VENICE, Italy: Julianne Moore led a flash-mob protest on the Venice red carpet on Friday in support of filmmakers detained around the world, as the festival premiered the new movie from imprisoned Iranian director Jafar Panahi.
Panahi, who won the top prize Golden Lion in Venice in 2000, was jailed in July along with two other filmmakers in the latest crackdown on Iranian civil society.
Moore, who is leading the jury at this year’s festival, was joined for the protest by dozens of other artists, including British director Sally Potter and last year’s Golden Lion winner, France’s Audrey Diwan.
They held posters that also highlighted the detention of Myanmar filmmaker Ma Aeint and Turkish producer Cigdem Mater.
Despite years of attempts to silence him, Panahi’s new film “No Bears” shows that he has lost none of his searing political critique and wry sense of humor.
The film is partly focused on Iranians in Turkey, trying desperately to emigrate to Europe.
But it also follows Panahi himself in a fictionalized version of his real life, as he struggles to make the film from across the border in Iran, which he was already banned from leaving.
One of the film’s stars, Mina Kavani, told reporters in Venice she was inspired by his focus, despite having to direct by phone and Internet.
“He was in such concentration, he had such perfectionism — as an actress, I couldn’t let myself get sentimental,” said Kavani, who lives in exile in France.
“All that counted for him was cinema. He just wanted to make his movie. I thought: ‘I know now why he’s Mr.Panahi.’“
In 2010, Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison for “propaganda against the system” following his support for anti-government protests.
As can often happen in Iran, the sentence was never carried out but hung over him — and was only enacted in July when he went to enquire about two other filmmakers, Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad, who had just been arrested.
Panahi and Rasoulof issued a defiant statement via the Venice organizers last week, vowing to continue making art.
“The history of Iranian cinema witnesses the constant and active presence of independent directors who have struggled to push back censorship and to ensure the survival of this art,” they wrote.
Panahi has won the top prizes in Venice (for 2000’s “The Circle“) and Berlin (2015’s “Taxi“), as well as best screenplay at Cannes (2018’s “Three Faces“) — but was unable to accept either of the last two prizes in person.
The crackdown on civil society has worsened even further under President Ebrahim Raisi, an ultra-conservative former judiciary chief who came to power last year.
Yet Iran’s independent filmmakers continue to punch above their weight, in spite of the pressure.
A second Iranian film is competing for the Golden Lion this week — “Beyond the Walls” by Vahid Jalivand — a grim look at Iran’s security state and those trapped within it.
Jalivand was cautious in his words at a press conference on Thursday, saying “a balance between the two sides” was needed in Iran today.
“In this movie the hero of the movie is a security official himself. We have unfortunately reached a perspective where it is totally bipolar,” he told reporters.
“If we can create the sense of brotherhood, dialogue will become much easier, there will be less violence. This is my true belief and I would still believe this even if I were living in Europe or the United States.”
Julianne Moore leads red carpet protest for jailed Iranian filmmaker
https://arab.news/y3amu
Julianne Moore leads red carpet protest for jailed Iranian filmmaker
- Panahi was jailed in July along with two other filmmakers in the latest crackdown on Iranian civil society
- Moore was joined for the protest by dozens of other artists, including British director Sally Potter and France's Audrey Diwan
Global gems go under the hammer
- International highlights from Sotheby’s ‘Origins II’ auction, which takes place Jan. 31 in Diriyah
Andy Warhol
‘Muhammad Ali’
Arguably the most famous name in pop art meets arguably the most famous sportsman of the 20th century in this set of four screen prints from 1978, created at the behest of US investment banker Richard Weisman. “I felt putting the series together was natural, in that two of the most popular leisure activities at the time were sports and art, yet to my knowledge they had no direct connection,” Weisman said in 2007. “Therefore I thought that having Andy do the series would inspire people who loved sport to come into galleries, maybe for the first time, and people who liked art would take their first look at a sports superstar.” Warhol travelled to Ali’s training camp to take Polaroids for his research, and was “arrested by the serene focus underlying Ali’s power — his contemplative stillness, his inward discipline,” the auction catalogue states.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
‘Untitled’
Basquiat “emerged from New York’s downtown scene to become one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century,” Sotheby’s says. The largely self-taught artist’s 1985 work, seen here, “stands as a vivid testament to (his) singular ability to transform drawing into a site of intellectual inquiry, cultural memory, and visceral self-expression.” Basquiat, who was of Caribbean and Puerto Rican heritage, “developed a visual language of extraordinary immediacy and intelligence, in which image and text collide with raw urgency,” the catalogue continues.
Camille Pissarro
‘Vue de Zevekote, Knokke’
The “Knokke” of the title is Knokke-sur-Mer, a Belgian seaside village, where the hugely influential French-Danish Impressionist stayed in the summer of 1894 and produced 14 paintings, including this one. The village, Sotheby’s says, appealed to Pissarro’s “enduring interest in provincial life.” In this work, “staccato brushstrokes, reminiscent of Pissarro’s paintings of the 1880s, coalesce with the earthy color palette of his later work. The resulting landscape, bathed in a sunlit glow, celebrates the quaint rural environments for which (he) is best known.”
David Hockney
‘5 May’
This iPad drawing comes from the celebrated English artist’s 2011 series “Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011,” which Sotheby’s describes as “one of the artist’s most vibrant and ambitious explorations of landscape, perception, and technological possibility.” Each image in the series documents “subtle shifts in color, light and atmosphere” on the same stretch of the Woldgate, “showing the landscape as something experienced over time rather than frozen in an instant.” The catalogue notes that spring has long been an inspiration for European artists, but says that “no artist has ever observed it so closely, with such fascinated and loving attention, nor recorded it in such detail as an evolving process.”
Zarina
‘Morning’
Sotheby’s describes Indian artist Zarina Hashmi — known by her first name — as “one of the most compelling figures in post-war international art — an artist whose spare, meditative works distilled the tumult of a peripatetic life into visual form.” She was born in Aligarh, British India, and “the tragedy of the 1947 Partition (shaped) a lifelong meditation on the nature of home as both physical place and spiritual concept.” This piece comes from a series of 36 woodcuts Zarina produced under the title “Home is a Foreign Place.”
George Condo
‘Untitled’
This 2016 oil-on-linen painting is the perfect example of what the US artist has called “psychological cubism,” which Sotheby’s defines as “a radical reconfiguration of the human figure that fractures identity into simultaneous emotional and perceptual states.” It’s a piece that “distills decades of inquiry into the mechanics of portraiture, drawing upon art-historical precedent while decisively asserting a contemporary idiom that is at once incisive and darkly humorous,” the catalogue notes, adding that the work is “searing with psychological tension and painterly bravura.”
