Interviews

Sergey Fetisov might have been just another footnote in human history had his memoir The Story of Roman not fallen into the creative hands of writer-director Peeter Rebane and writer-star Tom Prior (The Theory of Everything). His chronicle of serving in the Russian military in Estonia during the height of the 1970s Cold War and falling into a love triangle with fighter pilot Roman Medveyev (Oleg Zagorodnii) and best friend Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya) serves as the backdrop to a provocative study of love, self-acceptance, betrayal and social mores.

Jeffrey Schwarz, like most cinephiles, has a special love for the film Sunset Boulevard. While the award-winning documentarian thought he knew everything about Billy Wilder’s 1950 Hollywood masterpiece, which introduced the world to Norma Desmond, an aging actress brilliantly played by Golden Globe-winning Best Actress Gloria Swanson, he was surprised to discover a unique afterlife to the cinematic classic.

Oliver Stone’s latest project JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, is a documentary which explores the factual side of the events he dramatized in JFK (1991), which earned him a Golden Globe exactly 30 years ago. JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, narrated by Donald Sutherland and Whoopi Goldberg, premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on July 11, while JFK will be screened on the giant Plage screen.

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.

Joshua Coates directed, co-wrote and produced Ageless Love, a true love story about a Jewish couple, Yale Schwartz & Nina Lemisch, living in Philadelphia in the late 1960s. It’s an against-the-odds story of how their relationship began, she was a 38-year-old widow raising five children, and he, a 24-year-old college graduate.

When comic book writer Mark Millar sold his Millarworld publishing company to Netflix in 2017, the streamer was given access to an expansive library of potential new franchises. Included in the list of comic book properties was the much-loved superhero saga Jupiter’s Legacy, which first launched in 2013 and has now been turned into an original live-action television series with a cast that includes Leslie Bibb, Josh Duhamel, Ben Daniels and Matt Lanter.

With The County, director Grímur Hákonarson delves into an agricultural co-operative in rural Iceland and the mafia-like tactics it uses to keep farmers in their grip. When dairy farmer Inga’s husband has a car accident, she discovers that her husband has worked as an informer for the co-op making sure that they keep the monopoly in the county.

Justin McConnell’s Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business is a film about the harsh realities of indie filmmaking as we follow McConnell’s trials and tribulations while he endeavors to get his project greenlit through a five-year process. Navigating the current film business is more difficult now than ever before: rapidly changing technology and an overcrowded marketplace have led to an industry in which anyone can make a film, but few can make a living.

On March 9, 1997, Christopher George Latore Wallace, better known by his stage name the Notorious B. I.

Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal is about a heavy metal drummer who loses his sense of hearing. As the audience follows the character Ruben, played by Riz Ahmed, on his journey from becoming deaf to finding himself as a deaf man, the task of the editor Mikkel E.