Maani Petgar‘s CINEMA CINEMA deals with the controversial and popular Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the making of SALAAM CINEMA. The filmmaker placed an ad in the paper, with the opening words: ‘Wanted: one hundred common people who want to become actors.’ Around five thousand people reacted and fought for a role. In the following eight days, Makhmalbaf filmed thousands of applicants. During the auditions he tried to find out why they would love to act and to which extremes they would go to achieve their aim. In CINEMA CINEMA Petgar shows how the filmmaker works, manipulates and brings about effects, but also how Makhmalbaf himself is manipulated.
Tag: AUSTRALIA
A rock and roll singer gets stranded in a small Australian town after losing her job in a band. She winds up in a trailer park only to encounter, by accident, the teenage daughter she deserted following her husband’s death.
Unconcerned with narrative constraints, the ‘plot’ of Hamlet X is both brief and almost incidental to James Clayden’s motives: a man is released from prison and moves into a deserted city building with a woman friend, where he reluctantly becomes involved with a production of Hamlet. Haunted by the uncertainty of his past, together with his guilt for exisiting, he becomes more and more like Shakespeare’s infamous Dane.
A group of children use a cabin as the meeting place where they gather to sing. When the owner of the place has financial difficulties and thinks of selling it, the friends will devise a way to earn money: they will dye the surrounding sheep in different colors and try to sell the wool as if it were a natural product.
Min is a young woman who loses her job, her boyfriend and her flat on the same day, throwing her life into chaos. Fortunately her best friend Jaz, comes to her rescue and finds her a new flat with a seemingly nice male student, as well as a new job. A boyfriend takes much longer though, and the two girls discuss life, love and sex throughout the film, as they try to make ends meet in inner-city Sydney in the mid-90s.
After an absence of years, Mara (15) moves into her hippy Dad’s shack in remote river country. Marooned in Harry’s world, Mara broods on her haughty artist mother who lives at the top of the valley. When Mara falls for Herringbone John, a tramp ‘waiting for death to come along and knock him on the head’, their encounter is a trip through the ecstasy and agony of romantic love. What Mara finds on the other side sets her free.
Geoff, a journalist in his mid 40s, returns to Australia from 15 years abroad, leaving behind him in the U.S. a failed marriage and three children. He meets Maureen, the girl he was in love with when he left Australia. She is married to an older man, George, who she loves but have no children. Maureen – who once fell pregnant but had an abortion – tells Geoff her husband is sterile and asks for him to impregnate her.