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Qatar Tribune
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Qatar Tribune
Media City Qatar, RCD Media host masterclasses with Oscar-winning filmmaker
Tribune News Network Doha Media City Qatar supported a sold-out masterclass organised by RCD Media, one of its licensed companies. The two-day event brought acclaimed French-Iranian filmmaker and two-time Academy Award winner Asghar Farhadi to Qatar. Held on May 27 and 28, the masterclass welcomed 60 attendees from across the country's creative and filmmaking community. Farhadi, an Academy Award winner whose films have also earned the Golden Bear in Berlin and the Grand Prix at Cannes, is internationally known for A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016). He is widely regarded for his ability to craft emotionally layered stories that explore moral conflict and social complexity. His presence in Qatar marks a significant moment for the local film scene, offering emerging talent direct insight into the craft of one of the most influential contemporary directors. The masterclass reflects Media City Qatar's ongoing commitment to supporting the next generation of content creators and emerging talent, in alignment with its mandate to advance the country's production sector and creative economy.
Time Out
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Woman and Child
Iranian cinema is your go-to for knotty, complex morality tales. Small missteps are made, a series of seemingly inconsequential events leads to one big, defining one – and the fallout leaves characters trying to navigate the awful repercussions often made worse by the country's suffocating social and religious codes. A gun goes missing in Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig; a handbag is stolen in Asghar Farhadi's A Hero. Torment and tragedies ensue. In Saeed Roustayi's Woman and Child, a carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama that follows a Tehran family's slow disintegration, it's the supposedly joyous occasion of a marriage proposal that set the wheels of fate in motion. Hard-working nurse Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar, magnetic) is a 40-year-old widow with two kids: teenage tearaway Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi) and all-round poppet Neda (Arshida Dorostkar). She's dating ambulance driver Hamid (A Separation 's Payman Maadi), an older man whose flirtations suddenly turn serious. He pops the question, but there's an immediate string attached: will she pretend she's childless when his strict rural parents come to visit them at her house? For anyone unfamiliar with the strictures and mores of Iranian society, the answer would be 'hell no'. But as Roustayi shows in a movie that's sympathetic to its female protagonist almost to a fault, it's nothing like that simple. As a single mum, Hamid might be her best bet – even if he immediately scans as something of a rogue and she's happy to tick along without formalising things. So she cedes to his request, dutifully taking down the portraits of her kids on her apartment walls, and endures the pretence with grace as her own mother (Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee) sits in. And so the first domino falls in a series of connected events that will leave her broken up and grief-stricken. She's pushed her kids onto her reluctant father-in-law for the visit. He's a wheezing misanthrope played with raw unlikeability by Hassan Pourshirazi, and perhaps inevitably, something terrible happens. For Mahnaz, sadness and regret are not enough. She sets off on a quest for justice for those she blames for the tragedy: neglectful granddad; the teacher she believes had victimised her son; Hamid, who, to compound matters, had decided that he wanted to marry her sister anyway. The outstanding actress toggles from open-hearted to incandescent with total believability The storytelling is enthralling but not flawless. It's not entirely clear why Mahnaz's sister would fall for the slimy imprecations of a man who has just ditched her own sibling, especially when their formidable, matter-of-fact mother is enraged by the idea. And an overheated final stretch, in which Mahnaz goes full black widow, overheats a film that works best when it's simmering slowly. The question of her own responsibility in what transpired is glossed over. But Woman and Child, the third part in Roustayi's trilogy about Iranian women (2016's Life and a Day, 2022's Leila's Brothers), manages to be both incredibly tense and deeply stirring in its depiction of a woman coping with unimaginable pain. And in the outstanding Izadyar, who toggles from open-hearted to incandescent with total believability, he's found the perfect collaborator to bring down the curtain on his feminist triptych.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
French Stars Unite for Asghar Farhadi's ‘Parallel Tales'
Two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Salesman) has cast a who's who of French stars for his next feature, Parallel Tales. Gallic A-listers Isabelle Huppert (Elle), Virginie Efira (Benedetta), Vincent Cassel (Black Swan) and Pierre Niney (The Count of Monte-Cristo) are set to headline the French-language feature, alongside Adam Bessa, an up-and-comer nominated for a French César as best newcomer this year for his turn in Jonathan Millet's Ghost Trail. The film will also feature a cameo from French film legend Catherine Deneuve. More from The Hollywood Reporter Bloom Twins, Shells and Trance Wax Sign With Armada Music Publishing 'Ne Zha 2' Is the World's Biggest Animated Film Ever. So, We Just Had to Visit Its Beijing Poster Exhibition Auteur Zhu Xin Is Still in His 20s, But Is a Beijing Fest "Filmmaker in Focus" - and He Has Boundless Ideas Parallel Tales is set to begin shooting in Paris this fall, marking Farhadi's first French feature since 2013's The Past starring Tahar Rahim and Berenice Bejo. The film is being set up as a French-Italian-Belgian coproduction between Alexandre Mallet-Guy's Memento Production, Andrea Occhipinti's Lucky Red, and André Logie's Panache Productions and Gaëtan David's La Compagnie Cinématographique. U.S. group Anonymous Content will also co-produce. Mallet-Guy and Asghar Farhadi will produce together with David Levine. Executive producer credits include Carole Baraton, Yohann Comte, Pierre Mazars, Yousra Filali, Stefano Massenzi, Chadwick Prichard, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Maciej Musial and Lila Yacoub. Charades is on board to handle international sales, with UTA Independent Film Group repping U.S. rights. Memento will handle distribution in France, releasing in Spring 2026. Charades and UTA will launch the project for pre-sales at the Cannes film market next month. Best of The Hollywood Reporter "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked 20 Times the Oscars Got It Wrong
