Documentaries
Toronto Raptors vice-chair and president Masai Ujiri has joined the upcoming documentary series on the Basketball Africa League (Bal), a partnership between the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the International Basketball Federation (Fiba), as an executive producer.
Fremantle and Passenger are producing the as yet untitled series, which tells the story of the creation, launch and inaugural season of the Bal, a new professional basketball league in Africa featuring 12 club teams from across the African continent. The series is being directed by emerging South African director Tebogo Malope.
Ujiri was the architect behind the Raptors’ historic 2019 NBA Championship win and he also serves as president of Giants of Africa, the non-profit he co-founded in 2003, which uses basketball as a tool to educate and enrich the lives of African youth.
The first edition of Bal took place in May in Kigali, Rwanda. Working alongside showrunner and executive producer Richard Brown...
Toronto Raptors vice-chair and president Masai Ujiri has joined the upcoming documentary series on the Basketball Africa League (Bal), a partnership between the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the International Basketball Federation (Fiba), as an executive producer.
Fremantle and Passenger are producing the as yet untitled series, which tells the story of the creation, launch and inaugural season of the Bal, a new professional basketball league in Africa featuring 12 club teams from across the African continent. The series is being directed by emerging South African director Tebogo Malope.
Ujiri was the architect behind the Raptors’ historic 2019 NBA Championship win and he also serves as president of Giants of Africa, the non-profit he co-founded in 2003, which uses basketball as a tool to educate and enrich the lives of African youth.
The first edition of Bal took place in May in Kigali, Rwanda. Working alongside showrunner and executive producer Richard Brown...
- 10/28/2021
- by Naman Ramachandran
- Variety Film + TV
Danish writer Karen Blixen, whose memoir “Out of Africa” and short story “Babette’s Feast” were both turned into Academy Award-winning films, is now the subject of another big-screen makeover with an adaptation of her short story “The Immortal Story” set to be penned by Argentina’s Daniel Rosenfeld and Lucía Puenzo.
Argentine-French actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (“Bpm (Beats per Minute)”) and Leonardo Sbaraglia have signed letters of intent to head up the cast, along with an international actor and actress, which have yet to be confirmed, Rosenfeld told Variety.
Director-producer of Idfa player “Piazzola, the Years of the Shark,” which won best documentary at Argentina’s 2018 Academy Awards, Rosenfeld has purchased rights to the story, which was adapted by Orson Welles in 1968.
Rosenfeld is currently writing the screenplay adaptation with Puenzo, one of Latin America’s most courted film directors and showrunner on Amazon’s “La Jauría,” produced by Fabula and Fremantle.
Argentine-French actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (“Bpm (Beats per Minute)”) and Leonardo Sbaraglia have signed letters of intent to head up the cast, along with an international actor and actress, which have yet to be confirmed, Rosenfeld told Variety.
Director-producer of Idfa player “Piazzola, the Years of the Shark,” which won best documentary at Argentina’s 2018 Academy Awards, Rosenfeld has purchased rights to the story, which was adapted by Orson Welles in 1968.
Rosenfeld is currently writing the screenplay adaptation with Puenzo, one of Latin America’s most courted film directors and showrunner on Amazon’s “La Jauría,” produced by Fabula and Fremantle.
- 7/6/2020
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
I can’t think of a better start to the Berlin Film Festival than Raúl Ruiz’s The Tango of a Widower and its Distorting Mirror (1967/2020), an eerie, imaginative story about a despotic professor, haunted by the ghost of his deceased wife, and which is also a tribute to experimental cinema. The film was to be Ruiz’s debut feature, but he never completed it. Ruiz’s widow, Valeria Sarmiento, who was also behind the completion of Ruiz’s other celebrated posthumous project, The Wandering Soap Opera (2017), effectively became its co-director.The film’s plot is quite simple, perhaps even schematic. A renowned professor (Rubén Sotoconil) sees his nightmarish dreams infect reality, assailed by her image in daylight. Wigs move around his apartment—surrealist, sensual, tormenting. In one dream, his nephew removes a wig from his body, as if he just gave birth to it. There’s plenty here to create tension,...
