Global Cinema

The historical path of Iranian cinema from the East India Company film studios in India where the very first Iranian films were made, to major European film festivals, has been long and winding and indicative of the social and cultural history of Iran. Talking about Iranian cinema at a press conference with the HFPA, director Asghar Farhadi rightly pointed out, “There’s a great deal of talent in that region.

His amazing portrayal of Lieutenant-colonel Tawfiq Zacharya in Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit was one of the keys to the success of the Israeli film, which won three awards at the Un Certain Regard section in the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. That led to winning the Best Actor at the European Film Awards and the Jerusalem Film Festival, among many others, in the same year.

In September, a sophisticated Arabic series debuted on Netflix. The Platform made big waves across the Arab world, not only because it was widely seen on the streaming platform, but because it debuted outside of the peak viewing period of Ramadan, something big-budget productions never do.

The French publication Madame Figaro called Gong Li the “Chinese Meryl Streep”. In 2006, she was voted as China’s “most beautiful person” in a poll by The Beijing News.

The hunched old man in an ill-fitting suit shuffles through what seems to be a receiving line of uniformed people. There are few words spoken as he shakes hands with some, pins a swastika medal on another, gently touches the shoulder of a woman, all with trembling hands, before disappearing into a bunker with the wife he has just married.

Born in Sweden as Noomi Noren, Swedish actress Noomi Rapace lived in Iceland with her mother and stepfather in a town of people mostly afflicted with Down’s Syndrome. She caught the acting bug when she got a nonspeaking role in an Icelandic film at age 7, and moved back to Sweden to start her acting career when she was 15.

Margarita Terekhova, also known as the muse of legendary director Andrei Tarkovsky, was one of the luminaries of Soviet cinema. In Tarkovsky ‘s 1975 Mirror, now considered his best work by some critics, she played two roles: the mother and wife of the protagonist, and he lauded her by for being ‘an ordinary genius actress.

In 2018, when Iceland’s most expensive television show Trapped was playing on British television, the Guardian described its star, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, this way: “He’s huge, he’s hairy – and he’s the hottest man in Iceland,” rhapsodizing that the show was ‘raging like a blizzard in BBC4’s primetime Saturday night slot. ’The show was a worldwide success.

Before the Iranian Revolution of 1979 when the Pahlavi dynasty and the Shah of Iran were overthrown and the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, Iran had a thriving film industry known as Film Farsi. These were films much like Bollywood, that mashed up several genres with melodramatic stories, musical numbers, and superhero-like leading men.

Nollywood, Nigeria’s film industry, is second only to Bollywood as a producer of films, putting out more than 2,000 of them a year. These days, it’s an $800 million business employing more than a million people, but just 30 years ago, in its fledgling state, it was churning out movies on the cheap, most of them shot within a week and generally for less than $25,000, with low production values and simplistic storylines.