All posts by Amir Ganjavie
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Cannes: With Frankie, Ira Sachs Invites Audiences To Find The Extraordinary In The Ordinary
Director Ira Sachs has found his greatest inspirations from cinema outside of the US. With filmmakers like Éric Rohmer, Yasujirō Ozu, and Abbas Kiarostami held...
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Cannes: In His Feature Debut, Ukrainian Director Nairman Aliev Seeks Out A Universal Story With Homeward
Armed with a master’s degree and memberships to the Ukranian and European Film Academies, Nairman Aliev now represents his native country Ukraine in the Un...
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Cannes: Xavier Dolan Discusses Matthias & Maxime and His Quest To Convey Honesty Through What Characters Say Between The Lines
Xavier Dolan is no stranger to the Cannes Film Festival. As the director of eight feature films (most of which have premiered at Cannes) by...
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Slow-Burn: Director Lee Chang-dong on Storyboarding, Shooting, Lighting, and Scoring Burning
Eight years after Poetry, Lee Chang-dong premiered Burning in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition section. Based on the short story “Barn Burning” by Japanese author...
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Cannes Film Festival 2018: Nandita Das’ Biopic Manto Examines Iconclast Writer Saadat Hasan Manto
Presented in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, Nandita Das’ biopic, Manto, follows the most tumultuous years in the life of Saadat Hasan Manto,...
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Zama: Director Lucrecia Martel Discusses Her Long-Awaited New Film
Continuing to explore her interest in lost souls, found elsewhere in her films The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2008), Lurcecia Martel’s new feature film Zama is...
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“Melancholy and Aggression”: In the Fade Examines Democracy’s Limitations and Human Capacity for Revenge
Fatih Akin’s Cannes hit In the Fade was recently shortlisted as one of nine finalists in the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. With a...
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Angels Wear White: Director Vivian Qu Discusses Her Hard-Hitting Drama And The Complexity Of Social Justice
Angels Wear White is the second work by Chinese writer-director Vivian Qu—a modern-day noir that tells the story of two young victims of rape. Although...
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The Great Invisible: With Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas Makes Serious Stabs at the Supernatural
Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper is an attempt to evaluate cinema’s potential to represent and reflect upon the invisible. For the French auteur, it’s a continuation...
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Upstaged by Injustice: The Salesman Is About More Than Its Titular Character, Says Actor Shahab Hosseini
Asghar Farhadi’s newest film The Salesman recently won prizes at Cannes for both Farhadi’s screenplay and for Shahab Hosseini’s lead performance. The film presents the familiar idea...
Summer 2019
Spring 2019
Winter 2019
Guide 2019
Summer 2018
Year in MovieMaker
Inside the Issue: Acting
Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker: Richard Dreyfuss
American Graffiti, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stand By Me, Mr. Holland’s Opus… even while reading like a what’s what of cinema, those titles are just a handful...
1Inside the Issue: Directing
Cold Piece of Work: Richard Linklater Braves Greenland Hurricanes for Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Richard Linklater’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette opens with the answer to its titular question. In an impressively executed overhead shot, the camera gazes down onto placid Antarctic waters as...
Inside the Issue: How To
How They Did It: The Farewell Writer-Director Lulu Wang Shares Secrets to Turning Your Life Story into a Memoir Movie
The week before production started on The Farewell—my sophomore feature about a young woman (Billi, played by Awkwafina) and her family’s attempts to keep their grandmother’s cancer diagnosis hidden...