I caught Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows about Persian Cats, opening tomorrow at the IFC Center, when it screened at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. In the magazine, I wrote the following: The story told by the Iranian Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows about Persian Cats would have fit comfortably into an afternoon of mumblecore films at SXSW. A young couple tries to form a band and score an out-of-town gig. Because it’s set in Iran, however, the band is outlawed, money must be scraped together for the expensive exit visa, and the female musician is not even […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 15, 2010NAOMI WATTS AND TIM ROTH WITH UNWELCOME VISITORS MICHAEL PITT AND BRADY CORBETT IN DIRECTOR MICHAEL HANEKE’S FUNNY GAMES U.S. COURTESY WARNER INDEPENDENT PICTURES. Michael Haneke is a director who makes films strictly on his terms, and — as his new movie demonstrates — writes his own rules if he doesn’t like the existing ones. The son of an actor-director father and an actress mother, Haneke was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up just outside the Austrian capital, Vienna. He attended the University of Vienna, where he studied philosophy, psychology and theater. Over the course of the 70s and […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 14, 2008