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2 items from 2012

23 March 2012 5:05 PM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

This Is Not A Film was smuggled out of Iran inside a birthday cake. Long may film-makers continue to take risks for art

Jafar Panahi's This Is Not A Film demonstrates by the simple fact of its existence that the political oppression of difficult artists – a tradition as ancient and venerable as art itself – is alive and well in modern Iran. No surprises there, perhaps, but more encouragingly it also shows that Iranian responses to being silenced are as inventive as any ever developed by film-makers in repressive regimes. Given the formal and stylistic adventurousness of many movies made under arduous political circumstances, you might even argue that a bracing dose of aggressive censorship and brutal repression can sometimes do wonders for a director's formal and intellectual development.

Panahi had no need of such spurs to creativity; he was Abbas Kiarostami's assistant while Kiarostami was making films set »

- John Patterson

24 January 2012 10:00 AM, PST | ioncinema | See recent ioncinema news »

Ask a random sampling of cinephiles - let's even make a rule that they must be well-researched in and fanatic about European cinema - to name a significant Turkish filmmaker, living or dead, and by far the most common answer will be Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Runners-up will be 2010 Golden Bear-winner Semih Kaplanoğlu and German filmmaker Fatih Akin (he's of Turkish descent), and way down at a very distant fourth place will be a man by the name of Yilmaz Güney. Winner of the 1982 Palme d'Or by proxy for Yol (he was imprisoned during production and gave detailed directions to Şerif Gören, the 'official' director, on how to make the film), Güney is the most influential Turkish filmmaker in the country's history, and, frankly, still probably the greatest of them all (Ceylan may well surpass him, though, especially if he makes any more films on the plane as Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, »

2 items from 2012