Michael Cacoyannis, best known for the 1964 Oscar-nominated drama Zorba the Greek, died of complications from a heart attack and chronic respiratory problems early Monday at an Athens hospital. He was either 89 or 90, depending on the source. Born in Limassol, Cyprus, on June 11, 1921 or 1922, the young Cacoyannis (Mihalis Kakogiannis in Greek) was sent to London to study Law, but later turned to the theater, studying Drama at the Old Vic and playing various roles on the British stage, including the lead in Albert Camus' Caligula. Unable to find work in the British film industry, he eventually moved to Athens. Cacoyannis' directorial debut took place in the early '50s, with the breezy comedy Windfall in Athens (1955), whose production lasted two years. International acclaim followed the release of Stella (1955), which was screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. This drama about a free-spirited young woman (Melina Mercouri) torn by her...
- 7/25/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
If filming classical literature always presents difficulties to the filmmaker, one of them is the haloed status of classical texts. Since the classics appear not to be about ordinary people, we are uncertain how Achilles or Arjuna should be represented, whether they should be made human or beings of another kind. The efforts made by writers to humanize epic characters by infusing them with ‘psychology’ – e.g. Iravathi Karve’s Yugantha – may be well-intentioned but they do not add to our understanding of the epics. Putting our thoughts and our kind of motives into the heads of epic characters seems to reduce their stature. A reason may be that the epics were created before the birth of the ‘individual’, before Man and the World had been differentiated, before the inner and the outer were set apart. Oedipus killed his father and married his mother not because of ‘psychology’ – i.e.
- 3/23/2011
- by MK Raghvendra
- DearCinema.com
The Goa Film Festival that was from the 22nd of November to the 2nd of December and I managed to attend the first five days. Unfortunately, I got sick just after the festival and couldn’t compile the report in time. Anyway, some of the films screened here will go on to be important during award season and since that’s around the corner, I figured I’d club my impression of the festival with reviews of the films, since I had foreshadowed some of the buzz. Please keep in mind that this is not blow-by-blow and a laundry list of films reviewed but an impression of one of the biggest Asian film celebrations and the many conversations and predictions I managed to collect.
Rewind
So, here I am at the International Film Festival of India in Goa, an anarchic carnival of cinema that is as much an index of...
Rewind
So, here I am at the International Film Festival of India in Goa, an anarchic carnival of cinema that is as much an index of...
- 1/12/2011
- by Kamayani Sharma
- The Moving Arts Journal
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