News

1. Documentary Review: Kamay (2024) by Ilyas Yourish

As a symbol of resilience, Ilyas Yourish, as part of the diaspora, offers us not just a documentary, but a poem where the immutability of time and the magnificence of nature stand still, despite the hardships, marginalization, and injustice. This was just before Afghanistan was handed over again to the Taliban. (Jean Claude)

2. Film Review: Sister Midnight (2024) by Karan Kandhari

Full of strong contrasts and static shots, the cinematography by Sverre Sørdal is nicely complemented by hard-cut editing by Napoleon Stratogiannakis. Sudden changes in the setting leave the viewer as confused as the heroine herself. The soundtrack by Paul Banks, best known for being a member of the American rock band Interpol, largely consists of songs reminiscent of American Westerns, which in the end, feels like an inadequate choice as they don’t fit the atmosphere of India. However, the picture is nicely rounded...

In 1979, Iran’s historical monarchy was overthrown, and a new era began in the form of an Islamic state governed by Ayatollah Khomeini. But at what cost? Iranian documentary filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi starts her diary film ‘My Stolen Planet‘ with this question.

My Stolen Planet is screening at Black Movie

Born just three weeks after the revolution, Farahnaz recalls how the new government dealt its first blow to women. “The first blow lands on the bodies of women,” Farahnaz says. The regime restricts their rights—their choice of dress, where they can go, and what music they can listen to or dance to. But all this exists only in the “outside planet,” a planet that resides on the streets. There is another planet—inside—where everyone has each other beyond the restrictions and inhumanity.

All Iranian women live this double life—each day, each minute, in their own country. Farahnaz...

Maura Delpero’s Venice Silver Lion winner Vermiglio has earned the Gold Hugo award in Chicago International Film Festival’s international feature competition, while Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light has won the Silver Hugo.

Vermiglio follows three sisters in an Alpine village in the latter stages of the Second World War as a deserter’s arrival has a profound impact on the community.

All We Imagine As Light was the first Indian film in Cannes Competition in three decades and follows two nurses who head off on a road trip.

Silver Hugos in the international feature competition...

The 2024 Chicago Film Festival shined a light on films that stretch the limits of storytelling. From Italy to Cape Verde, this year’s award winners drew viewers in with stories about family, identity, and resilience, along with fresh directing approaches and standout performances. Below are some highlights from the festival’s top prize categories.

Gold Hugo for Best Film: Vermiglio

Directed by Maura Delpero, Vermiglio tells the story of a young woman finding her way within a complex family in Italy’s scenic Alps. The film won the festival’s top honor for its attention to human details and beautiful visuals, capturing relationships that feel timeless.

Silver Hugo for Jury Prize: All We Imagine As Light

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light explores choice and control across generations in a journey that invites audiences to confront life’s crossroads. It balances comfort with disruption and presents these choices with a relatable vulnerability.

The Chicago International Film Festival is wrapping up its 60th edition by handing out its prizes. In fact, though the New York Film Festival has been around longer (it just wrapped its 62nd festival), Chicago is the longest running fest in North America to give out awards. And as you’d expect from this festival that’s especially focused on international film, its winners have also been standouts at Cannes and Venice.

The Best Film winner, or Gold Hugo, at the Chicago International Film Festival is Maura Delpero’s “Vermiglio,” a World War II drama centered in the Alps that drew praise out of Venice, though received a mixed reception from IndieWire. Italy has named the film its entry for next year’s Best International Feature competition at the Academy Awards. The previous three winners of the Gold Hugo at Chicago are Gabor Reisz’s “Explanation for Everything,” Hlynur Palmason’s “Godland,...

Payal Kapadia’s Cannes grand prix winner All We Imagine As Light and Mohammad Rasoulof’s special prize recipient The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, along with Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Venice selection Harvest are among the international competition selections at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival running October 16-27.

A packed line-up also brings Joshua Oppenheimer’s Telluride entry The End to the International Feature Competition, along with the North American premiere of The Quiet Son from Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin, which debuted on the Lido.

There are world premieres for Clarissa Campolina and Sérgio Borges’s Suçuarana...

Payal Kapadia’s Cannes grand prix winner All We Imagine Is Light and Mohammad Rasoulof’s special prize recipient The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, along with Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Venice selection Harvest are among the international competition selections at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival running October 16-27.

