AFI FEST

Shakespearian plays have been adapted for the screen time and time again.   “Othello”, “Hamlet”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Tempest”, the list goes on an on and the familiarity for a viewer with these stories is established before they ever enter the theatre.  “Coriolanus” is a lesser know, and lesser adapted, play Shakespeare wrote.  Well-known actor […]

This is most definitely a film, a wonderful, essential conjuring of something from nothing, a necessity for the film-maker, and the selfless defiance of a repressive regime. The Iranian government has banned director Jafar Panahi from film-making or from leaving the country for twenty years, and at the time of this film’s making, he was […]

In an alternate universe, a Turin Horse will become the name for a movie that turns out to have nothing to do with its title. Slow-cinema maestro Béla Tarr’s latest (last?) opens with a blank-screen voiceover relating the semi-apocryphal story of Nietzsche’s madness-inducing encounter with a mistreated carthorse, and declares that “of the horse, we […]

An exquisite salmagundi of moral grey shades, A Separation explicitly hands off judgment to the audience in the opening scene, as Simin and Nader sit before a judge and address directly to camera their cases for and against divorce. She wants to emigrate, to raise their daughter, Temeh, away from the difficulties and repressions of […]

Every year at AFI FEST there are films placed in the Special Screenings section of the program.  They are films with distribution in place, and will become available for the general public to see in the coming weeks or months.  Jeff, Who Lives At Home was a part of this special screening section and will […]