Jafar Panahi won the Palme d'Or

Jafar Panahi won the Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His latest movie "It was Just an Accident" was competing during the 78th annual of Cannes Festival. 

As an Iranian, this news filled me with joy and pride. He has been a symbol of civil resistance in Iran. This is the second time an Iranian film director has won this prestigious prize.

Huge respect for Panahi: Panahi the artist, the campaigner, the activist, and the human.

Pedram

5/24/2025

Youth (Spring)

 

The representation of private interests ... abolishes all natural and spiritual distinctions by enthroning in their stead the immoral, irrational and soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a particular consciousness which is slavishly subordinated to this object."

Marx, On the Thefts of Wood, in Rheinische Zeitung (1842)

This movie is not an easy watch but a necessary one if you wish to understand the perils of unbalanced economic growth.  

Youth (Spring) is a 220-minute mammoth documentary filmed between 2014 and 2019. Separate substories show various workshops in Zhili City, China, the center of the textile industry. You see immigrant youth coming from nearby rural areas searching for jobs in these workshops under poor and unhygienic conditions. The dorms where these laborers work are dingy, rather dark, and depressingly dilapidated. The location is ironically named Happiness Street.

In the first story, we see a couple of lovers (19-20 years of age) having fun and joking about the speed of sewing the clothes and showboating their skill sets in an innocent childish way. Immediately after the intro, you're thrown into the real business which takes place downstairs (some similar structure in all the workshops: the boss's office is downstairs). The mother of the girl is negotiating time off for the abortion of her unwanted grandchild (the child of the jubilant girl upstairs). The boss's objection is business-oriented. Money-oriented. Religious values, Pro-life, and other philosophical/ideological concerns are distant and irrelevant in this material-oriented discourse. This is the heart of the textile industry in the aphotic heart of the Marxist world. They want the order to be prepared ASAP and they cannot offer the luxury of a day off.

The other story depicts a verbal argument between two young men (around 18 years old), The angry boy tries to attack with a scissor only to be stopped by the interference of ladies particularly a mother figure in the workshop, cutting his hand during the process.   

In one story, we have a protest from a group of workers as they express their discontent over their salary to the "bosses" downstairs. Here a couple in their 50s are in charge. The gentleman undermines the protestors and threatens the workers to be fired and replaced easily. Considering the mechanical nature of the job, one can hardly argue on that point. This is another sequence that implies how much violence is hidden behind the rudimentaries of Happiness Street!

Even rare off hours in the movie do not change the gloomy mood. In one of the scenes, we see young siblings in a dark internet cafe discussing and you see the exhausted girl fall asleep in the cafe.

Each story segues into another without a link except for identical environments across workshops. There is no sustained narrative as the director probably intended to provide collages of various substories. 

Youth is about a world reduced to paper bills, soulless transactions, and undignified souls walking their way through trash-strewn alleys (as a side note, you see abundant use of plastic in the environment!).  This is a real picture of an industry with a revenue of 330 billion dollars per year. However, in Happiness Street, the youth are slavishly subordinated to objects and to nondescript bosses who ruthlessly upbraid them. Marx did predict this but not for a Communist-ruled terrain! 

Youth (Spring) is directed by Wang Bing.

Pedram, 4/22/24

Black Sunday: An Enduring Masterpiece

 Watched this gothic masterpiece last Sunday. What a pleasant surprise it was. There are certain works that are decades ahead of their time both conceptually and stylistically. And no surprise, the reaction to most of them was pretty damning. But in long term, adventurous endeavors are appreciated.

Black Sunday (1960)

Directed by: Mario Bava

Starring: Barbara Steele, John Richardson, and Andrea Checchi

My Personal Take on Noir

 My affinity for noir movies is something I acquired through my limited exploration in cinema. It was one of the pleasant self-educational paths I took and the reward was so sweet.

It is hard to pinpoint why I like noir cinematography, aesthetics, or scenarios but there are some points that might be relevant. 

