FRANCE - This week, the right wing-leaning mayor of a small Parisian suburban town ordered local theaters to take the film “Timbuktu” (directed by Abderrahmane Sissako) off its program slate “in the name of the fight against glorifying terrorism.” The terrorist attacks that occurred in France last week have had many consequences, this incomprehensible cancelation of “Timbuktu” by Monsieur le Mayor being the collateral

The New York-based INDEPENDENT FILM PROJECT, an incubator for indie-minded [...]

Even though she was born in Malmö, Sweden on September 29, 1931, Anita Ekberg was an Italian actress. She had become a star elsewhere first but it was in Rome that her marquee lights flared. She was a living, breathing representation of cinema that drove both men and women, avowed cinephiles as well as Sunday movie-goers, crazy. And it is Rome, too, that Ekberg would call home ever since the fifties, never returning to her

Sean Penn, there’s an actor with range. This time around, [...]

A member of FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) who has attended the Cannes and Berlin Festivals Selin Sevinç Bertero is a California-based screenwriting expert, what's known in the industry as a "script doctor." This article was taken from her blog "The Magic of Story.") To all screenwriters out there who’ve studied screenwriters handbooks, manuals and guidebooks I don't think I am alone in

Mehran Tamadon is a Paris-based filmmaker who’s spent most of his [...]

Mike Nichols, auteur of "The Graduate," has passed away. He was 83. Nichols was a German-born American film and theatre director, producer, actor and comedian. He began his career in the fifties with the improv troupe the Compass Players, predecessor of the Second City in Chicago and as one half of the comedy duo Nichols & May, along with Elaine May. In 1968 Nichols won an Academy Award for Best Director for the film