Iranian New Wave: 1962–79 at Melbourne International Film Festival

Dead End by Parviz Sayyad

Iranian Cinema Before the Revolution, 1925-1979, a landmark retrospective held last year at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, was an eye-opener that traced a national cinema still largely unknown to a wide international audience. Thanks to the availability of new restorations and rare archival film prints, the majority of which now banned in Iran, an immensely creative period was revisited in splendid detail, revealing the roots of a rich and visionary cinematic tradition. While the New York program featured over five decades of Iranian cinema encompassing the avant-garde and the popular, this selection for the Melbourne International Film Festival, curated by the original team behind the MoMA exhibition, focuses on works associated with Cinema-ye Motafavet, or the Iranian New Wave.

Agony & Ecstasy: Visual Arts on Screen

Picasso and H. G. Clouzot in the studio during the production of  Le mystère Picasso

Agonia ed estasi: le arti sullo schermo
Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Cine Lumiere, Cineteca di Bologna, January 2019
A season of films about artists at work and the process of creating art captured by a movie camera. Prelude to Artefiera 2019.

BOOKING
FULL PROGRAMME IN ITALIAN

Leaving the museum, gallery or the stage of performance behind, this selection of films goes a few steps back and captures the joy and angst of the creative process in which artists build, compose, propose or occasionally destroy. These films are both about the places in which art is made and the feelings put into that creation, films filled with visions which, in the words of John Berger, make one gasp – "gasp as one does before a revelation."

The programme is consisted of a prologue, two main parts and an epilogue.

Drifting Shadows: Masterpieces of Finnish Cinema

Antti Alanen and I have put together a programme celebrating Finnish film history. Drifting Shadows -- a title borrowed from a book by Peter von Bagh to whom this programme is dedicated -- features 17 titles, short and feature length, documentary and fiction, to be screened from newly restored DCPs or vintage prints (both 16 and 35mm) at Close-Up Film Centre in London, 18-30 January 2019. A selection of six titles will be screened at Edinburgh's Filmhouse in January and February 2019.

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Cinema in Finland got a flying start with a visit of the Lumière company in 1896, and in 1907 fiction film production was launched to great success, but for a long time Finnish cinema remained a treasure for domestic consumption only. Before the Kaurismäki phenomenon the best-known Finnish film was Erik Blomberg’s The White Reindeer, but there is much more to discover. This programme sheds light on one of the most overlooked Nordic national cinemas which is currently enjoying a boom in audience success, production volume, and versatility.