Tag: cairo2014

The Iranian film Melbourne was awarded the Golden Pyramid for Best Picture at the Cairo International Film Festival this past Tuesday. I was lucky enough to attend the festival for this first time this year; besides having an excellent programming...

One of the most gripping films I've seen in ages, Nima Javidi's fiction feature debut Melbourne just won the Golden Pyramid for Best Film at the Cairo International Film Festival, and deservedly so. It proves that you don't need an...

While many factory jobs have moved to countries like Mexico or China, Canada still has its fair share of manufacturing. Most of us probably don't think about where many of our goods come from, or the difficult and often...

Most people would probably like to think that, when it comes to love, we get wiser as we get older, more able to tell who truly loves us and who is using us. But sometimes that chemical reaction takes over,...

Maha and her husband Sherif are talented set designers, who have been hired to work on their first commercial film (as oppose to the independent, art house films they usually prefer). On the first day of shooting, when Maha is...

We often see fleeting images of war and its victims, or brief scenes of torture on the news, but these are often presented in a sensational way, or sometimes sanitized, or more than often, ignored if they are happening in...

I'm sure many cinephiles are familiar with the Motion Picture Production Code, used by Hollywood in the mid-20th century to govern 'morality' in films. A self-imposed censorship, it banned any sexual acts beyond kissing, excessive violence, profanity, and many other...

Within the first few frames, it's easy to see why The Boy and The World won both Best Feature and the audience award at Annecy International Animated Film Festival, considered to be the most important of its kind. This is...

John Boorman's 1987 film Hope and Glory, about the London Blitz seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, is a favourite in the Rowan-Legg household (seriously, we can all quote it almost verbatim to the point of annoying guests)....

The words 'satire' and 'mockumentary', when referring to films, might automatically be thought to reference humour. But there is no humour, except very dark, in director Kaouther Ben Hania's brilliant The Challat of Tunis. It is a searing portrait of...

With the exception of Atom Egoyan's Ararat, the Armenian Genocide has not had much attention in Western cinema. German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin, whose previous films have often looked at issues of the marginalized, transnational cultures and violence, attempts to tackle...

Stories of war or violent conflict can often seem more acute and terrifying through the eyes of a child, especially if it is only from the periphery, when the child knows less than the audience. Theeb, Jordanian director Naji Abu's...