I feel beneath the grey gloomy veneer of the noir picture there are certain elements that are integral to the genre:

The question of individuality: probably the overarching presence felt constantly is that individuals facing the challenges on his own. No room for fancy comrades and mighty organizations and corporations backing him up. 

The question of morality: you will see the protagonist following a moral code and is persistent in obedience regardless of the outcomes.

The question of ultimate redemption: maybe this part is controversial but my understanding is that noir movies do not follow the happy-ending trends and more focused on picturing personal fulfillment. The hero is delivering according to his/her principles and you can see that being the only intact facet of the story.

Will they die for you?

دلم به شدت برای نفس عمیق تنگ شد... از نفس عمیق تا لرزاننده چربی؛ گفت و گو با مریم پالیزبان http://t.co/VpQF4AfYw2
— Pedram83 (@Pedramr83) October 14, 2013

The Falcon and the Snowman

Movie: The Falcon and The Snowman
Year: 1985
Writers: Robert Lindsay (Book), Steve Zaillian (Screenplay)
Director: John Schlesinger
Starring: Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn, David Suchet, Pat Hingle, Lori Singer, Dorian Harewood

Fact-based, the story of two californian boyhood friends Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee who  ultimately end up selling top-secret US document to Soviet Union. The movie has been of great impact the first time i watched about 20 years ago, and somehow i retrieved a better copy and the impact stays there. What's interesting in this somehow trivial espionage genre movie (which admittedly lacks tempo and composure at times)?
1- "The Sleeping Tiger"
The disappointment underlying Christopher's  committing this crime. It's definitely not money, or any kind of materialistic motive that derives him (no matter subsequently via this criminal adventure he gained hefty amount of money). He was disappointed by what he felt morally wrong interventions of US government abroad. First you feel fed-up then the trigger is pulled and there starts a vigorous serial of actions.
Look at this part for example:

[explaining why he didn't express his unhappiness with the CIA in a more acceptable manner]Christopher Boyce: It wouldn't have made a difference. I freely chose my response to this absurd world. If given the opportunity, I would have been more vigorous. 

2-"Oedipus Complex"
Another tip is a sort of Oedipus Complex formed indolently toward his father: a respectable former FBI agents with certain degree of patriotism flowing in his veins. Dad is the symbol of government, the authoritarian statue reminding him he has underachieved and underperformed.   On the other hand Mr. Boyce stress his patriotism once again by rejecting any outlaw intervention in his son's persecution but simply telling a friend :"Let him be judged."
3-"Extending a Personal Philosophy"
It doesn't work extending such personal ideas to complex scene of international affairs:

Christopher Boyce: I know a few things about predatory behavior. And what was once a legitimate intelligence gathering agency is now being used to prey on weaker governments.

So he seeks personal revenge by entrusting secret codes and documents to the soviets. 
4-"The Frail Companion"
Boyce and Daulton depict a sort of silly partnership in any practical terms let alone that be espionage amid cold war turmoil! Jittery heroin addict Daulton is in the business to handle the financial aspect but it turned to a rewarding way to pursue his drug trafficking in a larger scale under russians' political protection.
However russian bloc turn to a "carrot and stick" strategy in order to infiltrate deeper and connect directly to the mole (Boyce). Daulton easily gave away Boyce's name and many other crucial information.

Conclusion:
An intriguing political thriller with some decent performance by Hutton and Penn. (7/10)

Pedram

Movies to Watch

Rust and Bone (2012): Jacques Audiard
Savages (2012): Oliver Stone
Hate Crime (2005): Tommy Stovall
Fjellet (2011): Ole Giaever
Le Fils de Autre (2012): Lorraine Levy
The Turin Horse (2012): Bela Tarr
The Dark Knight Rises (2012): Christopher Nolan
Ronin (1998): John Frankenheimer
Grand Prix  (1966): John Frankenheimer
The Game (1995): David Fincher

Take Shelter: Movie Review by Roger Moore

Here's a brief review of "Take Shelter": an unsettling psychological thriller with an astounding performance by Michael Shannon. It;s written by Roger Moore and published @Orlando Sentinel. 

