On Li Yang and Blind Shaft
Li Yang was born in 1959 in Xi'an, China to a family of actors. He was a member of the China Youth Arts Theatre and studied directing at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, graduating in 1987. Most of Li's classmates went on to form what is commonly referred to as the "Fifth Generation" of filmmakers in China, breaking with filmmaking conventions in Chinese cinema.
Li went to Germany, made documentary films, became a television actor and worked as a camera operator. He then enrolled and graduated from the Academy of Media Arts in 1995. He returned to China in 2000 with the intention of finding a subject for a fiction film. He began to read novels in search of the right story, and when a friend suggested Blind Shaft, he found the source for his first fiction film.
In Blind Shaft, Li achieves an intimacy between the viewer and the main actors primarily via his exclusive use of handheld camera movements. Not once was a tripod used during the filming. The haunting, intimate performances in the film are testament to Li's expertise with actors.
For various reasons, Li Yang does not associate himself with the Fifth or the Sixth Generation of filmmakers in China. The directors of the Fifth generation are his contemporaries but he has only just begun making his mark in Chinese cinema. The Sixth Generation, he claims, is only designated as such because of the common age of the directors, not because of a common film concept, and so he does not identify with this group either. He also has made Germany his home.
Despite this seeming lack of a fixed sense of place, Li Yang is rooted in the tradition of making socially engaged films. He is concerned with the human and spiritual cost of development in China. For as he says, "when the economy develops up to a point, human beings need to return to developing themselves. This is a process that cannot be avoided."
Li's new film Blind Mountain is currently available from Kino.
Link TV is proud to be presenting Blind Shaft. Please join our discussion board and tell us what you think of the film, and what else you'd like to see on Cinemondo.
- Posted August 21, 2008
On Rajnesh Domalpalli and Vanaja
Rajnesh Domalpalli was born in Chennai, capital of the Indian state Tamil Nadu, but eventually moved to Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh where Vanaja was filmed. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai in 1984 and went on to get an MS from SUNY, graduating in 1986. Rajnesh then headed to California to work as a computer engineer in Silicon Valley before deciding to attend Columbia University to study film in 2001. Vanaja was his thesis film at Columbia.
A particularly multi-talented and ambitious man, Rajnesh not only began writing short stories while in college but studied classical Indian music by learning the veena and later the classical vocal tradition. Vanaja, it seems, is a culmination of Rajnesh's various artistic interests. The traditional arts, narrative storytelling, painting and photography all come together to form what is a beautifully crafted story about a young girl whose only way out of her caste is through traditional Kuchipudi dance. Since the filming of Vanaja, Mamatha Bhukya, the young actress who plays Vanaja is back in school and anxious to become a proponent of Kuchipudi to the world.
While Vanaja does touch upon lingering issues of caste in India, it is also a plea to preserve traditional culture and heritage. Domalpalli's choice to use Kuchipudi dance in Vanaja is his way of bringing the folk arts to life and emphasizing not only their importance but the importance of keeping them alive.
- Posted July 11, 2008
On Özer Kiziltan and Takva
Özer Kiziltan was born 1963 in Istanbul and studied law at Istanbul University. He decided to leave prior to completing his degree in order to study cinema and television. Özer's decision to do so was partly based on his desire to use cinema to present stories about Turkish life to the rest of the world.
Özer eventually directed several award-winning shorts among which were Distress, Caution, Mice, Your Eyes are the Last Passion Fire of Yesilcam and The Last Birds Too are Gone. He has also directed a number of dramatic series for Turkish television.
In 1997, along with several filmmaker friends, Özer formed Yeni Sinemacular (New Filmmakers), a production company that has, to date, produced four critically acclaimed feature films, Takva being their fifth and most recent production. Takva was Turkey's submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film, and the decision generated a lot of controversy. Many criticized the film for portraying Turkey as 'a country of sects'. Özer's response to this criticism is quite simply: "I am not interested in making a Tourism brochure, I am researching a reality in this country."
Takva is a film that achieves an unusual balance between local authenticity and universal relevance, making it both a both a critical and commercial success in Turkey and hopefully elsewhere. The film's executive producer is Fatih Akin, the renowned Turkish-German filmmaker whose latest, The Edge of Heaven, was recently released in the U.S. and is one of the most acclaimed films of the year. Akin's editor, Andrew Bird, cut Takva for Özer.
Link TV is proud to be presenting the US TV premiere of Takva: A Man's Fear Of God. Please join our discussion board and tell us what you think of the film, and what else you'd like to see on Cinemondo.
