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Pen Pictures of directors (1): India
Some directors who will feature on the course, who you may wish to investigate: Deepa Mehta This Canadian director was born in Amritsar in the Punjab and emigrated after getting her degree in...
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The name game
I blogged my reactions to The Namesake when I first saw it in May this year. You can check out the blog here. On a second viewing it worked just as well, but I got even more from it. I’ve softened a...
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Gegen die Wand (Head-On, Germany/Turkey 2003)
Director Fatih Akin (b. 1973) is one of the exciting new talents of German cinema. Growing up in a Turkish community in Hamburg he studied Visual Communications and started making short films in the...
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Auf der anderen Seite (Germany/Turkey 2007)
At last a day off and the chance to watch some movies. In fact it started the night before when I saw Juno, but Friday was the day when I managed to see the new print of Bertolucci’s The Conformist and...
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European Box Office Data 2007
One of our aims on the blog is to promote ‘cross border’ knowledge about films. Outside Hollywood, many films only circulate in their own domestic market or associated language markets. Films have to...
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Black History Month: Introduction
October is ‘Black History Month’ in the UK. It’s a celebration of the importance of Africa and its peoples and diaspora around the world. The US has a month in February, but in the UK, October became...
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Black History Month: Babymother (UK 1998)
Babymother is one of the few Black British films to receive a UK release of any kind since the 1980s, but even so, it is likely to be better known abroad where it was shown in festivals. In the UK it...
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Le Grand Voyage (France/Morocco 2004)
I thought this film was much more interesting than some of the rather sniffy reviews that appeared at the time. Le grand voyage won various prizes around the world, including one at Venice and was then...
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Women Without Men (Zanan-e bedun-e mardan, Ger/Austria/Fra/It/Ukraine/Morocco...
This film sneaked out on a single print in June 2010 in the UK and I missed it. I only became aware of it when researching A Separation. I’m glad that it is now available on DVD as it proves to be an...
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Izzat (Norway 2005)
Izzat is exactly the kind of film this blog is all about. It’s a crime genre film from Norway – a filmmaking country better known internationally for serious social drama until hits like The Troll...
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Midnight’s Children (Canada-UK 2012)
I approached this screening with some trepidation. I read Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children in 1982, identifying strongly with its central theme. It felt like the cutting-edge of a fiction in...
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Bend It Like Beckham (UK-Germany 2002) – Narrative, Genre and Representation
This is one of our occasional archive publications of notes on specific films for film and media studies students. These notes were originally published in 2004. Introduction Bend It Like Beckham...
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London Indian Film Festival #1: Josh (Against the Grain, Pakistan-US 2012)
Josh is the first of three screenings of films from the 2013 London Indian Film Festival to be shown ‘on tour’ at the National Media Museum in Bradford and I’m not quite sure what to make of it....
View ArticleNowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika, Germany 2001)
Nowhere in Africa is an engrossing film and it is no surprise that it won the Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2002. It is adapted from an autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig in which she explores...
View ArticleLFF2016 #7: Divines (France-Qatar 2016)
Divines is a fascinating and provocative film that is highly entertaining and timely. No wonder it created a stir at Cannes earlier this year where it won the Camera d’Or, the ‘first feature’ prize,...
View ArticleIndian Film at 70 #1: Notes on the cinematic exploration of Indian Partition...
These notes were compiled for a Day School earlier this year that looked at extracts from various Indian films/films about India in an attempt to understand how the issues surrounding the Partition of...
View ArticleMargarita With a Straw (India 2014)
(This is one of ten reports on films at the 58th London Film Festival – other reports can be found on The Case for Global Film Blog) It will be interesting to see how this film fares on release in...
View ArticleWhen I Saw You (Palestine-Jordan-UAE-Greece 2012)
When I Saw You is an important film. Well-made and times very beautiful, it is perhaps a film that surprises in what it achieves. Significantly, it is one of the first Palestinian films to be made...
View ArticleGholam (UK-Iran 2017)
This unusual film places a major Iranian star actor, known in the West for three leading roles in the films of Asghar Farhadi, into a downbeat slow-paced thriller set in parts of North London. The...
View ArticleLFF 2021 #2: Queen of Glory (US 2021)
This shortish first feature (78 mins) is fronted by an outstanding performance by its writer-director-star Nana Mensah. An experienced actor with credits on several TV series and some Independent...
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