And a Happy New Year to All

Yeah, I broke my new year's resolution early this year, like before Christmas. That's why I don't actually make them. But here I am breaking the silence as well to wish all a busy production schedule for 2011.

As regular readers know, I won't be ready to post a true ten-best list until something like March, when the Iras finally take place. But my editor at Jewish Week asked me for a year-end wrap-up for film, which is a first, and I obliged him with what I think is a pretty interesting overview.

I regret omitting a few items of interest from that piece. I should have mentioned Frederick Wiseman's graceful and surprisingly funny Boxing Gym, and I meant to add that the year's most important re-release was the new print of Shoah. (I had a truly bizarre interview with Claude Lanzmann, which can be read here.)

It was a year that ended with at least one piece of really terrible news, the imprisonment of Jafar Panahi. As many of you will know, Panahi was out on bail until last week when he was sentenced to six years imprisonment and a ban of 20 years on filmmaking and travel abroad. His crime is for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic." For more information on Panahi and others with the courage to oppose the Ahmedinejad regime, I recommend several websites:

The Green Voice of Freedom: http://en.irangreenvoice.com/
Tehran Avenue: http://www.tehranavenue.com/
Reporters Without Frontiers -- Iran Page: http://en.rsf.org/iran-press-freedom-violations-recounted-31-12-2009,33433.html
Article 19 -- Global Campaign for Free Expression: http://www.article19.org/index.html
Index on Censorship: http://www.indexonline.org/

I will be updating the blogroll and other links, and will include these for future use.

Hoping your new year is cheerier than Panahi's.

Not a Film Post (But an Amazing Facsimile)

Just want to pull your coat to a series of events taking place in New York City (yeah, I know, I'm too parochial by half, but that just happens to be where this program is set), an annual event celebrating New Literature from Europe. As regular readers of this blog know, one of my hobbyhorses is the dearth of literature in translation available in the US, Canada and the UK. (Sorry, I can't take on more of the globe than that.) This event, a series of panels, readings and other such literary doings, highlights the work of eight contemporary authors from the Old World. To quote the website:

In this year’s New Literature from Europe, eight cultural institutes have teamed up to present a series of discussions and readings featuring eight critically acclaimed European writers: Philippe Claudel (France), Kirmen Uribe (Spain), Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany), Gerhard Roth (Austria), Radka Denemarková (Czech Republic), Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), Gabriela Adameşteanu (Romania), and Antonia Arslan (Italy). Moderators will include distinguished writer André Aciman, chair of Comparative Literature and director of the Writers' Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center and Susan Bernofsky, Guest Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College (CUNY).

Well worth your time and interest.

Ah, the Joys of Free Wi-Fi

Here I am at the Hazleton (PA) Motor Lodge having given the first of two talks in a pair of synagogues in this town in the foothills of the Poconos. Tonight was about the insane diversity of the Jewish world and how it became so fragmented and complicated. I suspect those of you who are (still) reading this blog will have little interest in this subject, but tomorrow's talk, about Jewish aesthetics in the face of the seeming prohibition on graven images, might be more to your taste, particularly as I argue -- more than half-seriously -- that cinema is the Jewish art form par excellence. As I intimate in the talk, this is a notion that I have been playing with for a while, but would be reluctant to go to war over. I'll leave it for you readers to take up the cudgels right now. I'm going to sleep. I actually might get seven hours if I can fall asleep quickly.

Not Dead Quite Yet

No, I'm still around. In fact, tomorrow I leave for a weekend gig as a scholar-in-residence for two synagogues in the Poconos. And when I get back, I'll try and update this blog more regularly. After all, it's been nearly three years of posting, this one being the 320th, and it would be a shame to stop now. Right?

An Absolute Must

By far the best of this year's Rendezvous with French Cinema was Stephane Brize's Mademoiselle Chambon. When it played the Walter Reade, it didn't have a distributor, but that has been fixed and the film opened Friday in New York at the Lincoln Plaza and the Cinema Village. I can honestly say that this is one film you really must see this summer. Here's what I said when it played the WRT:

Mademoiselle Chambon, by Stéphane Brizé, is even better, a warm and intelligent drama about a 40-something husband who becomes involved with his son's grade-school teacher. Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain are charming as the mismatched couple, and Brizé handles the material with a minimum of melodrama so that the complexities of the emotions stand on their own. The result is quite a lovely and nuanced film and one that I hope will find a distributor pronto.

Skip the latest Bruckheimer rubbish and Sex and the Shitty 2. Go see this instead.

Panahi Released, For Now

Jafar Panahi was released on bail about a half-hour ago. Apparently, the turning point was his decision to go on a hunger strike. For more information, go here.

It is unclear what happens now, but for the moment, Panahi is out of prison.

Meanwhile, in Cannes

Nice to see Apichatpong Weerasethakul winning the Palme d'Or. I've been duly impressed by his previous work and am eger to see the new film. Plebs like me don't get to Cannes -- I'm too old to sleep on the beach and too happily married to find a starlet to shack up with -- but my friend and fellow Ira voter Michael Giltz has been covering the festival for several years, and his insights and interventions are always worthwhile. This time, he's been traipsing around the Riviera for the Huffington Post, and you can find his film-by-film report here.