Industry

He won two Golden Globes for Best Foreign Film, in 2010 for The White Ribbon and in 2012 for Amour. The Austrian director, who is also fluent in French, shot many films in France and has won 10(!) prizes at the Cannes Festival, talks to HFPA-journalist Elisabeth Sereda about life, career and awards in his native language.

The crime. The mystery.

Who is Elena Ferrante? This has been one of the most asked questions in the “trivial pursuit” in literary circles and among her/his/their millions of readers in Italy and worldwide. Ferrante, the author of  “My Brilliant Friend” -- the quartet of novels based in Naples telling the story of a “girl friendship”  between the 1950s and the 2000s -- has become one the most famous pseudonyms ever in the history of publishing.

For the first time in film history, women have dominated the three most famous and the most important international film festivals in the world – Berlin, Cannes, and Venice – by earning their top awards. It’s impossible to predict whether this is the beginning of a new trend (although that is not likely), or a series of coincidences.

A contemporary of Golden Globe Nominee John Cassavetes (Faces, Shadows), arguably the father of the New American Cinema, Shirley Clark (1919-1997) is an equally seminal figure of bold and audacious indies who, due to gender and other biases, has remained an unsung hero. Early on, Clarke saw the limitations of experimental cinema and the narrow scope of exploring female subjectivity and sexual desire.

When she was only five years old in 1938, Sylvia La Torre won a singing contest. At seven years old, La Torre began her film career.

The death on October 2, 2021, of director of photography Halyna Hutchins, a victim of a gunshot while filming the western Rust, was much more than an accident that highlighted the danger of using firearms with ammunition on set. Losing Hutchins also brought attention to the fact that there’s a small number of women who are working in cinematography.

The history of cinema is marked by the rocky path that women had to hurdle to work in a profession beset, from its origins, by the infamous gender gap. The inclusion of women in opportunities beyond their appearances on the big screen has been late and slow in every aspect of the movie industry.

Not since the race film genre of movies that started around 1915 and continued till the 1950s was there another movement in cinema history where Black filmmakers made films with all-Black casts and crews primarily for Black audiences till the blaxploitation era of the early 1970s. The similarities in both movements abound.

The heyday of Film Noir was in the 1940s and 50s in the post-WWII period.  The films characterized by black and white photography, stylishly shot, voiceovers, flashbacks, mostly based on hard-boiled crime fiction depicted flawed characters that encompassed detectives, losers, grifters, femmes fatales.