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Audition by Katie Kitamura review
Katie Kitamura's most recent books, A Separation (2017) and Intimacies (2021) – each narrated by an unnamed woman upping sticks for Europe in the wake of emotional upheaval – were among several American novels to take inspiration from the coolly analytical style of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy. Kitamura's new novel, Audition, centred on marital strife between an actor and an art critic in New York, likewise deploys that Outline-patented register of philosophical meditation, this time to unsettling and even unfathomable purpose – which is another way of saying I just didn't get it. Mystery reigns from the start. We've got another unnamed narrator, who visits a restaurant to meet Xavier, 25, nearly half her age. The meeting is 'something I had not chosen to share with Tomas', her husband, 'although I didn't know why', a caveat that sounds the keynote for a coy guessing game. 'I want you to know that I accept what you told me,' Xavier tells her; we have no idea what he means, but it's only page 8, and we're enjoying the tension. When the narrator tells him: 'I don't think we should see each other again… No relationship between us can be possible,' it's a feint that wrongfoots us for the moment when – still only 40 pages in, no spoiler – we're told this isn't about sex: the 'conflict in the air between us… read as carnal interest [but] the actual story, the reality of what was happening between us in that moment, was much less easily imagined'. Well, OK, but there's a hair's breadth between intrigue and time-wasting, and I don't think Audition knows the difference; we're as likely to be grumpy as gripped. 'I couldn't understand why I had agreed to meet Xavier in the first place,' the narrator says. 'I had felt sorry for him perhaps… But had it only been that?' (You tell us!) She thinks Tomas thinks she's cheating; something he'd never do: 'Tomas was, or so I believed, largely indifferent to other women… But could that really be possible?' True, the pedantic itemising of the narrator's various anxieties, mixed with descriptions of buying coffee or pastries, does make us want to know where the story's going. It's a high-risk strategy – the payoff had better be good – and Kitamura raises the stakes with a risky rewind at the halfway mark, resetting the book's second part in the same restaurant where the narrator met Xavier 'all those months ago', only this time Tomas is there too, and Xavier's their son. The result is a bizarre juxtaposition of contradictory timelines. Kitamura in effect torches the first half's laboured explanation of how the narrator could afford her apartment – because she doesn't have kids – to say nothing of some early passages involving her memories of abortion and miscarriage, a sequence rendered almost offensively pointless, given it's just about the most vivid thing in the book. The tricksy self-cancelling leads to blankness upon blankness. When the narrator finds she can't remember Xavier's boyhood ('it was as if our relationship did not exist… Was it normal for a mother to be so unreflective?'), I don't think she's meant to be a maternally ambivalent empty-nester whose memory is failing; she's just a character in a novel that's fundamentally uninterested in creating one. Cusk's most recent novel, Parade, was also a puzzling journey into abstraction, but you always sensed genuine feeling behind its horror of character creation as a kind of malign exercise of power (for Cusk, it's the work of domineering parents as well as novelists). By contrast, Kitamura questions how fiction works simply by emptying it of significance. When the narrator reassures herself that Xavier's return isn't 'a figment of my imagination but… real, real, materially real', the strange repetition reminds us that nothing in a novel is ever 'happening', an insight delivered with lethal solemnity rather than rug-pulling glee. Is Audition a study of amnesia? A zeitgeisty metaphor for an imminent AI hellscape flooded with untrustworthy utterance? Or perhaps something more basic, given that it ends with Xavier writing his mother a play, a monologue for 'a woman who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real'? Whatever the key to this joylessly evasive experiment, I ended up feeling that Kitamura could keep it. Audition by Katie Kitamura will be published on 17 April by Fern Press (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Book Review: Katie Kitamura's new novel about an actor explores idea that 'all the world's a stage'
A woman meets a man half her age at a sleek Manhattan restaurant for lunch. Is he her lover or her son? If the former, then you might expect her to wield the power, like the character of Mrs. Robinson in 'The Graduate,' Mike Nichols' 1967 film about a young man who has an affair with one of his parents' friends. If the latter, then you might expect the young man, Xavier, to wield the power because youth outshines age and parents, for the most part, are willing to go to almost any length to make their kids happy. In her latest novel, 'Audition,' Katie Kitamura exploits all the tension and ambiguity inherent in that opening scene to craft a short, propulsive novel that suggests that at work and in life, we are constantly trying out roles and making it up as we go along. Or, to quote Shakespeare, 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.' 'Audition' features an unnamed female narrator, an actor of some renown, in rehearsals for a difficult new play. When she is not on stage, she lives a quiet life in the West Village with her art historian husband, Tomas. Halfway through the novel, everything changes. The relationships between her, Xavier and Tomas are turned upside down in head-spinning fashion like the figure/ground illusion known as Rubin's vase. Look at the picture one way, and it is a container for flowers; look at it another way, and it is the silhouettes of two heads facing each other. Kitamura's two previous novels also featured unnamed female protagonists whose work was bound up with interpretation: in 'Intimacies,' a female interpreter at the Hague, and in 'A Separation,' a translator. In this book she evokes a stylish city built out of glass, a sort of Mastercard ad where people have personal assistants and nibble on charcuterie trays in tastefully furnished apartments. In this facsimile of New York, which does not include disheveled people sleeping on the street or garbage spilling out of trash cans, Kitamura does a good job of creating a sense of the uncanny and feeling of dread. Reality is unstable; nothing is as it seems. The cleverly constructed plot ends with the narrator wrestling with big, abstract ideas including the possibility that a family is nothing more than a 'shared delusion, a mutual construction,' a group of actors performing their parts. ___ AP book reviews:
