The official blog of Laemmle Theatres
Dr. Alisa Wolf of Actors for Autism will introduce the 5:10 PM screening of BEST KEPT SECRETat the Playhouse on Saturday, September 7.
The filmmakers will participate in a Q&A after the 5:10 PM screening on Sunday, September 8. The Q&A will be moderated by Leigh Ann Tipton of the SEARCH Family Resource Center.
Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras is familiar to Laemmle audiences from her films My Country, My Country (an Oscar nominee) and The Oath. She and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald are the people who facilitated former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leak about the full extent of U.S. government surveillance. As detailed in the last weekend’s New York Times Magazine cover story about her, she’s now making a film on the same subject, but after years of intense harassment at airports (even before connecting with Snowden the government placed her on the watch list known as Secondary Security Selection), she has relocated to Berlin to protect her material from seizure. The measures she takes to protect herself and her work from surveillance is just one of the stunning and chilling things revealed in the article.
When asked by the Times reporter why he chose to contact Poitras and give her and Greenwald all of his documents (thus far they have only released a small portion of them), Snowden said “she had demonstrated the courage, personal experience and skill needed to handle what is probably the most dangerous assignment any journalist can be given — reporting on the secret misdeeds of the most powerful government in the world — making her an obvious choice.”
KPFK’s Sonali Kolhatkar interviewed MORE THAN HONEY filmmaker Markus Imhoof this morning on her program Uprising! You can listen here.
Posted on the L.A. Times website on July 24 by Alexandra Sandels and Ramin Mostaghim, a piece about the filmmaker of an acclaimed documentary we open at the Music Hall on August 2, THE GARDENER.
BEIRUT — Iran’s expatriate filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf is facing withering condemnation in his homeland for attending a film festival in Israel, the Islamic Republi’s archfoe.
The acclaimed director, considered a pioneer of moviemaking in Iran, traveled to the Jerusalem Film Festival this month to screen his latest work, “The Gardener,” which explores the conflict between two generations about the role of religion in society.
Javad Shamgdari, the head of Iran’s official cinema organization, penned a letter to the leadership of the Iranian cinema museum demanding the removal of all of the director’s awards and trophies.
“Makhmalbaf made his first 10 films in Iran using the money of the state-run organizations to learn cinema,” Shamgdari was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Mehr news agency. “Now he has fallen into the arms of the occupier, the murderous Zionist regime.”
Read the rest of the Times piece here.
Yesterday the Gray Lady published a short, potent rave review of NICKY’S FAMILY, calling in “enthralling.”
We’re very pleased to open NICKY’S FAMILY July 19. Today the L.A. Times published a piece about Sir Nicholas Winton, a very modest hero whose life-saving accomplishments went unacknowledged for decades: “Winton said he didn’t talk about his accomplishments because ‘there were more important things going on than to dwell in the past.'”
Beginning July 19 we’ll be screening NICKY’S FAMILY, the acclaimed documentary about Nicholas Winton, an Englishman who organized the rescue of 669 Czech and Slovak children just before the outbreak of World War II: He was a big part of what we now know as the Kindertransport. This hero is still alive and in May CNN marked the occasion of his 104th birthday by broadcasting this piece about him and the new film.
With government surveillance in the news, IFC Films’ release of DIRTY WARS could not be more timely. The documentary follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Mercenary Army, as he traces the rise of the Joint Special Operations Command, the most secret fighting force in U.S. history.
Reason.com just posted Scahill’s reactions to unfolding events.