A packed line-up also brings Joshua Oppenheimer’s Telluride entry The End to the International Feature Competition, along with the North American premiere of The Quiet Son from Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin, which debuted on the Lido.

There are world premieres for Clarissa Campolina and Sérgio Borges’s Suçuarana...

The 68th BFI London Film Festival has just announced the line-up and – as always – a wide variety of Asian films is included in the vast Programme. Over 12 days, the Lff will showcase 255 works from 80 countries, featuring 64 languages and including 112 projects made by female and non-binary filmmakers.

The London Film Festival, officially called the BFI London Film Festival is organised annually by the British Film Institute (BFI) since 1953. It is the UK’s largest public Festival of its kind and is visited by thousands of film enthusiasts who have the the ability to see films, documentaries and shorts from all over the world. The festival will take place at London’s BFI Southbank and The Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, as well as cinemas and venues across central London, and will run from 9 to 20 October 2024.

All the info about tickets and booking are Here.

And now, let’s browse the...

The awards ceremony of the 14th Taiwan International Documentary Festival (Tidf) took place on May 16. 42 nominated films in the Asian Vision Competition, International Competition, Taiwan Competition and 14 works shortlisted for the Tidf Visionary Award, an award for promoting sinophone documentaries, competed for 11 awards.

The Programme Director Wood Lin says this is his 7th time participating in Tidf's programming since 2010, and a persistent self-pursuit for incarnating the spirit of documentary through curating has made each version more challenging than imagined. He also thanks all the filmmakers at the ceremony for devoting their lives to and fully engaging in filmmaking; their works are wonderful gifts that introduce the complexity and beauty of the world to the audience in Taiwan. He then quoted this year's Outstanding Contribution Award recipient, Chang Chao-tang: “We exist, because people who remember us”, saying that Tidf also exists because all who participate, remembers it.

K-Family Affairs

In Taman-taman (Park) directed by So Yo-hen,...

The Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival is coming off a successful — and at times turbulent — 26th edition, wrapping “amidst an explosive ambiance with episodes of violence and intolerance.”

In a post-festival report, TiDF says 66,000 spectators and visitors participated in the event this year, an increase of 16 percent over 2023. The festival ran from March 7-17 in Greece’s second largest city, nestled in a gulf of the Aegean Sea.

“This year’s TiDF hosted a great number of premieres, exciting talks and special events, and welcomed the internationally acclaimed artist Dimitris Papaioannou,” the festival noted in its report. “Moreover, it bestowed honorary Golden Alexanders to the Academy Award-winning Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba and the Greek film director, screenwriter, author and translator Panayotis Evangelidis.”

TiDF hosted more than 300 in-person screenings at several venues, as well as showcasing 133 documentaries through the festival’s online platform. The concurrent Agora film market played host to the...

Egypt’s iconic Al-Ahram studio in Cairo has been destroyed by a fire that broke out in the early hours of Saturday, March 16.

The fire began after the day’s production wrapped on the Ramadan TV series El-Moallem starring Mustafa Shaban.

Three neighbouring buildings were evacuated before the fire spread. The cause of the fire is still unknown.

Egyptian prime minister Mostafa Madbouly visited the site alongside the governor of Giza and other officials to assess damage and assure compensation for those affected. According to Egypt’s State Information Service, each family affected by the fire will receive Egp 15,000 as...

Filipino writer-producer-director Ramona S Diaz is unafraid of a fight.

She plans to release her politically controversial feature documentary And So It Begins in the Philippines herself later this year, galvanised by the rection to her 2003 film Imelda. The film premiered at Sundance in January and had its European premiere in the international competition of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival last week.

Imelda was about the life of former Filipino First Lady Imelda Marcos. Marcos unsuccessfully took Diaz to court in an attempt to stop the documentary being shown in the Philippines.

And So It Begins looks at the 2022 elections...

My Stolen Planet by Farahnaz Sharifi won the €12,000 Golden Alexander prize of the international competition of the 26th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival (Tidf), which closed on March 17.

The intimate family portrait is a Germany-Iran co-production and made its world premiere in the Berlinale’s Panorama programme last month.

At Tidf, it also won the Fipresci award and a place in the pre-selection shortlist for the best documentary Osar. France’s Cat&Docs is handling international sales.

Lidia Duda’s Forest, won the €5,000 international competition special jury prize, the Silver Alexander. The Poland-Czech Republic co-production, also about a family, this...

