Tag: movie set

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Eagles of the Republic
(نسور الجمهورية)

Director – Tarik Saleh – 2025 – Sweden, France, Denmark, Finland – Cert. 15 – 129m

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A top Egyptian movie star finds himself working on a big budget, high concept, state-sponsored propaganda movie – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, May 22nd

The opening three scenes… The credits run over a montage of Egyptian movie posters. A group of men outdoors in the Egyptian sun listen attentively to radio commentary of a horse race. One of the men lights his lady passenger’s cigarette from his own as their car speeds towards the horizon of what could well be Monument Valley.. “cut” …but is a movie set with back projection. His assistant tells him has son has called three times – it’s the boy’s birthday, so the actor has his assistant buy his son an expensive watch. Not the greatest of fathers. The kissing couple on the side of the outside studio wall proclaims him to be Pharoah of the Screen George Fahmy (Fares Fares from Cairo Conspiracy, Tarik Saleh, 2022; Westworld, TV series, 2018; The Nile Hilton Incident, Tarik Saleh, 2017; Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Gareth Edwards, 2016; Department Q: The Keeper of Lost Causes, Mikkel Nørgaard, 2013; Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) and her Rula Haddad (Cherien Dabis, director of Only Murders in the Building, 6 episodes, 2021-23).… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Exhibitions Features Live Action Movies

Making Waves
– Navigators of
Hong Kong Cinema

A virtual exhibition of Hong Kong movie unit photography stills

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Accessible from Friday, July 8th to Sunday, August 14th in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2022 Making Waves

The online platform hosting the exhibition

Funny things, virtual exhibitions. Like online platforms for viewing movies, they can take a bit of getting used to. In a real life exhibition in a museum, you wander from room to room, either looking at everything or, perhaps, looking at particular exhibits that take your fancy or that you want to study in further depth.

All that happens too in an online exhibition. I guess they can be viewed on a smartphone, but I was looking at this on my PC. There are help instructions on the menu, but I, like many others I suspect, ignored them and worked out how it all worked as I was going round.

I must have seen quite a bit of the whole before I realised that the best way to proceed might well be the ‘previous’ and ‘next’ buttons taking you from exhibit to exhibit. Before that, I’d worked out that if you clicked on a photographic image hanging on the gallery wall, your viewpoint / the screen / the camera would zoom in on the exhibit and frame it perfectly.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Lucky Chan-sil
(Chansilineun
Bokdo Manhji,
찬실이는 복도 많지)

Director – Kim Cho-hee – 2019 – South Korea – 95m

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When a film director she’s worked for over several years dies, his film producer has to rethink her life – currently streaming on MUBI as part of their New South Korean Cinema season

Director Ji (Seo Sang-won), his fortysomething producer Lee Chan-sil (Kang Mal-geum) and three or four others are drinking Soju round a table after a hard day’s work on the set. Suddenly, Ji slumps forward. Everyone thinks he’s kidding. He’s not. He’s dead. Unexpectedly dead. Ji makes little independent films in his own highly idiosyncratic style. If he’s no longer there, then the film, too, is dead. And Chan-sil, who has only worked with him, is suddenly out of a job.

With her regular income gone, she downsizes and moves into a cheap flat owned by an ageing live-in landlady (Youn Yuh-jung). It’s near the top of a hill, so other members of the abandoned film production help her carry stuff up there. She sees a lot of her flighty actress friend Sophie (Yeung Soon-ah) for whom she now goes to work as a cleaner. These changes of circumstance give her the both the space and the opportunity to reassess her life.… Read the rest