With special thanks to Dr Bahar Sadeghi who introduced the movie. 

pedram

Michael Shannon plays a good man and caring father besieged by nightmares

In days of old, they might have thought Curtis a prophet of doom, or possessed by the Devil.

But since he’s a modern working class Joe, drilling test holes for a contracting firm, these dreams Curtis is having provoke a modern response. Is he seeing the future, birds swarming before a nightmarish rain of oil, a tornado? Or is he coming unglued? Should he protect his family by preparing them for disaster, or check himself into a hospital, protecting them from him?

That’s the provocative conflict at the heart of “Take Shelter,” the second film to team rising star filmmaker Jeff Nichols and the great character actor Michael Shannon. As Curtis, Shannon brings his usual mix of menace and vulnerability, adding confusion and acute paranoia to the brew inside of this guy’s head.

Curtis has a lovely, resourceful wife, played by the marvelously earthy and omnipresent Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”). He has an adorable daughter, a nice rural Ohio home and a loyal dog. But he’s seen the dog bite him in his nightmares. The dog goes outside.

His pal at work (Shea Whigham, terrific) runs the gigantic drill, and on a break, sizes him up.

“You’ve got a good life, Curtis. I think that’s the best compliment you can give a man.”

But the dreams won’t stop. Curtis wets the bed, seeks medical help and yet hedges his bets. There’s an old storm shelter in the yard. He’s going to fix it up to withstand anything.

Shannon wonderfully modulates Nichols’ portrait of a man whose mind and life seem to unravel before our eyes. Nichols surrounds him with great character players such as Chastain and Whigham, with Kathy Baker playing his mother and Ray McKinnon (“The Blind Side”) well-cast as the concerned brother who shows up to see what’s up.

Nichols walks a tightrope between giving us a dark, Gothic tale of misunderstood prophecy and a sobering lesson on the state of mental health care in rural America.  And Shannon, piling up the accolades with every film (“Reservation Road,” “The Runaways”) adds the troubled and troubling Curtis to a growing resume of vivid and utterly real off-center characters.

Roger Moore

@Orlando Sentinel

(Courtesy of Dr Bahar Sadeghi)

Jacques Audiard: 'My work is like rolling thunder'

For a man who is a bundle of intense, nervous energy, Jacques Audiard is a surprisingly slow worker. Since he started directing, in 1994, he has completed just six features, with lengthy gaps between them. Indeed, the three-year run up to his new film, Rust and Bone, represents something of an acceleration. "I am free," Audiard shrugs, "because I work for a producer [Pascal Caucheteux] who says, 'We'll go when it's ready.' He doesn't give me a deadline. The films take a long time to write – too long, perhaps. That is where the time is spent."

But what films they are. His last, A Prophet, the coruscating study of a French-Arab convict who becomes a player in the Corsican mafia, was four years in the making, and won a runner-up prize at Cannes in 2009; it also made a star of its lead, Tahar Rahim. Before that, in 2005, there was The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a nerve-shredding remake of James Toback's seminal New Hollywood film, Fingers; again, it made a huge star of its lead, Romain Duris, in a role originally played by Harvey Keitel. Rewind another four years and there was Read My Lips, in 2001, in which deaf office worker Emmanuelle Devos falls for hoodlum Vincent Cassel and takes part in a brutal robbery. Read My Lips emerged a full five years after the film that put Audiard on the map: A Self-Made Hero, his fantastically watchable account of a fake Resistance fighter, with a liquidly brilliant central performance by Mathieu Kassovitz.