- Posted July 3, 2008
On Bahman Ghobadi and A Time for Drunken Horses
Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi got the world's attention in 2000 with A Time for Drunken Horses, the first Kurdish-language feature film ever made. At the time of the release of A Time for Drunken Horses few viewers noticed that the language spoken in the film was not Farsi, Iran's principal tongue, but Kurdish, which has been banned from country's schools since the 1940s. In fact, Horses was the first feature film in Kurdish to achieve international release. The film won the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Born in 1969 in the Iranian town of Baneh, near the Iraqi border, Ghobadi, has subsequently completed three more feature films, all in Kurdish, which have won prizes at major film festivals around the world. His 2002 film, Songs of My Motherland (known as Marooned in Iraq outside Iran), unfolds against the backdrop of the flight of the Iraqi Kurds toward the Iranian border after the 1991 Gulf War. But Ghobadi’s story is about an aging Kurdish singer from Iran who wants to cross the border into Iraq to find the female singer who left him 25 years before. As he has done elsewhere, Ghobadi makes fruitful use of non-actors, many of them children, many of whom had never seen a movie camera before.
Ghobadi’s next film, Turtles Can Fly (2004), takes place in a Kurdish refugee camp in Iraq, where residents anticipate Saddam Hussein's fall even as they fear that the impending American invasion will bring new devastation. Most of central characters are children, and their leader is an adolescent who calls himself Satellite as a badge of the technical knowhow that gives him an advantage over the other kids - including a new rival, a boy without arms.
Completed in 2006, Half Moon marked the first time Ghobadi fell seriously afoul of Iranian authorities, who were doubtless upset not only by the use of Kurdish language, but also by the film’s depiction of an aging impresario’s struggle to mount a concert in Iraq that includes female singers, who have been banned from performing in public since the Islamic Revolution of 1978. They first advised him to make cuts in the film, then banned it entirely.
Half Moon is available in the U.S. from Strand Releasing.
- Peter Scarlet, excerpt from Tribeca Film Festival.org
- Posted June 26, 2008
On Daratt
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, the director of Daratt, was born in N'Djamena, the capitol of Chad. His first exposure to films was at an open theater in Abeche, where he watched Westerns and Bollywood features. While these movies inspired him to become a filmmaker, he was not interested in replicating what he saw on screen. In discussing Daratt in the interview that follows its broadcast on Cinemondo, Mahamat admits the influence of Westerns but, as he says: “my hero is Chadian, he is not a Hollywood hero…He is a hero because he does not kill and not a hero because he kills."
Today, Mahamat-Saleh makes films to counter the ‘colonisation by images’ he claims is rampant in Africa. He works under almost impossible conditions, with non-professional actors and no local facilities to process the 35mm film he uses. Just as the production for Daratt was beginning, the civil war in Chad erupted again after a cease-fire. Mahamat and his crew kept on against great odds, all because he's determined to give to the Chadian people the kind of film he believes they deserve. In an intimate portrayal of a boy orphaned by the man he seeks to kill, Mahamat shows how refraining from revenge is an “act of violence against oneself” - but one that ensures the possibility to “envision another future.”
If you like Daratt you might want to check out Mahamat-Saleh's two previous features, Bye Bye Africa (1999) and Abouna (2002). Let us know what you think of Daratt by joining the Cinemondo discussion board. And tune in to Cinemondo next week for the U.S. TV premiere of Bahman Ghobadi's A Time for Drunken Horses, the first Kurdish-language movie and the winner of the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
- Posted June 20, 2008 by Steven Lawrence and Leslie Tô
Details on the new CINEMONDO season!
CINEMONDO is Link TV's regular series of outstanding world films, hosted by Peter Scarlet. Starting June 21, CINEMONDO will feature a new group of outstanding movies thatintroduce Americans to the unique visions of leading filmmakers fromChad, China, India, Iran and Turkey. Several films will be followed by10 to 15 minute interviews with the directorsincluding Rajnesh Domalpalli, Bahman Ghobadi, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun andÖzer Kiziltan. You can look forward to the following line-up ofessential films from around the world:
Blind Shaft (China) directed by Li Yang
Daratt (Chad) directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Takva: A Man’s Fear of God (Turkey) directed by Özer Kiziltan
A Time for Drunken Horses (Iran) directed by Bahman Ghobadi
Vanaja (India) directed by Rajnesh Domalpalli
Visit our Season 3 Page!
“There is no other channel in America that has made such a commitment to presenting the diversity of great movies being made beyond our borders. In addition to presenting four of the best recent films I’ve seen, we’re bringing viewers A Time for Drunken Horses, Bahman Ghobadi’s first feature, which has been out of circulation in the U.S. since 2001 for legal reasons. It took us months of detective work and negotiations to get a deal done, but that just shows you how much we care about these films. They’re all treasures.”
- Peter Scarlet, CINEMONDO host & Artistic Director of the Tribeca Film Festival
