[Non-Asian] - FCDP

The 8th edition of the festival Cinemas Differents of Paris, from Decembre 08-17 organised by the CJC.
Many experimental films, different, underground films are to be screened. Several specials are proposed, including a focus on engaged or political (in a large sense) films. site

4 shorts already presented at Directors Lounge and which can be seen at Directors Lounge TV are selected and sheduled on Saturday night, part of the screening on engaged films.

The Holocaust Tourist (Jeremy Benstock, 2005)
Solo für Ramallah (Andreas Rost, 2005)
Still Life (M. Foxley, 2006)
Untitled # (Masha Godovannaya, 2005)

[Non Asian] 3. ZEBRA poetry award

ZEBRA poetry award, the first festival and award worldwide that is solely dedicated to films based on poetry, opened wednesday for its third edition in Berlin.

On Friday (tomorrow) Mannaka No le (The House In The Middle) by André Werner will be screened at 3h30 pm as part of Gesellschaftsspiele. It was shown in world premiere on this years Directors Lounge 2006.

Mannaka No le, pure japanese poetry, entirely filmed in the deserts of Nevada, is also on air at Directors Lounge television. This will be the first major screening of Mannaka No le (The House In The Middle) with it´s new, brilliant remastered score, an achievement by Dan of tagez fame.

Mannaka No le Gesellschaftsspiele, friday 3h30 pm
Kino Babylon berlin:mitte
Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30
10178 Berlin

Congratulations!!! :)

via

[non-Asian] - RIP Fabian Bielinsky

Fabian Bielinsky, Argentinian director, 47, died in Brazil on June, 29th.

SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - Argentine film director Fabian Bielinsky, who shot the critically-acclaimed Nine Queens crime caper, died of a heart attack in Sao Paulo, Brazil, consulate officials said on Thursday. He was 47.

Bielinsky was in Brazil doing casting for commercials. He died on Wednesday night in his hotel.

Nine Queens, shot in 2000, won a total of 21 awards at international film festivals and in 2004 gained a Hollywood remake, Criminal, which was less successful.

In the original movie, two con artists played by Ricardo Darin and Gaston Pauls try to swindle a stamp collector by selling him fake rare stamps.

His latest film was "El Aura" (The Aura), this week garnered six Silver Condors, the Argentine equivalent of the Oscar.

[non-Asian] - Slow Space

Slow Space
a film and art project by fellow curator at the Directors Lounge, Klaus W. Eisenlohr, will be shown in premiere at Kino Arsenal/ Friends of German Kinemathek
june 7th 9pm

Filmed entirely within the urban constructed environment that makes up the contemporary North American city of Chicago, Slow Space is a visually arresting investigation into how space is described, defined and ultimately experienced. Berlin filmmaker Klaus W. Eisenlohr commutes this relationship with the outside 'world' via an array of constructed transparencies in the glass domes and atriums that formed so much of architecture's modernist preoccupation for a constructed inside/outside dialectic. Descriptions and ultimately opinions on the status of public space in Chicago form part of the film's identity via a series of interviews conducted from the participant's private domains. Looking out and sealed behind the glass of their window panes a number of Chicagoans talk about their own experiences on the private/public borders of contemporary urbanity.
Slow Space is a film of many photographs if one considers it's over 3000 edits. Each frame in this 67 minute film it seems has been invested with a quality of aesthetic authorship normally attributed to the production of single images. Employing a staggering depth of compositional artistry Klaus W. Eisenlohr has enabled a joint optic relationship to come into view between maker and film spectator returning the film experience to an almost first time phenomenological encounter. I am, after seeing the film, reminded of my capacity to see, absorb and recognize spaces as images and spaces imagined simultaneously, i.e. to be totally stimulated with my senses activated to the fields of vision being presented. Seeing this film, it becomes apparent how visually stimulating the film experience can be.
Ben Anderson

more

Slow Space 72' 16mm
a film and art project by Klaus W. Eisenlohr
Premiere at Kino Arsenal/ Friends of German Kinemathek
june 7th 9pm
Arsenal Kino, Potsdamer Straße 2, 10785 Berlin, U / S Potsdamer Platz

[non-Asian] -A New Life (Une Vie Volée)

A New Life (Une Vie Volée) by Philippe Grandrieux (2002).

Yes, this is not an Asian film, but it's a great, experimental and strange film. First of all, this is my second Philippe Grandrieux film. I once saw Sombre which was his first fiction film. Philippe Grandrieux isn't a filmmaker very appreciated in France, and he's almost unknown outside of this country.
I guess the particular and tense world and the ambiguity of his works can easy make people uncomfortable or even can be too disturbing.
However one can not deny his artistic and cinematic approach and his personal exploration on human nature, and more particularly on the hidden, dark side of human soul.
A New Life can be seen as a visual and sound experimentation to create an emotive and sensory tension, and like Sombre, the film is raw, rather physical with a certain expression of the body and in which passions, torments and obsessions merge with the opacity of the cinematography, the lights and shades. Some powerful and amazing shots will always stay. The atmosphere is so tense that it almost feel claustrophobic in a world which seems to be like a dream but where women are for sale, somewhere in Eastern Europe. The narrative is completely torn to part, and isn't the matter and the purpose here since it's the sound and the visual that structure the film itself.

A surprising work of art.