Posted February 24, 2007 by John Menick
From the Web site:
The 2007 New York Arab & South Asian Film Festival (NYASAFF) presents the best in recent features, docs, & shorts that increase awareness of the creative vitality and sociopolitical realities of North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and their diasporas. Given the historical and cultural affinities between these geographic regions, as well as the contemporary political landscape, several cultural and media organizations, including Alwan for the Arts, 3rd i NY, South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, and Downtown Community Television have launched a collaborative series encompassing film, video, music, visual art, and literature, that will culminate in the annual, NYASA Film Festival running from February 23 - March 4, 2007.
Update: More from the Reeler.
Posted December 19, 2006 by John Menick
* “Shoot all scriptwriters,” he wrote in his popular, long-running Village Voice column, “and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema.”
* “The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be “shot” in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival. There was a scene in a butcher shop, for example, and I had to find every camera angle we needed in a butcher shop in 1945 Berlin. If there was a scene outdoors, a destroyed park or a zoo, I had to find those camera angles. There was interplay between the writing, directing, and archival research: what I could find that was in Paul Attanasio’s script, and whatever else I found in my research that might work or that piqued Paul’s interest, or Steven Soderbergh’s… A colleague of mine in the art department, Joanna Bush, created an amazing database of all the footage I’d collected. It was organized based on the geography of Berlin. So that on Steven’s computer, he could click on a map of Berlin and it would find all the archival footage that I had gotten on a particular plaza or a particular street or a particular location, and pull up all that archival footage and all the stills. Steven could know where he was situated in Berlin, and the art department could recreate a particular strasse. We’d know the ruins and we’d know how much that area was bombed out and all that.” More…
* “My first exposure to the subject came in a book by another medical anthropologist, Margaret Lock, whose Twice Dead (2002) is a brilliant comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to brain-death as the criterion of death. Hence the title: a person is ‘once dead’ when technical criteria establish that the brain has stopped, while the body is still ticking over quietly on a ventilator; ‘twice dead’ when the heart is stopped and the organs harvested.”
* “What, he wondered, did we want to do? Did we want to eat, to drink, to fuck? Uh, dinner sounds cool.”
* And last, but not least, the Athanasius Kircher Society 2006
Posted October 7, 2006 by John Menick
I’ll be in Paris next week for two screenings of Occupation in the Parisian ‘burbs. The first is in Les Lilas, at Espace Khiasma, on October 11 at 9 PM. Check Espace Khiasma’s Web site for more info and directions.
The second screening will be at Cinéma Le Studio 2 in Aubervilliers on Friday, October 13, 8:30 PM, where we shot one key scene in the project. Eli Lotar’s Aubervilliers will also be screened at Studio 2. A talk with Jack Ralite, Aubervilliers’ longtime mayor, is scheduled to follow.
More info (in French).
Posted October 3, 2006 by John Menick
Two quick updates on Lebanon and the arts:
MakeFilmsNotWar, launched this year at the Venice Film Festival, is co-sponsoring the 7th Beirut International Film Festival. And for this month’s issue, the editors of Artforum “turned to five individuals involved in [Modern Art Oxford’s “Out of Beirut” exhibition]—Lamia Joreige, Bernard Khoury, Walid Raad, Walid Sadek, and Christine Tohme—and asked them to reflect on the Lebanese crisis and its implications for their practices and for the culture at large.” Some of the results are online.