Iranian filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet won the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival today, automatically qualifying the film for Oscar consideration.

The film, which held its world premiere at the Berlinale last month, combines the director’s memories with fragments of 8mm film recorded by others to examine the vitality of Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Golden Alexander win comes with a €12,000 prize.

Jurors called My Stolen Planet, “A well-crafted and moving first-person essay that brilliantly confirms that every political reality has a subreality and that resistance comes in many forms, not least among them in the private realm.” My Stolen Planet also won the the Fipresci Award as the Best Documentary of the International Competition. [Scroll for full list of winners]

The Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival awards ceremony.

Forest, directed by Lidia Duda, claimed the Silver Alexander and a €5,000 prize. Jurors described that film as, “An observational portrait...

Iranian filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi’s “My Stolen Planet,” an intimate family portrait of life during Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, won the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival on Sunday, bringing a close to an emotional and politically charged week in Greece’s second city.

Using both the director’s personal archives and 8mm recordings of strangers’ lives, the film — which world premiered in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama strand — uses an essayistic style to present the joy and vitality of life in Tehran in the 1970s, in contrast with the oppression imposed on the Iranian people by the country’s hardline regime.

The jury praised “My Stolen Planet” as “a well-crafted and moving first-person essay that brilliantly confirms that every political reality has a sub-reality and that resistance comes in many forms, not least among them in the private realm.”

In a pre-recorded video, Sharifi heralded the award...

Taking place just weeks after the historic passage of a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in Greece, the 26th edition of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival — which runs March 7 – 17 — pays tribute to that watershed moment in the long-running fight for equal rights for the country’s LGBTQ community, while also issuing a rallying cry for diversity, inclusion and empowerment across the globe.

“Our festival aspires to map out a detailed and thorough overview of our world’s complexity, welcoming films from the four corners of the world, which outline the radical changes, the challenges and the problems of our times,” says festival general director Elise Jalladeau. The program spotlights “the urgent call for diversity, stories of women’s empowerment [and] the visibility not only of the Lgbtqi+ community, but of all marginalized and oppressed groups of people who have suffered discrimination due to their identity,” she adds.

Following on the historic victory for...

The 26th edition of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival (TiDF) kicks off today (March 7) with 12 features screening in international competition.

Several titles are making their world premiere at the festival including Johatsu - Into Thin Air from Andreas Hartmann and Arata Mori about the thousands of people who disappear in Japan each year.

Also playing is Sundance award-winner A New Kind Of Wilderness from Silje Evensmo Jacobsen. The Norweigan film, which won the grand jury prize in documentary, follows a family living in the wild who are forced to confront contemporary society after a tragic event.

Fellow Sundance-award winner Nocturnes...

Women dancing, women singing, women burning their hijab: these acts of defiance shape Iranian filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi’s feature-length debut, “My Stolen Planet.” After premiering in Berlinale’s Panorama section and winning a second place Audience Award, the film now competes for the Golden Alexander at Thessaloniki International Doc Fest.

Prior to her feature, Sharifi made eight shorts while working as an editor for documentaries, including Firouzeh Khosrovani’s IDFA winning “Radiograph of a Family.”

Using the essayistic style of a diary, “My Stolen Planet” presents the joy and vivaciousness in contrast with the regimented oppression in Tehran using both the director’s personal archives and 8mm recordings of strangers’ lives. The film is produced by Anke Petersen and Lilian Tietjen of Jyoti Film and co-produced by Farzad Pak of PakFilm, who was behind the Golden Bear winner “There Is No Evil,” directed by Mohammad Rasoulof. Cat&Docs is in charge...

The 26th Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival has revealed the lineup of the International Competition section, which includes “A New Kind of Wilderness,” winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema – Documentary section of Sundance Film Festival. Thessaloniki Documentary Festival runs from March 7-17.

The films participating in the section have their world, international or European premiere at the festival.

The films compete for a number of awards, accompanied by monetary prizes. Among them are the Golden Alexander award, accompanied by a 12,000 euro prize, and the Silver Alexander award, accompanied by 5,000 euros.

The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival is an Oscars qualifying festival and the film that wins the Golden Alexander award will automatically be eligible to submit for Academy Awards consideration in the documentary feature category.

The documentaries that will participate in the International Competition section are as follows. (Descriptions supplied by the festival).

“A New Kind of Wilderness”

Silje Evensmo Jacobsen,...