News Analysis India

Tag: World Cinema

  • Cinema Without Borders: Struggles of a woman in ‘One Fine Morning’

    Express News Service

    Film: One Fine Morning

    French actress Lea Seydoux has had quite a formidable run in the last few years. After her breakthrough performance in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), as a Bond girl in Spectre (2015) and No Time To Die (2021), Seydoux was striking in Bruno Dumont’s middling satire France (2021). Crimes of the Future (2022). But it’s in Mia Hansen-Love’s One Fine Morning(2022) that one finds Seydoux at her most extraordinary as the ordinary Parisian Sandra.

    Sandra is an Everywoman. A single mother raising an eight-year-old girl. A daughter taking care of an ailing professor father and desperately seeking a good nursing home for him, something his pension can’t quite pay for. A woman unexpectedly finding love in an old friendship. She is as strong as she is vulnerable, stoic as much as sensitive.

    In the semi-autobiographical, naturalistic world of Hansen-Love there’s barely any drama propelling the narrative. Tension emerges from a door that a man suffering from neurodegenerative disease is unable to open, the inability to think that the man of ideas is fated to get afflicted with or a sudden rush of tears forced by the overwhelming burden of sadness that can embarrass you in front of a stranger.

    Hansen-Love builds One Fine Morning on the quotidian, the daily rhythms of any woman’s life in any corner of the world. It’s in the commonplace that one feels an uncommon affinity with Sandra. So many of us, like her, are whirling at that point in our lives when we are caught between twin, antithetical pulls—aging parents are the cause of our anxieties, fears and deepest of insecurities, and the young have demands of their own even while signaling hope for the future. Then there is the soothing, healing interlude of love that is also interrupted by strife of its own. In trying to keep up with the relationships closest to her, lies Sandra’s struggle to find space, time, and allegiance for her own self. One Fine Morning dwells a lot on all of it without saying much at all.

    The biggest takeaway from the film is about how there can be no strict compartments in life. At any point in time, it is all about the compatibility of the incompatibles, simultaneity of the irreconcilables, and having the good and bad in equal measure. Happiness can unexpectedly break in through the clouds of gloom. Loss and longing, grief and desire can go hand in hand. The finality of mortality will co-exist with an essential continuity that underlines the circle of life.

    Hansen-Love and Seydoux collaborate in great harmony while plumbing the emotional depths of a seemingly unremarkable situation in life and take the audience along on a most affecting ride. I was fortunate to have caught One Fine Morning in the company of Hansen-Love and Seydoux when it opened at Cannes.

    Hansen-Love spoke about how the film tells the story of “mourning for someone who is still alive”, a man getting deserted by his mind, disappearing as a soul but still “prisoner of his physical state”. Sandra must let go, overcome the guilt of abandoning all that’s dire in the most compelling bondof her life, and free herself to come alive for herself. In a nutshell, One Fine Morning is a journey into the heart of these inexpressible feelings.

    French cinema has had an eventful 2022. For the Oscars, the country would have had to pick from, among others, Hansen-Love’s labour of love, veteran Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon, a sultry love story in the times of COVID and political turbulence, and Saint Omer, documentary filmmaker Alice Diop’s harrowing first feature about the trial of an immigrant mother accused of killing her child. That’s how you define the embarrassment of riches in cinema.

    Film: One Fine Morning

    French actress Lea Seydoux has had quite a formidable run in the last few years. After her breakthrough performance in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), as a Bond girl in Spectre (2015) and No Time To Die (2021), Seydoux was striking in Bruno Dumont’s middling satire France (2021). Crimes of the Future (2022). But it’s in Mia Hansen-Love’s One Fine Morning(2022) that one finds Seydoux at her most extraordinary as the ordinary Parisian Sandra.

    Sandra is an Everywoman. A single mother raising an eight-year-old girl. A daughter taking care of an ailing professor father and desperately seeking a good nursing home for him, something his pension can’t quite pay for. A woman unexpectedly finding love in an old friendship. She is as strong as she is vulnerable, stoic as much as sensitive.

    In the semi-autobiographical, naturalistic world of Hansen-Love there’s barely any drama propelling the narrative. Tension emerges from a door that a man suffering from neurodegenerative disease is unable to open, the inability to think that the man of ideas is fated to get afflicted with or a sudden rush of tears forced by the overwhelming burden of sadness that can embarrass you in front of a stranger.

    Hansen-Love builds One Fine Morning on the quotidian, the daily rhythms of any woman’s life in any corner of the world. It’s in the commonplace that one feels an uncommon affinity with Sandra. So many of us, like her, are whirling at that point in our lives when we are caught between twin, antithetical pulls—aging parents are the cause of our anxieties, fears and deepest of insecurities, and the young have demands of their own even while signaling hope for the future. Then there is the soothing, healing interlude of love that is also interrupted by strife of its own. In trying to keep up with the relationships closest to her, lies Sandra’s struggle to find space, time, and allegiance for her own self. One Fine Morning dwells a lot on all of it without saying much at all.

    The biggest takeaway from the film is about how there can be no strict compartments in life. At any point in time, it is all about the compatibility of the incompatibles, simultaneity of the irreconcilables, and having the good and bad in equal measure. Happiness can unexpectedly break in through the clouds of gloom. Loss and longing, grief and desire can go hand in hand. The finality of mortality will co-exist with an essential continuity that underlines the circle of life.

    Hansen-Love and Seydoux collaborate in great harmony while plumbing the emotional depths of a seemingly unremarkable situation in life and take the audience along on a most affecting ride. I was fortunate to have caught One Fine Morning in the company of Hansen-Love and Seydoux when it opened at Cannes.

    Hansen-Love spoke about how the film tells the story of “mourning for someone who is still alive”, a man getting deserted by his mind, disappearing as a soul but still “prisoner of his physical state”. Sandra must let go, overcome the guilt of abandoning all that’s dire in the most compelling bond
    of her life, and free herself to come alive for herself. In a nutshell, One Fine Morning is a journey into the heart of these inexpressible feelings.

    French cinema has had an eventful 2022. For the Oscars, the country would have had to pick from, among others, Hansen-Love’s labour of love, veteran Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon, a sultry love story in the times of COVID and political turbulence, and Saint Omer, documentary filmmaker Alice Diop’s harrowing first feature about the trial of an immigrant mother accused of killing her child. That’s how you define the embarrassment of riches in cinema.

  • Acclaimed Iranian film ‘No Bears’ opens with its director Jafar Panahi behind bars

    By Associated Press

    NEW YORK: After being arrested for creating antigovernment propaganda in 2010, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was banned from making films for 20 years. Since then, he’s made five widely acclaimed features.

    His latest, “No Bears,” opened in New York on December 23 awhile Panahi is in prison. It will open in Los Angeles on January 10 before rolling out nationally.

    In July, Panahi went to the Tehran prosecutor’s office to inquire about the arrest of Mohammad Rasoulof, a filmmaker detained in the government’s crackdown on protests. Panahi himself was arrested and, on a decade-old charge, sentenced to six years in jail.

    ALSO READ | Iran morality police status unclear after ‘closure’ comment

    Panahi’s films, made in Iran without government approval, are sly feats of artistic resistance. He plays himself in meta self-portraitures that clandestinely capture the mechanics of Iranian society with a humanity both playful and devastating. Panahi made “This is Not a Film” in his apartment. “Taxi” was shot almost entirely inside a car, with a smiling Panahi playing the driver and picking up passengers along the way.

    In “No Bears,” Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself while making a film in a rural town along the Iran-Turkey border. It’s one of the most acclaimed films of the year. The New York Times and The Associated Press named it one of the top 10 films of the year. Film critic Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times called “No Bears” 2022’s best movie.

    “No Bears” is landing at a time when the Iranian film community is increasingly ensnarled in a harsh government crackdown. A week after “No Bears” premiered at the Venice Film Festival, with Panahi already behind bars, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died while being held by Iran’s morality police. Her death sparked three months of women-led protests, still ongoing, that have rocked Iran’s theocracy.

    More than 500 protesters have been killed in the crackdown since Sept. 17, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran. More than 18,200 people have been detained.

    In December, the prominent Iranian actress Taraneh Alidoosti, star of Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning “The Salesman,” was arrested after posting an Instagram message expressing solidarity with a man recently executed for crimes allegedly committed during the protests.

    In the outcry that followed Alidoosti’s arrest, Farhadi — the director of “A Separation” and “A Hero” — called for Alidoosti’s release “alongside that of my other fellow cineastes Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof and all the other less-known prisoners whose only crime is the attempt for a better life.”

    “If showing such support is a crime, then tens of millions of people of this land are criminals,” Farhadi wrote on Instagram.

    Panahi’s absence has been acutely felt on the world’s top movie stages. At Venice, where “No Bears” was given a special jury prize, a red-carpet walkout was staged at the film’s premiere. Festival director Alberto Barbera and jury president Julianne Moore were among the throngs silently protesting the imprisonment of Panahi and other filmmakers.

    “No Bears” will also again test a long-criticized Academy Awards policy. Submissions for the Oscars’ best international film category are made only by a country’s government. Critics have said that allows authoritative regimes to dictate which films compete for the sought-after prize.

    ALSO READ | Two dozen young Iranians risk being hanged to death over protests

    Arthouse distributors Sideshow and Janus Films, which helped lead Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Japanese drama “Drive My Car” to four Oscar nominations a year ago, acquired “No Bears” with the hope that its merit and Panahi’s cause would outshine that restriction.

    “He puts himself at risk every time he does something like this,” says Jonathan Sehring, Sideshow founder and a veteran independent film executive. “When you have regimes that won’t even let a filmmaker make a movie and in spite of it they do, it’s inspiring.”

    “We knew it wasn’t going to be the Iranian submission, obviously,” adds Sehring. “But we wanted to position Jafar as a potential best director, best screenplay, a number of different categories. And we also believe the film can work theatrically.”

    This image released by Sideshow and Janus Films shows filmmaker Jafar Panahi during the filming of ‘No Bears’. (Photo | AP)

    The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences declined to comment on possible reforms to the international film category. Among the 15 shortlisted films for the award announced recently was the Danish entry “Holy Spider,” set in Iran. After Iranian authorities declined to authorize it, director Ali Abbasi shot the film, based on real-life serial killings, in Jordan.

    In it, Panahi rents an apartment from which he, with a fitful internet signal, directs a film with the help of assistants. Their handing off cameras and memory cards gives, perhaps, an illuminating window into how Panahi has worked under government restrictions. In “No Bears,” he comes under increasing pressure from village authorities who believe he’s accidentally captured a compromising image.

    “It’s not easy to make a movie to begin with, but to make it secretly is very difficult, especially in Iran where a totalitarian government has such tight control over the country and spies everywhere,” says Iranian film scholar and documentarian Jamsheed Akrami. “It’s really a triumph. I can’t compare him with any other filmmaker.”

    In one of the film’s most moving scenes, Panahi stands along the border at night. Gazing at the lights in the distance, he contemplates crossing it — a life in exile that Panahi in real life steadfastly refused to ever adopt.

    Some aspects of the film are incredibly close to reality. Parts of “No Bears” were shot in Turkey just like the film within the film. In Turkey, an Iranian couple (played by Mina Kavani and Bakhiyar Panjeei) are trying to obtain stolen passports to reach Europe.

    Kavani herself has been living in exile for the last seven years. She starred in Sepideh Farsi’s 2014 romance “Red Rose.” When nudity in the film led to media harassment, Kavani chose to live in Paris. Kavani was struck by the profound irony of Panahi directing her by video chat from over the border.

    “This is the genius of his art. The idea that we were both in exile but on a different side was magic,” says Kavani. “He was the first person that talked about that, what’s happening to exiled Iranian people outside of Iran. This is very interesting to me, that he is in exile in his own country, but he’s talking about those who left his country.”

    Many of Panahi’s colleagues imagine that even in his jail cell, Panahi is probably thinking through his next film — whether he ever gets to make it or not. When “No Bears” played at the New York Film Festival, Kavani read a statement from Panahi.

    “The history of Iranian cinema witnesses the constant and active presence of independent directors who have struggled to push back censorship and to ensure the survival of this art,” it said. “While on this path, some were banned from making films, others were forced into exile or reduced to isolation. And yet, the hope of creating again is a reason for existence. No matter where, when, or under what circumstances, an independent filmmaker is either creating or thinking.

    NEW YORK: After being arrested for creating antigovernment propaganda in 2010, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was banned from making films for 20 years. Since then, he’s made five widely acclaimed features.

    His latest, “No Bears,” opened in New York on December 23 awhile Panahi is in prison. It will open in Los Angeles on January 10 before rolling out nationally.

    In July, Panahi went to the Tehran prosecutor’s office to inquire about the arrest of Mohammad Rasoulof, a filmmaker detained in the government’s crackdown on protests. Panahi himself was arrested and, on a decade-old charge, sentenced to six years in jail.

    ALSO READ | Iran morality police status unclear after ‘closure’ comment

    Panahi’s films, made in Iran without government approval, are sly feats of artistic resistance. He plays himself in meta self-portraitures that clandestinely capture the mechanics of Iranian society with a humanity both playful and devastating. Panahi made “This is Not a Film” in his apartment. “Taxi” was shot almost entirely inside a car, with a smiling Panahi playing the driver and picking up passengers along the way.

    In “No Bears,” Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself while making a film in a rural town along the Iran-Turkey border. It’s one of the most acclaimed films of the year. The New York Times and The Associated Press named it one of the top 10 films of the year. Film critic Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times called “No Bears” 2022’s best movie.

    “No Bears” is landing at a time when the Iranian film community is increasingly ensnarled in a harsh government crackdown. A week after “No Bears” premiered at the Venice Film Festival, with Panahi already behind bars, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died while being held by Iran’s morality police. Her death sparked three months of women-led protests, still ongoing, that have rocked Iran’s theocracy.

    More than 500 protesters have been killed in the crackdown since Sept. 17, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran. More than 18,200 people have been detained.

    In December, the prominent Iranian actress Taraneh Alidoosti, star of Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning “The Salesman,” was arrested after posting an Instagram message expressing solidarity with a man recently executed for crimes allegedly committed during the protests.

    In the outcry that followed Alidoosti’s arrest, Farhadi — the director of “A Separation” and “A Hero” — called for Alidoosti’s release “alongside that of my other fellow cineastes Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof and all the other less-known prisoners whose only crime is the attempt for a better life.”

    “If showing such support is a crime, then tens of millions of people of this land are criminals,” Farhadi wrote on Instagram.

    Panahi’s absence has been acutely felt on the world’s top movie stages. At Venice, where “No Bears” was given a special jury prize, a red-carpet walkout was staged at the film’s premiere. Festival director Alberto Barbera and jury president Julianne Moore were among the throngs silently protesting the imprisonment of Panahi and other filmmakers.

    “No Bears” will also again test a long-criticized Academy Awards policy. Submissions for the Oscars’ best international film category are made only by a country’s government. Critics have said that allows authoritative regimes to dictate which films compete for the sought-after prize.

    ALSO READ | Two dozen young Iranians risk being hanged to death over protests

    Arthouse distributors Sideshow and Janus Films, which helped lead Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Japanese drama “Drive My Car” to four Oscar nominations a year ago, acquired “No Bears” with the hope that its merit and Panahi’s cause would outshine that restriction.