Rust and Bone is a reworking of a book of short stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson, and of two in particular: the title story and another called Rocket Ride. It's a substantial rewrite: the killer-whale trainer played by Marion Cotillard was originally male; an accident that is a backstory in the book becomes the climax of the film; the film's two central characters live in entirely separate worlds in Davidson's original, and never meet (Audiard's film has them conducting a complex, passionate relationship). Moreover, the film is set in France, in an anti-glamour Riviera of ramshackle workshops, grubby flats and battered wastelands. (This is not, as Audiard is at pains to point out, an assault on the plushness of the Côte d'Azur; it is simply because the only killer-whale aquarium in France is located in Antibes.)

Key to this part of the process is Audiard's scriptwriter, Thomas Bidegain, who worked on A Prophet and also acts as the director's unofficial translator. Sitting in on our interview, he chips in, amplifying his director's words. "The way we work is to talk about what the film should be, the kind of film we want to do. We were coming out of A Prophet – a jail movie – no women, no space, no light, no love. So the idea we had was to do a love story."

But Audiard, twitching with auteurist pride, cannot be talked over. "I really believe the form of the film must be in the scenario; cinema is not just added value to the scripting. I believe in it as a totality. There was a specific problem with this film, which we saw often during the writing: the clash between realism and stylisation. You had constantly to be looking for an equilibrium. If it's too realistic, it's boring. If it's too stylised, you don't believe it." Bidegain adds: "What attracted us to the short stories was the universe they described, a universe of catastrophe – a world where people just have their body left to sell. The characters were normal people, but their destiny is magnified by accidents."

But this is the director's show, and Audiard wants to talk about a key scene in which Cotillard's character, Stéphanie, loses her legs. In Davidson's story, the incident is described with gruesome precision: the trainer stands on the killer whale's lip, slips, and is horribly mutilated as the animal attempts to eject him from its throat. The film's treatment of this central moment is, in sharp contrast, cryptic and impressionistic; a chaotic, dream-like sequence, slowed down to the point of abstraction. "We start out very realistic," Audiard says. "We shot the marine show just as it is, very natural. But if you do the accident like that, it would be over so fast. So we go outside the point of view of the character: what we make is more like a fantasy. It could be an image a child dreamed, after the story was told to him."

That seems as good a rationalisation of Audiard's extraordinarily fluid image-making as you're likely to get from the director. His is an ability that is as confident as cinema has seen for decades. It is not for nothing that Audiard has been repeatedly compared to Martin Scorsese in his Taxi Driver and Raging Bull period; he has the same restless imagination, the same unerring confidence in handling the camera. Audiard is reluctant to explain details – "It is immodest, like I am God!" – but rather poetically likens his scene-building to "rolling thunder", a tension crackling away in the background before the climactic moment.

He used CGI for Cotillard's post-amputation scenes, digitally removing her legs. "It's just a cheap computer manipulation, you know. When we shoot, she's just wearing green socks. You get used to the green socks, then one day we saw the first finished CGI, and you think: Wow! It's really erotic." He expands on this: "We know this from the original story – that's what the film is about – she is someone who doesn't like sex before the accident: she's too controlled. She finds in love the possibility to be abandoned, to let go – she finds out what love is."

Audiard has been here before. In Read My Lips, the disability is deafness, but the film has a near-identical dramatic drive: a woman whose impairment is an analogue to a repressed emotional life; an insensitive, inarticulate man; a relationship that unlocks them both. Audiard says he never noticed the similarities; it was his editor who pointed them out. But it is this inquisitiveness about his characters' inner lives that really marks Audiard out as a director. For a long time regarded as essentially a crime guy, a modern Jean-Pierre Melville (perhaps due to his predilection for spiffy trilby hats and a pipe), Audiard looks very much like a director with a yen for intense, emotional romances. "Maybe it's a problem of vocabulary – 'crime' is perhaps too specific a term for what I do."

Be that as it may, you would have thought Audiard would be a natural candidate for a Hollywood – or at least an English-language – transfer, like so many of his French colleagues, with varying degrees of success: everyone from Renoir and Truffaut to Besson and Audiard's former star Mathieu Kassovitz have tried it. The Beat That My Heart Skipped cleverly aligned him with the cultier end of 70s American cinema; and Rust and Bone, after all, could easily have been a boutique Hollywood production, with an Oscar-winning lead. But Audiard remains wary; partly, his sketchy English makes it a tad tricky; and partly he genuinely seems to prefer the unploughed pastures of his homeland. "If you open the door of a boxing gym in Brooklyn, you know what is behind it. You've seen it 200 times, in 200 films. If you open it in Antibes, it's all new. There is curiosity. Had we set set it in America, it would be a kind of cliche, somehow. You need something to say about the place where you make films. I know Europe. The US I don't know so well. I need a film that sees something, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest did for Milos Forman. It makes it worth the trip."

@Guardian

by: Andrew Pulver

Howling Wheel

 

I realize now that my task is not over, and so I will be returning to Samsara. I know that we shall meet again. Perhaps when we do you will be able to tell me what is more important: satisfying one thousand desires or conquering just one. 

( Apo: [his last letter to Tashi])

Excerpted from "Samsara" screenplay : Pan Nalin

Image: "Metamorphosen" ,Theater MESCHUGGE, Ilka Schönbein 

Gerry

Gerry: A brilliant sequence!

Movie: Gerry
Year: 2002
Written by: Gus Van Sant, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck
Director: Gus Van Sant
Starring: Matt Damon, Casey Affleck
I watched Gerry in march and since then the ideas flew to my mind about the haunting picture. The movie progress in the absolute absence of action. Thus the poor response from audience and critics was not surprising. The dialogues are so limited and totally improvised by two stars. Personally i found Gerry moving. Imagine watching two young boys crossing the desert with no water, food,...and most importantly no motive can be noticed. It's the journey itself that matters: the journey, the adventure and the depth of a relationship that emerges through simple plot, that's all. I liked it.

Hanna: A Gruesome Mutation

Saoirse Ronan; Adopt or Die!

Film: Hanna
Year: 2011
Writers: Seth Lochhead, David Farr
Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett 
I saw pretty mediocre reviews and below par rating of this science-fiction. I definitely have to object and i have my reasons to enjoy this movie: 
The main thing is the issue which is well-processed in a unique way. A girl is the product of a programmed mutation in order to overcome physical boundaries of human being. The whole mutation is accomplished at the cost of wasting emotional aspect. The outcome demonstrates a mixture of supreme combatant quality while lack emotional/sexual orientation. The ending sequence is memorable. My overall score to Hanna is 6/10. 

Haneke Presents: "Amour"

 By Sunday morning the 65th Cannes Film Festival had its first masterwork and an overwhelming critical favorite in Michael Haneke’s “Amour.” A tender, wrenching, impeccably directed story of love and death, the French-language film stars Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant as a Parisian couple in their 80s — named Georges and Anne, as are most of Mr. Haneke’s middle-class couples — struggling with an increasingly debilitating illness and the specter of what comes next. One day over breakfast she suffers a frightening episode that leaves her briefly locked in a mute, seemingly unaware blankness. She’s there, but not, and then just as suddenly she returns.

A hospital stay follows along with an operation, a grim prognosis, a slide into helplessness, the expected accumulation of humiliations, natural and not, and swells of emotion. Half-frozen by a stroke, Anne’s body has begun to betray her, but Georges holds her so very close: he brushes her hair, bathes and dresses her. Somewhat stooped, with a shaky, hitchy walk, he trembles when he lifts her from the bed or a chair, but he keeps holding on. The first time he has to help her move from her wheelchair, she tells him how to grasp her properly, as if in a hug, a gesture that’s poignant in its literalness — they press into each other — and reverberant of an erotic life shared and still remembered.