- 2/26/2020
- MUBI
Foreplays is a column that explores under-known short films by renowned directors. Raúl Ruiz's Le film à venir (1997) is free to watch below.I.At the start of Le film à venir or The Film to Come, the narrator informs us about the existence of a secret society, the Philokinettes, devoted to the promotion of a fragment of film lasting 23 seconds—a film also called Le film à venir. This film-within-the-film is not defined by its contents, but by the way it is shown and by the effects it produces. Projected in a loop, the film induces a state of deep hypnosis—and once you reach this state, the narrator informs us, “You can see.” The film described is thus a spiritual instrument toward revelation, an object embedded in a larger ritualistic and performative practice. Ruiz begins his own film with four black and white views of a landscape—a...
- 11/14/2018
- MUBI
Lorenzo Vigas’ Venice Golden Lion winner From Afar and César Augusto Acevedo’s Cannes Critics Week France 4 Visionary Award winner Land And Shade will screen at the International Film Festival of Panama.
Both selections will play in the Ibero American Showcase under the auspices of Iff Panama 2016, which runs from April 7-13.
Italian actress Lucía Bosé will be guest of honour at the festival’s fifth edition when three of films will screen — Death Of A Cyclist, Story Of A Love Affair, and No Peace Under The Olive Tree. High Heels will screen in special presentation.
Ibero American Showcase entries include Anna Muylaert’s Brazilian foreign language Oscar submission My Second Mother, Álex de la Iglesia’s My Big Night (Spain), 3 Beauties (Venezuela) by Carlos Caridad-Montero, and Spy Time (Spain) by Javier Ruiz Caldera.
Rounding out the section are: The Apostate (Spain-France-Uruguay) by Federico Veiroj; Road To La Paz (Argentina) by Francisco Varone; Semana Santa (Mexico) by [link...
Both selections will play in the Ibero American Showcase under the auspices of Iff Panama 2016, which runs from April 7-13.
Italian actress Lucía Bosé will be guest of honour at the festival’s fifth edition when three of films will screen — Death Of A Cyclist, Story Of A Love Affair, and No Peace Under The Olive Tree. High Heels will screen in special presentation.
Ibero American Showcase entries include Anna Muylaert’s Brazilian foreign language Oscar submission My Second Mother, Álex de la Iglesia’s My Big Night (Spain), 3 Beauties (Venezuela) by Carlos Caridad-Montero, and Spy Time (Spain) by Javier Ruiz Caldera.
Rounding out the section are: The Apostate (Spain-France-Uruguay) by Federico Veiroj; Road To La Paz (Argentina) by Francisco Varone; Semana Santa (Mexico) by [link...
- 3/23/2016
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
Chris New, Tom Cullen in Andrew Haigh's Weekend Anna Paquin, Terrence Malick: Cinephile Society Winners Best Picture 01. A Separation 02. The Tree of Life 03. Mysteries of Lisbon 04. Certified Copy 05. Weekend 06. Margaret 07. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives 08. Drive 09. Meek's Cutoff 10. Hugo 11. Melancholia Best Director Terrence Malick – The Tree of Life Runner-up: Asghar Farhadi – A Separation Best Film Not In The English Language 01. A Separation 02. Mysteries of Lisbon 03. Certified Copy 04. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives 05. The Skin I Live In 06. Poetry 07. House of Pleasures 08. Le Havre 09. Le Quattro Volte 10. Of Gods and Men Best Actor Tom Cullen – Weekend Runner-up: Peyman Moaadi – A Separation Best Actress Anna Paquin – Margaret Runner-up: Juliette Binoche – Certified Copy Best Supporting Actor Brad Pitt – The Tree of Life Runner-up: Shahab Hosseini – A Separation Best Supporting Actress J. Smith-Cameron – Margaret Runner-up: Jessica Chastain – Take Shelter Best Original Screenplay A Separation – Asghar Farhadi...
