In the opening scene of Zeina Durra’s debut, The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, Asya, a young artist, poses naked for the camera. A hijab on her head, a machine gun in hand, she explains to an off-screen assistant her rationale for why the religious freedom fighter she’s portraying might have waxed her pubic hair. It’s a scene that is as funny as it is politically loaded, much like the movie that follows. Although its milieu — the young, privileged and the artistic — is the stuff coming-of-age movies are made of, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! is more than just another […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Apr 12, 2011Filmmaker Zeina Durra’s Sundance Competition film The Imperialists are Still Alive! has its East Coast premiere tonight, June 24, in an Indiewire-hosted screening at the 2nd Northside Festival of Film and Music in Brooklyn. The film, a graduate of the IFP Narrative Lab, is an upscale Manhattan comedy of manners with an internationalist flavor and a post-9/11 paranoid bent. It also has the most arresting first shot of the year. Writing for Filmmaker, Eric Kohn said of the film: Consider the revelatory drama The Imperialists Are Still Alive! Like a 1990s-era Amerindie upgraded to post-9/11 concerns, this insightful low key […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 24, 2010[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 25, 12:30 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] The hardest decision I had to make among a lot of crazy decisions was only days before we were meant to start shooting; a piece of financing fell through at the last minute and we only had enough money for the first three weeks of our 23-day shoot. It was also the end of January 2009, the heart of the financial crisis was breaking — a scary time to raise funds for a small indie film! I decided to go ahead since everything was planned, the team and […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 25, 2010