Mr. Haneke has often turned his cool gaze toward power and violence, and in some respects he has done so again in “Amour,” one difference being that he’s also made room here for tenderness. Part of the film’s emotional force is due to the actors, both superb, and to the poignancy of watching these two familiar, now frail bodies of cinema, as it were, performing in a pantomime of sickness and death. This very real fragility makes a sharp contrast with the bodies cinema immortalizes — eternally young — and it seems telling that Mr. Haneke, who likes to pick at screen illusion, cast actors who starred in two of the most famous French films of all time: Mr. Trintignant was the titular man from “A Man and a Woman” and Ms. Riva played the nameless woman in “Hiroshima Mon Amour.”

“Amour” sent a charge through the packed, rapt 2,300-seat theater, and immediately suggested that there was more to the official lineup than the first few days had suggested. The competition had gotten off toa terrific start with Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom,” even if not everyone was equally convinced. A similar critical ambivalence greeted another strong competition entry, “Beyond the Hills,” from the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who won the Palme in 2007 for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” His new film centers on two young women who, after a reunion, are slowly and forcibly separated by different faiths: Alina (Cristina Flutur) believes in their friendship while Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) has turned to God and become a nun in a tiny Christian Orthodox sect.

Set largely in Voichita’s monastery, a windswept outcropping of buildings in the deep countryside, the story unfolds in atmospheric bits and narrative pieces. Alina and Voichita are lifelong friends, having grown up in the same orphanage. Alina, the stronger, more stubbornly independent of the two, has returned home after a stint working in Germany and thinking that she and Voichita will go off together. Mr. Mungiu, who prefers that viewers come to their own conclusions, never makes it clear if the women are lovers — “You will think whatever you will think,” he said during the party for his film Saturday — though a scene in which Voichita massages Alina’s back, then looks away when Alina turns over, baring her breasts, suggests private worlds of complication.

Shot on film and running two-and-a-half engrossing hours, “Beyond the Hills” explores the push and pull between the collective and the individual, between faith and free will. Voichita insists that she wants to stay at the monastery, where she and some dozen other nuns — along with chickens, boxes of bees and a kind of Greek chorus of incessantly barking dogs — live without electricity under the strict religious supervision of a priest. With mounting desperation and increasingly violent outbursts, Alina tries to change Voichita’s mind. Believing in a world of absolute good and evil, and confused by Alina’s passion, the nuns and priest respond by trying to ritualistically drive out the Devil, an ordeal that effectively pits one woman against a millennium of religious orthodoxy.

At his party, a typical Cannes beach affair with pounding beats and revelers swarming the open bar, Mr. Mungiu talked about his film, the difficulties of shooting in winter and working with a young, untested cast. He based the screenplay (originally 245 pages!) on a pair of fact-based books by Tatiana Niculescu Bran about a real nun who died after being gagged and tied to a cross for days in a Romanian monastery during an exorcism. (Ms. Bran turned her first book into a play, “Deadly Confession,” which was staged at La MaMa in 2008.) It’s a shocker of a story, yet while Mr. Mungiu’s sympathies are transparently with Alina he neither sentimentalizes her — he keeps her at both an emotional and visual distance — nor does he demonize the priest or, especially, the nuns.

“The film should be watched and judged from each character’s perspective,” he explained, giving the larger, suggestively political view. “This is how you will discover that it is difficult to say who is guilty, because the people who are really guilty are not in the film. They are the people who created this kind of society, the people who created education that completely lacks the very important moral values that people should have.”


@NYTIMES

More Than Meets The Eye II

Gerry: Gus Van Sant back to his experimental roots

Some fantastic material for my movie archive! I watched a number of great movies on my days off during recent months. I'd like to mention them. Moreover i added my personal scores which partly reflect how much i liked them. (I don't fully support the idea of rating artwork this way !) I've done so just to mark my initial personal impressions about each of these movies. My personal experience reveals the understanding and excitement about some artworks develop slowly. That's interesting to observe how my personal conception gradually changes by time. I'm willing to write a brief review about some of them in upcoming posts.


Hanna (2011) ; Joe Wright 6/10
The Trial (1962) ; Orson Welles 10/10
Les Asacias (2011) ; Pablo Giorgeli 7/10
The Holy Girl (2004) ; Lucrecia Martel 9/10
Gerry (2002) ; Guus Van Sant 10/10
Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (2011) ; Nuri Bilge Ceylan 9/10
Batman Begins (2005) ; Christopher Nolan 8/10
Army of Shadows (1969) ; Jean-Pierre Melville 9/10
A Good Heart (2009) ; Dagur Kari 6/10
My Sister's Keeper (2009) ; Nick Cassavetes 9/10
Angela's Ashes (1999) ; Alan Parker 6/10
A Christmas Carol (2009) ; Robert Zemeckis 8/10
Z (1969) ; Costa-Gavras 9/10

The Life of David Gale

I watched Alan Parker’s “The Life of David Gale” on my vacation. It was an intriguing movie considering the plot and the convincing job by Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslet. Unfortunately I must mention some weak points which appeared as fumbles to me. In such a real and tense context (including issues like rape, murder and suicide), some over-dramatic and scenes coupled with ultra-moralist blah blah damaged the picture. The movie is not coy about the anti-death penalty message. Unfortunately this overdid hampered the outstanding dynamic of the movie. The main characters are well executed and presented, however the peripheral ones are poorly dramatized. One exception is  Constance Harraway (Laura Linney), Gale’s colleague and close friend, which is well portrayed. Gale/Harraway relationship evolves in a comprehensible manner and dramatically contribute to the whole story. Laura Linney handled the complex role of Constance excellently. The final third of the movie was shocking to me. It appears that all false inquests were part of a bigger plan; a series of self-intended acts  such as euthanasia or serving as an innocent convicted to execution, etc. All and all serve Gale and Harraway social/political plan to hit out at pro-death penalty officials. The result is a heart-wrenching drama.

pedram, April 2012

Les anges du peche (1943)

The Secular and the religious, the extremism and the wisdom, innocence and sin, these have been thematic concerns of Robert Bresson and are present as this movie as well. Bressonian stylistic signature is visible in images and narration. 
The story takes place in a convent which aim is to rehabilitate former convicts. The story orbit around the character of Anne-Mariea: a rich and idealistic girl who joined the convent  as a dedicated novice. In a visit from a jail she becomes preoccupied with a prisoner, an opportunistic person (Therese). After her release from prison, Therese kills an ex-friend because of which she has been imprisoned. Thereafter Therese joins the convent as an escape from the public and police. Anne-Marie's expects the event and embrace her with absolute fascination. Therese is reluctant to tell her the dark secret and protests against her innocence and kindness.  pedram


aka: Angels of the streets or Angels of sin
 Director/Writer: Robert Bresson
Starring: Renee Faure, Jany Holt, Mila Parely
Produced: 1943
Release Date (USA): 1950

Wilson

"Don't worry Wilson, I'll do all the paddling. You just hang on."

My Author of The Month (August and October 2011)

Andrei Tarkovsky

I've been reading some pieces and parts of screenplays.  I was extremely engrossed by the depth of his thought and the adamantine element of poetry entwined with philosophy.

My Author of The Month (July 2011)

بابک احمدی

اول به دلیل ترجمه ی دشوار متن" طبیعت و قاعده" قسمت هایی از دیالوگ که ریکور سخن می گوید را احمدی ترجمه کرده است. اما دلیل اصلی من برای این انتخاب کتاب "امید بازیافته" در تحلیل سینمای  آندری تارکفسکی است. چندی پیش بود که با یکی از دوستانم در کافه ی تئاتر شهر،به درد دل مسئول کتابفروشی تئاترگوش می دادیم.از کلاس های احمدی برای اهالی تئاتر و سینما می گفت. از نادر بودن این فرهیختگی در اهالی سینما می نالید.والبته واهمه ایست به جا: گم شدن این تک صدا در همهمه ی عامیان.