Arecord 58 countries from four continents are vying for nominations in next year's best foreign-language film Oscar category, including first time entrants Iraq and Fiji, officials said.
Organizers of cinema's top awards unveiled the entrants for next year's Academy Awards' foreign movie section some three months ahead of the announcement of the nominations for the 78th annual Oscars.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had invited 91 countries to present a film for consideration for the 2006 Oscar for best foreign film and the winner will be unveiled at a star-studded show in Hollywood on March 5.
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Mobsters in the 1990 film Goodfellas have beaten a fear of heights in Vertigo and the great white shark of Jaws to help the Martin Scorsese film clench the mantle of greatest movie of all time in a survey of UK film experts. Goodfellas, which featured Ray Liotta, Robert de Niro and an Oscar winning supporting role from Joe Pesci, topped the list of 100 movies in a survey of film critics by Total Film.
Goodfellas will not appear on the billing in Iran as there won't be any liquor-swilling God-deniers on the Iranian silver screen any time soon -- nor drug takers, secularists, liberals, anarchists or feminists.
Thus ruled a committee of Islamic clerics, led by new hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which earlier this week banned foreign films -- specifically naming those elements of Western culture that were judged as affronts to the government's vision of Iran's Muslim culture.
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With the decision, Iranians felt one of the first cultural reversals of the opening to the outside world that they enjoyed under their former reformist president Mohammad Khatami.
And the ban, designed to wipe out what clerics call ``corrupt Western culture,'' is not going down well with many in Iran.
``It's not right to fight other cultures. Imposing censorship is not the logical way to resist Western culture, at any rate,'' said Ali Reza Raisian, head of the Iranian film directors association. ``If Westeners were to treat us the same way, we also would not be able to reach them through film with our messages and way of thinking.''
PHOTO: AP
The ban aims to distance the Persian state from the open cultural policies undertaken by Khatami that encouraged cultural coexistence and dialogue among civilizations. But many experts and officials say the ban will only cause Iranians to turn to the black market for western video tapes or to foreign satellite television broadcasts.
Meanwhile, stirred but not too shaken was the reaction of a British film industry mission to news that most of the next James Bond film will be shot in Prague and not its traditional site, Pinewood Studios, outside London.
It is the first time that the four decades old Bond series will be mostly shot on foreign soil. Landing most of the work on the next 007 blockbuster underlines Prague's credentials as a global movie centre, but it is sobering news for the depressed British screen industry.
Mike Newell had the backing of one of Hollywood's biggest studios and a budget he called "colossal," but the British director was continually fighting over money while filming the latest Harry Potter blockbuster. In a weekend interview to promote Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Newell said his experience was not unlike that on smaller movies where he felt there were never enough funds to get the job finished.
Child actress Dakota Fanning has signed on to star in the animated movie Coraline in which she will voice the main character, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The movie, to be directed by Henry Selick is based on the book by Neil Gaiman about a girl who discovers a door in her house that leads to an alternate version of her life.
Fanning, 11, is currently starring in Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story. She had her breakout role opposite Sean Penn in 2001's I Am Sam and went on to star with Denzel Washington in Man on Fire, Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds and Robert DeNiro in Hide and Seek.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby