The central Asian republic of Kazakhstan plans to fight back against the damage done to its reputation by the box-office smash Borat by holding an international film festival.
The capital Astana will host the Eurasia film festival from Sept. 7 to Sept. 13.
Hollywood star Jack Nicholson has agreed to attend, festival director Gulnara Sarsenowa said, while Sean Penn, John Malkovich and Tommy Lee Jones have also been invited.
Films from Kazakhstan and the other central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will be competing for prizes. Around 50 films exhibited at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals will also be shown.
In the 2006 hit British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen played Borat, a boorish Kazah television reporter, a depiction that angered Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic which is five times the size of France and has vast oil and gas reserves.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit on Wednesday strongly condemned an Iranian documentary about the 1981 assassination of former president Anwar Sadat, calling such works "irresponsible."
"We condemn this film in the strongest possible terms," Abul Gheit told reporters in Cairo, two days after Egypt summoned Tehran's envoy in Cairo to lodge a formal protest over the airing of the film.
"We tell our brothers in Iran they must stop producing these works which reflect a lack of responsibility," the foreign minister said.
The Iranian film, entitled Assassination of a Pharaoh, says Sadat was killed for signing the 1978 Camp David Accords that led to a 1979 peace treaty with Israel, the first by an Arab country.
On Sunday, a Cairo daily reported that Sadat's family was considering legal action against the Iranian producers of the documentary which has already been shown on Iranian television.
Al-Masry al-Youm said then that the film, broadcast "in honor of the martyrs of the Islamic renaissance," deals with "the revolutionary assassination of the treacherous Egyptian president at the hands of the martyr Khaled Islambouli."
Islamic militant Islambouli was one of the soldiers who shot Sadat dead at a military parade in Cairo on October 6, 1981. He was hanged for the killing in 1982 and subsequently had a Tehran road named after him.
"The producers should have asked for the family's authorization before making the film," said Sadat's daughter, Roqeya. "Such slander will receive a strong response."
Diplomatic ties between Egypt and Iran were severed in 1980, a year after the Islamic revolution, in protest at Egypt's recognition of Israel, its hosting of the deposed shah and its support for Iraq during its 1980 to 1988 war with Iran.
Relations have recently warmed, with both countries signaling a willingness to restore ties.
Everybody knows Juliette Binoche the actor. Some may even know Binoche the painter, or the poet. But now, after about two years learning a new art form, we are to get Binoche the dancer.
"It's not easy you know. You try releasing the hips," she encouraged journalists last Friday. The actor was in London to talk about what promises to be a Binoche fall on London's South Bank arts complex with the premiere of her collaborative work In-I at the National Theatre, a retrospective of her films - from The English Patient to Chocolat to Hidden - at the BFI (British Film Institute), and an accompanying exhibition of her paintings and poems.
In-I is a collaboration with choreographer Akram Khan which also features sets by artist Anish Kapoor and music by composer Philip Sheppard, who is writing and producing the music for the Olympic handover ceremony in Beijing.
What the work is and what audiences will see is still something of a mystery and one that the four artists were yesterday keen to continue. It is not just a piece of dance, or just a piece of theatre, it is both of those and more, they said.
Binoche said they began with the question what is love, but said they may not be giving any answers. "You have to be patient, we're still on the road searching," she said
Learning to dance was all about breaking out of comfort zones, Binoche said. "If we get too much into habits, too much into doing what we know we can do, then there is no life."
While she has learned dance, Khan learned to play the guitar, something he may or may not do in In-I. He may also act and sing.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s