Advertising Age Books

Bread & Alley 1970 نان و کوچه

by faridb2000 (Category: Film & Animation)

http://astore.amazon.com/faridb2002-20″I believe the films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami are extraordinary.
Words cannot relate my feelings.
I suggest you see his films; and then you will see what I mean”- Akira Kurosawa -Abbas Kiarostami was born on June 22nd 1940 in Tehran, he was interested in the arts from an early age.
He won a painting competition at the age of eighteen, and left home to study at Tehran University’s Faculty of Fine Arts.
As a designer and illustrator, Kiarostami worked throughout the ’60s in advertising, making commercials, designing posters, creating credit titles for films, and illustrating children’s books.In 1969 Kiarostami helped to set up a filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults.
The department’s debut production was Kiarostami’s own first film, “Bread and Alley” (Naan va Koche.)The department would go on to become one of Iran’s most famous film studios, producing not only Kiarostami’s films, but also such modern Iranian classics as The Runner (Amir Naderi) and Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bahrab Beyzaii.)But it was not until the late ’80s that his films began to be shown outside Iran.
He received his first most important recognition with “Where is the Friend’s House?” (Khaneh Doost Kodjast?), winning the Pardo di bronzo at Locarno in 1987.
“Life Goes On” (Va Zendegi edameh darad) in 1992 (the first of Kiarostami’s films to be shown at the New York Film Festival) won the Rossellini Prize at Cannes, and Through the Olive Trees (Az Mian-e Derhtan-e Zeitoon) 1994 were the films that made Kiarostami’s reputation in the West.
In 1995 he was part of the jury at the Venice Film Festival and in 1996 he was honored with a retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.In 1997 he came to the Cannes Film Festival with “Taste of Cherry” (Taame Gilas), only to walk away with the grand prize, becoming the first Iranian director ever to win the Palme d’Or.
He was also awarded the Special Prize of the Jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1999 for “The Wind Will Carry Us”.
In 2000, at the request of the United Nations’ International Fund for Agricultural Development, he travelled to Uganda to make the documentary ABC Africa, his first film shot on digital video.
In 2002 he premiered his newest film, “Ten”, at Cannes.His latest film is “Shirin” , which is now being shown at Venice Film Festival ( August-September 2008.
) Women, are inspected closely watching the story of Khosrow and Shirin, a semi-mythic Persian romance of female self-sacrifice.
Three or four times Shirin’s travails reduce the entire audience to floods of tears; at other points, the biting of lips, fiddling with headscarves, and expressions of rapt attention tell a sub-verbal narrative of some power.
Kiarostami’s pretext for “Shirin” was a short 3-minute experiment he did with “Romeo & Juliet.” Today, Kiarostami is one of the masters of “cinema” , whose early works have rarely been seen; “Bread and Alley” is one of them.Kiarostami is also a noted photographer and poet.
A bilingual collection of more than 200 of his poems “Walking with the Wind” was recently published by Harvard University Press.for more on Kiarostamihttp://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/kiarostami.html

Somers Town (2008) Movie Trailer

by TheMoviePreviews (Category: Film & Animation)

http://www.CentralMovieNetwork.com/tmd.htmSomers Town (film)Somers Town is a 2008 film directed by Shane Meadows, written by Paul Fraser and produced by Barnaby Spurrier.
Starring Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello, Kate Dickie, Perry Benson, and Elisa Lasowski.Somers Town follows two teenage boys Tomo and Marek, adrift in an adult world, who develop a mutual trust and acceptance through an unlikely friendship.
Tomo runs away to London from a lonely, difficult life in the Midlands.
Through a chance encounter he meets Marek, a Polish immigrant living with his father in Somers Town, central London.
Unknown to his father, Marek begins hiding Tomo in his flat and the two boys go on little adventures, stealing clothes from a laundromat and earning money from an eccentric neighbour, Graham while sharing a growing obsession for Maria, the French waitress at their local café.The film is a black-and-white study of a social environment in London.
Filming took place entirely in and immediately around Phoenix Court, a low rise council property in Purchese street.It was originally conceived as a short film which began as a nine or ten-minute concept, with just a handful of pages, but they quickly realised it was growing into something larger.
Meadows deliberately avoided pinning a set length to it.The film was shown at the Berlin and Tribeca Film Festivals.
At Tribeca, stars Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello jointly shared the award for Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film.
It had its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival on 20 June 2008, where it won the Michael Powell Award, the festival’s highest award.Surprisingly, the film was produced by advertising agency Mother as a covert advertising campaign for their client, Eurostar, a European train service.
Jonah Bloom, a columnist from Advertising Age, writes,It’s a film from British director Shane Meadows that won best film at the Edinburgh and Berlin film festivals and the best-actor award at Tribeca, although it didn’t make it past the shortlist for the Titanium.
Mother made the film on behalf of client Eurostar, the train service that connects London to Paris and Brussels and has a terminal in St.
Pancras near the Somers Town estate.
It cost less than the average 30-second spot to make, is expected to be seen by millions without any media buy and tests as having a positive ROI in terms of prompting people to book train trips.
Yet even the most cynical viewer would never guess it was funded by a corporation.
This is the best incidence of art meeting commerce since Leo McGarry was induced to fall off the wagon by a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue Label in the “Bartlet for America” episode of “The West Wing.”en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somers_Town_(film)