    “He puts himself at risk every time he does something like this,” says Jonathan Sehring, Sideshow founder and a veteran independent film executive. “When you have regimes that won’t even let a filmmaker make a movie and in spite of it they do, it’s inspiring.”

    “We knew it wasn’t going to be the Iranian submission, obviously,” adds Sehring. “But we wanted to position Jafar as a potential best director, best screenplay, a number of different categories. And we also believe the film can work theatrically.”

    This image released by Sideshow and Janus Films shows filmmaker Jafar Panahi during the filming of ‘No Bears’. (Photo | AP)

    The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences declined to comment on possible reforms to the international film category. Among the 15 shortlisted films for the award announced recently was the Danish entry “Holy Spider,” set in Iran. After Iranian authorities declined to authorize it, director Ali Abbasi shot the film, based on real-life serial killings, in Jordan.

    In it, Panahi rents an apartment from which he, with a fitful internet signal, directs a film with the help of assistants. Their handing off cameras and memory cards gives, perhaps, an illuminating window into how Panahi has worked under government restrictions. In “No Bears,” he comes under increasing pressure from village authorities who believe he’s accidentally captured a compromising image.

    “It’s not easy to make a movie to begin with, but to make it secretly is very difficult, especially in Iran where a totalitarian government has such tight control over the country and spies everywhere,” says Iranian film scholar and documentarian Jamsheed Akrami. “It’s really a triumph. I can’t compare him with any other filmmaker.”

    In one of the film’s most moving scenes, Panahi stands along the border at night. Gazing at the lights in the distance, he contemplates crossing it — a life in exile that Panahi in real life steadfastly refused to ever adopt.

    Some aspects of the film are incredibly close to reality. Parts of “No Bears” were shot in Turkey just like the film within the film. In Turkey, an Iranian couple (played by Mina Kavani and Bakhiyar Panjeei) are trying to obtain stolen passports to reach Europe.

    Kavani herself has been living in exile for the last seven years. She starred in Sepideh Farsi’s 2014 romance “Red Rose.” When nudity in the film led to media harassment, Kavani chose to live in Paris. Kavani was struck by the profound irony of Panahi directing her by video chat from over the border.

    “This is the genius of his art. The idea that we were both in exile but on a different side was magic,” says Kavani. “He was the first person that talked about that, what’s happening to exiled Iranian people outside of Iran. This is very interesting to me, that he is in exile in his own country, but he’s talking about those who left his country.”

    Many of Panahi’s colleagues imagine that even in his jail cell, Panahi is probably thinking through his next film — whether he ever gets to make it or not. When “No Bears” played at the New York Film Festival, Kavani read a statement from Panahi.

    “The history of Iranian cinema witnesses the constant and active presence of independent directors who have struggled to push back censorship and to ensure the survival of this art,” it said. “While on this path, some were banned from making films, others were forced into exile or reduced to isolation. And yet, the hope of creating again is a reason for existence. No matter where, when, or under what circumstances, an independent filmmaker is either creating or thinking.

  • Do look up: Shaunak Sen on capturing Delhi’s dystopia in Sundance winner ‘All That Breathes’

    By PTI

    MUMBAI: Filmmaker Shaunak Sen says his documentary “All That Breathes”, which recently won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, began as an idea to capture the ecological doom that envelopes India’s capital through the eyes of its two modest protagonists.

    The 90-minute documentary follows two siblings, Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who have devoted their lives to rescue and treat injured birds, especially the Black Kites.

    Working out of their derelict basement in Wazirabad, the Delhi brothers become the central focus of the film and their story zooms out to document a larger snapshot of the city, where the air is toxic and the ground is on a slowburn of social turmoil.

    In a telephonic interview with PTI from New York, Sen said his idea was to simply “disassemble Delhi”.

    “I knew in the vaguest and most abstract sense that we wanted to do something around the visual texture of our lives in Delhi- the grey, monotoned, hazy lamina that laminates the city.

    “Every time you look up, you see these tiny dots peppering the sky, gliding lazily across, which are the black Kites,” he said.

    Sen, an alumnus of Jamia Millia Islamia University and JNU, also had the awareness that people in Delhi breathe “noxious air” and the environment enveloping its citizens has slowly become hostile to their welfare.

    “There was this strong sense that the very engines of the world were going awry. We were also deeply interested in thinking of non-human life in the city and how climate change affects them as well. I wanted to make something that the audience would watch and then look up at the sky.

    “We started looking for people who shared a profound relationship with the sky and the birds in particular. That’s when we chanced upon the work of the brothers and got to know how they treated Kites.”

    The brothers, who claim to treat 8-10 birds a day, started their journey two decades ago, and eventually set up their non-profit organisation, Wildlife Rescue, treating birds with clipped wings and wounds.

    With a shooting unit comprising four members each in the direction and camera team, Sen filmed the brothers “relentlessly” for over two years, documenting their “infrastructural hassle, emotional tussle, and private challenges”.

    By the end of the shoot, Sen had roughly 150 hours of footage and an intimate portrait of their lives and the city.

    The 34-year-old director grew up in Delhi’s defence colony and now resides in Chittaranjan Park.

    “All That Breathes” is his second directorial after the acclaimed 2016 “Cities of Sleep”, which was about the homeless scouting for places to sleep in the capital.

    “My directorial team and I have been embedded in the city. We are deeply engaged and in love but also equally disquieted by the city.

    “It is chaotic, there is a dizzyingly delirious, frenzied rush of the city that can be aggressive, in turns tender, in turns unkind, in turns myriad. In my previous film, I looked at Delhi through the lens of sleep.

    “In this film, the idea was to disassemble Delhi through the lens of birdlife, the sky. And when you talk about the sky, you talk about the smoke and the ground where it is coming from. Hopefully, it gives a sideways optic or prism through which one attends to the city.”

    For Sen, the story of Saud and Shehzad, right down to their house, was “cinematically riveting”.

    Two brothers working in a tiny basement, surrounded by heavy metal cutting machines and industrial decay, tending to “vulnerable birds”, he said.

    “The salient bipolarity of the place was truly cinematic. We just kept shooting for two and a half years and slowly a form emerged where we could talk about both these characters and alongside them- the broader snapshots of the city itself.”

    Their process of treating Kites, aided by donations and by their employee Salik, gave Sen the proverbial David vs Goliath arc.

    These men are “soldiering on indefatigably”, in the direst of conditions, against all odds, the filmmaker added.

    “Essentially, they are fighting against a problem that is enormous, which is in an almost apocalyptic way, birds falling out of the sky. Delhi does not get any more clichedly dystopic than that. It is literally those two or three people, in a tiny basement, dealing with that problem.

    “There is something inherently cruel and unbelievable about the situation and what they do is heroic. The idea was to follow the spine of what was happening with their everyday lives.”

    In her citation for Sundance, filmmaker juror Emilie Bujes had described “All That Breathes” as a “poetic film” which delivers an “urgent political story”.

    Many critics have also lauded Sen for not only capturing the man-animal relationship and the dreaded air pollution, but also the recent ground realities of the city, which witnessed the anti-CAA protests at the end of 2019 and early 2020 — through its protagonists.

    But Sen said the film never intended to be a “frontal snapshot of the social situation” of the city.

    “That was never its founding aspiration. However, when you are training your gaze firmly on your protagonists, different aspects of their lives come into the picture. I saw it in the form of leaks — how the outside world leaks into the inner sanctum of their lives. That’s how some of the reverberations of the outside microcosmic world came in.

    “There are different kinds of toxicities intertwined in the film, both the aerial ones and, of course, the ones of social turmoil and so on. But the film does not, in any frontal, direct way, go into that. That’s left by the way of insinuations or hints, where you get a texture that something is ominous or there is some kind of churning going on outside that leaves you with a sense of disquiet,” he concluded.