- 2/22/2012
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Above: Manoel dans l'île des merveilles (1984).
Notebook is unfurling a series of tributes to Raúl Ruiz entitled Blind Man's Bluff: along with some previously published articles, here in English for the first time, the bulk a compilation of new, shorter pieces from a few generous critics and Ruizians on favorite moments from a vast, subterranean filmography. For more from Raúl Ruiz: Blind Man's Bluff see the Table of Contents.
On Top Of The Whale (1981)
Given his immense success with the impossible Proust, Ruiz may have proven the ideal director for Nabokov, especially his hilarious Pnin. Ruiz and Nabokov were well matched with their shared themes of memory and exile, rapture and obsession; their fondness for elaborate word/image play; their grave facetiousness. Imagine what Ruiz might have done with that vertiginous “segue” at the start of Chapter Four of Pnin in which Victor’s nocturnal fantasy imagines his...
Notebook is unfurling a series of tributes to Raúl Ruiz entitled Blind Man's Bluff: along with some previously published articles, here in English for the first time, the bulk a compilation of new, shorter pieces from a few generous critics and Ruizians on favorite moments from a vast, subterranean filmography. For more from Raúl Ruiz: Blind Man's Bluff see the Table of Contents.
On Top Of The Whale (1981)
Given his immense success with the impossible Proust, Ruiz may have proven the ideal director for Nabokov, especially his hilarious Pnin. Ruiz and Nabokov were well matched with their shared themes of memory and exile, rapture and obsession; their fondness for elaborate word/image play; their grave facetiousness. Imagine what Ruiz might have done with that vertiginous “segue” at the start of Chapter Four of Pnin in which Victor’s nocturnal fantasy imagines his...
- 9/28/2011
- MUBI
Above: Composer Cliff Martinez. Photograph by Robert Charles Mann.
Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, Georges Delerue, Toru Takemitsu...sometimes it seems like cinema's greatest composers are all behind us. But just as films were not "better back then," soundtracks weren't either. Looking for great soundtrack artists nowadays is akin to looking for great movies: there seems a lot more of everything, and it takes a roving gaze (and ear) to find that excellence and expression splintered across film festivals, creaking home video releases, YouTube videos (see, recently, a gathering of music by Jorge Arriagada for Raúl Ruiz's films) and other disseminations of the ever-widening world of cinema.
While I may look forward to a film by a director I like, or one shot by a cinematographer I'm interested in, it's not every day I'm excited to hear a movie. One major exception to this aural ignorance is a name that...
Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, Georges Delerue, Toru Takemitsu...sometimes it seems like cinema's greatest composers are all behind us. But just as films were not "better back then," soundtracks weren't either. Looking for great soundtrack artists nowadays is akin to looking for great movies: there seems a lot more of everything, and it takes a roving gaze (and ear) to find that excellence and expression splintered across film festivals, creaking home video releases, YouTube videos (see, recently, a gathering of music by Jorge Arriagada for Raúl Ruiz's films) and other disseminations of the ever-widening world of cinema.
While I may look forward to a film by a director I like, or one shot by a cinematographer I'm interested in, it's not every day I'm excited to hear a movie. One major exception to this aural ignorance is a name that...
- 9/27/2011
- MUBI
Above: City of Pirates (1983).
Jorge Arriagada's multi-faceted, genre-crossing (and blending) collaboration with Raúl Ruiz is one of cinema's most fruitful, varied and extensive composer-director partnerships, beginning in the 1970s and continuing all the way through Ruiz's most recently released film, Mysteries of Lisbon. Here is a selection of Arriagada's scores for Ruiz, all from chapaev36's YouTube channel, to which we offer our thanks.
