [...]

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 [...]

No REQUIEM OF SNOW in Copenhagen

Iranian director Jamil Rostami, whose Iranian-Iraqi Requiem of Snow recently became Iraq’s first film to be submitted for a best foreign-language film Academy Award, has withdrawn his coming-of-age drama from the Danish capital’s Buster-Copenhagen International Film Festival for Children and Youth as a protest against the publication of cartoons portraying Islam’s prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
"I planned to participate in the festival in Copenhagen," Rostami was quoted as saying. "But since that country’s press has insulted the sanctity of the Prophet, I will boycott it."
In December 2005, Requiem of Snow, about a young woman dreaming of escaping from an undesirable marriage in a land parched by drought, won the best director award [...]

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 [...]

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