Industry

Silent film star Vilma Bánky was born Vilma Koncsics on January 9, 1898, in Nagydorog, Hungary on the outskirts of Budapest. Her father was a police officer and her mother a stage actress.

By 1900, Western silent films were mostly a minute or so, and featured scenes of cattle roundups or staged incidents like stagecoach robberies or fights with Indians. Cripple Creek Barroom of 1898 was shot in a saloon and is an example of an ‘actuality film’, which uses footage of real events.

Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier is one of the most successful and renowned directors of our time. She won the Best Picture: Non-English Language Golden Globe for her 2010 film In A Better World (Haeven), and many other accolades while working on films and series such as Brothers, After the Wedding, Things We Lost in the Fire, Serena, and Bird Box.

For the first time, people once again gathered in person at the Italian Cultural Institute in Westwood, the façade of the building lit with the colors of the Ukrainian flag in support of the ongoing and tragic conflict. The occasion, however, was a celebratory one, to honor the two-time Oscar nominee and legendary maestro of cinematography Dante Spinotti and two of the three Italian nominees for this year’s Oscar: Enrico Casarosa, director of the animated film Luca and Massimo Cantini Parrini, costume designer of Cyrano.

If conventional dramatic biopics grapple consistently with the difficulties of condensing a full and rich life into a reasonable running time, so too do nonfiction films examining a specific person or even a social movement – in their case typically struggling with integrating that focused illumination into a broader portrait of the changing culture at large. Co-directed by Abel Sanchez and Andrés Alegria, A Song for Cesar brings a unique point of view to the life and legacy of labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, who in the 1960s worked tirelessly on a series of campaigns to improve the lives and livelihoods of exploited, overwhelmingly immigrant Mexican field laborers in the United States.

It’s time to restore and revise film history: Agnes Varda should get full credit as a co-founder and the only significant female member of the French New Wave. Most books about this innovative movement, whose official birth is considered to be in 1959, have singled out the quintet of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, and Claude Chabrol.

Sezim (Alina Turdumamatova) is a young woman in Kyrgyzstan with big dreams. She would like to go to university in Bishkek and move in with Aksana (Madina Talipbek) who left the village a while ago for an independent life in the city.

The fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal would be one of the key players of the 2022 awards season became obvious after the world premiere of The Lost Daughter at the 78th Venice Film Festival, where Gyllenhaal won the Golden Osella Award for Best Screenplay for the psychological drama which she both wrote and directed. Her feature directorial debut also brought Gyllenhaal, who is already a Golden Globe-winning actress, her first Golden Globe nomination for Best Director, along with numerous other accolades for Best Directing and Best Adapted Screenplay.

UPDATE- The cycle of honors around the 50th Anniversary of The Godfather will close in full regalia this weekend. On Saturday, October 29, at 7:30 PM,  Francis Ford Coppola’s classic film, winner of five Golden Globes, will screen for one night only, to the sound of Nino Rota’s score, played live by a 61-piece orchestra at the Dolby Theatre, 6801 Hollywood Blvd.

‘Below the line’ is an industry term for everyone working on a film who is neither a writer, director, producer or cast member. Despite what the term might indicate, these are not jobs that are less significant to the collaborative effort of making a TV or film production.