In the playlist below you'll find Arriagada's music from:
The Territory (1981) On Top of the Whale (1982) City of Pirates (1983) Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983) Manoel dans l'île des merveilles (Manoel's Destinies) (1984) Treasure Island (1985) Richard III (1986) The Blind Owl (1990) Dark at Noon (1993) Three Lives and Only One Death (1996) Time Regained(1999)...
Jorge Arriagada's multi-faceted, genre-crossing (and blending) collaboration with Raúl Ruiz is one of cinema's most fruitful, varied and extensive composer-director partnerships, beginning in the 1970s and continuing all the way through Ruiz's most recently released film, Mysteries of Lisbon. Here is a selection of Arriagada's scores for Ruiz, all from chapaev36's YouTube channel, to which we offer our thanks.
In the playlist below you'll find Arriagada's music from:
The Territory (1981) On Top of the Whale (1982) City of Pirates (1983) Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983) Manoel dans l'île des merveilles (Manoel's Destinies) (1984) Treasure Island (1985) Richard III (1986) The Blind Owl (1990) Dark at Noon (1993) Three Lives and Only One Death (1996) Time Regained(1999)...
- 8/23/2011
- MUBI
CANNES -- This movie's English title is a misnomer. The French noun "l'avocat" means attorney, while the English word "advocate" means something entirely different. The subject of Barbet Schroeder's in-depth documentary, included in Un Certain Regard sidebar, is Jacques Verges, a French attorney who has made a career defending unpopular individuals, more than a few considered war criminals and terrorists. But as the old saying goes, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. So what Schroeder wants to do is probe the moral complexities in a man capable of defending those who commit heinous crimes.
Verges, who agrees to be interviewed, proves a slippery figure, using his lawyer's guile to sidestep questions and spin facts. But he is a fascinating figure, and "Terror's Advocate" is a fascinating film even if it never completely pins him down. The film should do extremely well in European festivals and art houses although North American viewers' heads may spin as the film leaps through the history of foreign terrorist organizations of the past half-century.
The key thing about Verges is that he was born in Thailand in 1924 or 1925 -- even here he apparently is slippery -- to a mother from Vietnam and a father from Reunion Island, the Indian Ocean island that is part of France. He thus came of age as multiracial in a colonial setting, which as one interviewee notes, means "to be against things," to be anti-establishment, anti-colonialist and anti-government. So even when this seemingly leftist lawyer defends Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, from his perspective he sees the trial as an opportunity to show that French collaborators were no different from evil Barbie.
As a young attorney, he was asked to defend Djamila Bouhired, an Algerian woman who came to symbolize her country's hopes for freedom when she was arrested and tortured by France for planting bombs in cafes in 1957. Eventually, he obtained her pardon after she was sentenced to death. Subsequently, he married her.
But his reward was to be turned into "the husband of Djamila Bouhired" and to be banished to divorce cases. So it was that Verges abruptly disappeared. Last seen at a political meeting in Paris in February 1970, he didn't re-emerge until 1978.
Cultivating an enigmatic image, Verges merely says, "I was among people". He was spotted occasionally by friends in Paris. Theories of his whereabouts otherwise range from Cambodia, where Pol Pot was a friend from student days, to Palestinian camps or even China.
When he returned, he defended terrorists from Magdalena Kopp and Anis Naccache to Carlos the Jackal and Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. When he defended Kopp, German-born terrorist married to Carlos, history repeated itself. He apparently fell in love with his prisoner-client. Only this time she was married and turned her back on him once she was freed.
One can easily get lost amid the endless talking heads of defendants, experts, politicians, historians and attorneys. But what seems clear is that the defining moment in Verges' life came in his aggressive defense of Djamila Bouhired. That young, passionate and committed man was never able to repeat such a pure legal-political act. So he gradually, especially after his eight-year walkabout, drifted from advocate to l'avocat, becoming a man who knows how to legally help a client in the profitable business of terror or who can associate with anti-Semites and quarrel over the body count in the killing fields of Cambodia.
Schroeder eschews narration, letting the interviewees give the time lines and paint the portraits. Thus no one fills in all the blanks or provides a historical context for the many terrorist groups. Schroder also scrupulously avoids passing judgment -- or at least does so only in his selection of what comments or revelations he chooses to include.
A rich symphonic score by Jorge Arriagada helps flavor this visually thin broth of talking heads and a little archival footage.
L'AVOCAT DE LA TERREUR (TERROR'S ADVOCATE)
Magnolia Pictures
A Wild Bunch/Yalla Films co-production with participation of Canal Plus and the Center National de la Cinematographie
Credits:
Director: Barbet Schroeder
Producer: Rita Dagher
Director of photography: Caroline Champetier, Jean-Luc Perreard
Music: Jorge Arriagada
Editor: Nelly Quettier
Running time 137 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Verges, who agrees to be interviewed, proves a slippery figure, using his lawyer's guile to sidestep questions and spin facts. But he is a fascinating figure, and "Terror's Advocate" is a fascinating film even if it never completely pins him down. The film should do extremely well in European festivals and art houses although North American viewers' heads may spin as the film leaps through the history of foreign terrorist organizations of the past half-century.
The key thing about Verges is that he was born in Thailand in 1924 or 1925 -- even here he apparently is slippery -- to a mother from Vietnam and a father from Reunion Island, the Indian Ocean island that is part of France. He thus came of age as multiracial in a colonial setting, which as one interviewee notes, means "to be against things," to be anti-establishment, anti-colonialist and anti-government. So even when this seemingly leftist lawyer defends Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, from his perspective he sees the trial as an opportunity to show that French collaborators were no different from evil Barbie.
As a young attorney, he was asked to defend Djamila Bouhired, an Algerian woman who came to symbolize her country's hopes for freedom when she was arrested and tortured by France for planting bombs in cafes in 1957. Eventually, he obtained her pardon after she was sentenced to death. Subsequently, he married her.
But his reward was to be turned into "the husband of Djamila Bouhired" and to be banished to divorce cases. So it was that Verges abruptly disappeared. Last seen at a political meeting in Paris in February 1970, he didn't re-emerge until 1978.
Cultivating an enigmatic image, Verges merely says, "I was among people". He was spotted occasionally by friends in Paris. Theories of his whereabouts otherwise range from Cambodia, where Pol Pot was a friend from student days, to Palestinian camps or even China.
When he returned, he defended terrorists from Magdalena Kopp and Anis Naccache to Carlos the Jackal and Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. When he defended Kopp, German-born terrorist married to Carlos, history repeated itself. He apparently fell in love with his prisoner-client. Only this time she was married and turned her back on him once she was freed.
One can easily get lost amid the endless talking heads of defendants, experts, politicians, historians and attorneys. But what seems clear is that the defining moment in Verges' life came in his aggressive defense of Djamila Bouhired. That young, passionate and committed man was never able to repeat such a pure legal-political act. So he gradually, especially after his eight-year walkabout, drifted from advocate to l'avocat, becoming a man who knows how to legally help a client in the profitable business of terror or who can associate with anti-Semites and quarrel over the body count in the killing fields of Cambodia.
Schroeder eschews narration, letting the interviewees give the time lines and paint the portraits. Thus no one fills in all the blanks or provides a historical context for the many terrorist groups. Schroder also scrupulously avoids passing judgment -- or at least does so only in his selection of what comments or revelations he chooses to include.
A rich symphonic score by Jorge Arriagada helps flavor this visually thin broth of talking heads and a little archival footage.
L'AVOCAT DE LA TERREUR (TERROR'S ADVOCATE)
Magnolia Pictures
A Wild Bunch/Yalla Films co-production with participation of Canal Plus and the Center National de la Cinematographie
Credits:
Director: Barbet Schroeder
Producer: Rita Dagher
Director of photography: Caroline Champetier, Jean-Luc Perreard
Music: Jorge Arriagada
Editor: Nelly Quettier
Running time 137 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 5/21/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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