Hermès named a luxury handbag after her and she’s still dictating fashion do’s and don’t’s to “It” girls around the world. Now Egypt’s glamorous festival on the Red Sea pays homage to the late legend by presenting a selection of films that showcase her remarkable life and career.
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Photo by © Brigitte Lacombe, courtesy of the Marrakech Film Festival
Martin Scorsese to attend 20th anniversary edition of Marrakech Film Festival
The beloved Italian-American filmmaker will also be patron, looking over the 6th edition of the Atlas Workshops.
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Stylish should be his middle name: Luca Guadagnino to receive SIAE Andrea Purgatori prize in Venice
From his latest collaboration with Spanish luxury house Loewe, to his latest film which features everyone’s favorite girl Zendaya, the Italian-Algerian filmmaker and fashionista has always proven that cinema and fashion go hand in hand.
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"...I haven't completely lost hope" writes Amos Gitai about Israel, in Sunday's 'La Repubblica'
The beloved international filmmaker and artist, who spends his time between Haifa and Paris, has taken to writing op-eds in the international media, where he equates his country’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu to Machiavelli and draws parallels between Israel’s distant past with its possible undoing because of Bibi’s latest act.
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Photo by © Getty Images, courtesy of the DFI, used with permission.
Michael Winterbottom at Qumra 2023: "If you want to have a healthy film culture, you want directors who are making lots of films"
Qumra Master Michael Winterbottom is a critically acclaimed British filmmaker renowned for unconventional narratives and hard-hitting social commentary. In fact, what Winterbottom does counts as much in real life as it does on the big screen.
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Six questions with Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir
A personal favorite helmer, Jacir’s latest project ‘All Before You’ has just been accepted to participate in the upcoming Venice Film Festival’s Gap-Financing Market.
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Kaouther Ben Hania, in blue, flanked by the cast and crew of her latest film in Cannes
An open letter to Kaouther Ben Hania about her latest film 'Four Daughters'
For as long as I've been watching her work, the filmmaker has been reinventing cinema, her cinema, which knows no boundaries and sees no limits.
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John Malkovich talks 'Seneca', acting in the TikTok generation & shooting in Morocco, again
The American actor may have said something during the press conference about his good friend Julian Sands, also featured in the film Malkovich is promoting at this year's Berlinale, but during our interview the tragedy of the actor who has gone missing felt like a looming presence, unspoken and indescribable.
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An interview with Aamir Khan for 'Laal Singh Chaddha', the Indian Forrest Gump
"We have such a large and healthy audience of our own in India, the fact is that none of the filmmakers have really felt the need to reach out to a world audience," Aamir Khan told me in 2010, "and when I say really felt the need, I mean filmmakers in Argentina perhaps, or in France or Germany, different parts of the world, don't have such big and healthy audiences of their own and so they come from a situation where they really need to reach out to a world audience and an audience in the West."
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"The digital revolution has brought democracy to filmmaking": Spike Lee speaks
Thirty years after Lee's film 'Malcolm X' was the first ever international production to film in Mecca, the filmmaker returned to Saudi Arabia, to bring his film full circle and inspire film lovers in the Kingdom.
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"If only there was a Palestinian Superman": An interview with Sayed Kashua
Sayed Kashua is a Palestinian writer who pens his work in Hebrew and whose latest projects include a film helmed by an Israeli filmmaker and a TV series airing on Israeli kids TV -- but don't call the man a bridge-builder, not to his face anyway!
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"The language of cinema is universal": Damian Kocur's 'Bread and Salt' in Cairo
Before the film received one more award, this time at the Cairo International Film Festival, I sat down with the Polish filmmaker to talk cinema, inspiration and what constitutes the best soundtrack of all to him in a film.
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Photo by © Yani
Hany Abu-Assad talks 'Huda's Salon', Arab women audiences & the theme of betrayal
In his latest film, Palestinian auteur Hany Abu-Assad does what he does best -- tackles betrayal and draws us a story made in human shades of grey.
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A still from ‘Until Tomorrow’ which world premiered at Berlinale in 2022
Ali Asgari talks 'Until Tomorrow' and filmmaking in Iran
Don’t think of this film as your ordinary Western world garden variety torment, as Asgari's oeuvre usually involves two individuals dancing a dance of impossibilities with the authorities of Tehran, trying to navigate a world that makes one's humanity a challenge.
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Darren Aronofsky at El Gouna FF gives a masterclass in personal filmmaking
The American filmmaker talked about inspiration, meeting one's heroes and making personal films the audience wants to watch, at a great masterclass in Egypt. in 2021.
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Searching for Sarah, in ‘A Starry Sky Above the Roman Ghetto’ by Giulio Base
Magical: Giulio Base and his wondrous ‘A Starry Sky Above the Roman Ghetto’ hits the U.S.
I remember the very day I discovered Italian filmmaker and actor Giulio Base — on Twitter! His voice of reason seemed like such a breath of fresh air on a platform usually invaded by opinionated views that only wish to prove any wisdom wrong. I went about finding out more on this artist, the man behind the avatar “Il Banchiere Anarchico” (The Anarchic Banker) which was what his Twitter handle was at the time. The journey didn’t disappoint. Base is as cool a filmmaker as he is an actor but also as a man. And that perfect package is wrapped up in kindness, intelligence and generosity.
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A still from the short ‘Maya at 24’ by Lynne Sachs
"Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression" and why you cannot miss her MoMI retrospective
All the great filmmakers have been artists of the lens. If you think about Hitchcock, Truffaut, Wilder, Kazan, Visconti, Fellini and endless more that make up our collective cinematic heritage, they constructed their work like one long sequence of aesthetics — sight and sound.
Lynne Sachs is no exception.
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Julia Vysotskaya in a still from ‘Dear Comrades!, photo by Sasha Gusov, Courtesy of NEON
Watch 'Dear Comrades!'... and some Andrei Konchalovsky wisdom will be your gift in return
So, if I had to explain why Andrei Konchalovsky’s films appeal so deeply to me, what would I say? That his women characters are always the entree in his films and often his male roles seem like the parsley sprinkled around them to enhance the presentation. Embodied often by his real-life wife Julia Vysotskaya, women like Lyuda in ‘Dear Comrades!’ appeal to my sense of womanhood, to my inner strength but also on a very basic aesthetic level. Lyuda is elegant, in her clunky shoes and with her hungry, lean body, as are the men around her. First and foremost Konchalovsky is a true artist, always loyal to the visual — the most important aspect of the seventh art.
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Rufus Sewell photographed by James Van Alden, courtesy of CIFF
Rufus Sewell does his thing at this year’s Cairo International Film Festival: "I’m not nearly as rock and roll as I used to think..."
Since “virtual is the new black” as Cairo Industry Days Head Aliaa Zaky so perfectly pointed out in a Facebook post, I got to interview Rufus Sewell on Zoom while the actor was in Cairo — with the hustle and bustle of a film festival happening all around him. As a journalist who specializes in interviews, I have to say that I’ve never interviewed anyone like Sewell. Funny, insightful, but also ready to steer me in the right direction when I went wrong. While replaying it to write it out, I found the interview fascinating and heard myself not so much in the driver’s seat, as I’m accustomed to during a Q & A, but rather enjoying a passenger’s side ride into the life, love and career of one of the most charismatic actors of our time.
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Lesson in Sincerity: Sir Christopher Hampton receives Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Cairo International Film Festival
Oscar-winning writer Sir Christopher Hampton has the wonderfully modest aura about him. Despite being an awardee of one of the most coveted prizes in the world, a celebrated screenwriter and playwright, the perfect translator of the works of two of the most notable French authors of contemporary times, Hampton is humble.
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