


The NCLR is a national legal organization committed to advancing the civil and human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families through litigation, public policy advocacy, and public education.
The 29th Créteil Films de Femmes, International Women's Film Festival (March 23 through April 1), threw its spotlight on films directed by women from Great Britain, featuring, for example, a retrospective of the work of Sally Potter. Among the highlights were Yes, with Joan Allen and Sam Neill, and the brilliant and luscious Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton based on the novel by Virginia Woolf.
The charismatic Scottish filmmaker's Mary Miles Thomas's One Life Stand, a remake of Pasolini's Mama Roma, tells the story of a single mother who works as a tarot card reader over the telephone and struggles to raise her 18-year-old son, John Paul, who is employed by an escort service for women. The outstanding digital feature has already won several awards at various festivals.
The first feature from festival veteran Pratibha Parmar, Nina's Heavenly Delights, was seven years in making and centers on an Indo-Scottish lesbian who returns to take up her father's restaurant business following his death - she falls for a woman who owns half of the establishment.
This year's guest of honor was Charlotte Rampling, who selected François Ozon's Under the Sand from her repertoire for screening. Rampling plays Marie, a university professor at the Sorbonne in Paris whose husband Jean suddenly disappears during their beach vacation. Marie refuses to accept that Jean is dead even when the coroner produces his body.
Mira Nair was also celebrated at Créteil this year with a screening of her new feature, The Namesake, released in France at the end of March. [Nair has also been a recent guest on Film Weekly.]
Xiaolu Guo from Beijing, now based in Great Britain, took home the jury prize for best feature film. In How Is Your Fish Today?, the interplay of voiceover with a rich tableau of iconographic documents creates a rich tapestry of investigation, making Guo one of the most exciting Chinese directors of today. Guo, who also produced the film, received partial funding from Channel Four in Great Britain. She says her work is representative of a new generation of Chinese filmmakers who are finding new ways to make films and steering clear of an industry stuck on recycling martial arts formulas.
The runner up chosen by the 29th Créteil jury was Shoot the Messenger by Ngozi Onwurah from Great Britain, also voted the best film by the public and the Créteil youth jury. The film is about a black teacher, Joe Pascale (David Oyelowo), who works in an urban school composed of predominantly black students and white teachers. He's hired to inspire black youth, according to the school administration, but is instead soon unfairly accused of assaulting a student and his entire world collapses. Joe is driven to insanity, incarcerated and later winds up homeless but is soon rescued by evangelicals and a job recruitment firm. The film is refreshingly told from Joe's, with strategic close-ups of him commenting directly into the camera about the story unfolding.
The audience runner-up was Finn's Girl, the story of a woman whose partner dies and who decides to raise her daughter and carry on her work at an abortion clinic which has been receiving death threats. The film was made by the Canadian couple Dominique Cardona and Laurie Colbert.
The documentaries at Créteil this year, many of them overtly political, addressed a wide array of topics. Receiving an honorable mention from the Créteil gymnasium jury was Melek Ulagay Taylan's Dialogues in the Dark from Turkey, a film which deals with legislation aimed at "honor killings" of Muslim women by male relatives. The filmmaker also touches on the Turkish diaspora by bringing in the infamous case of 26-year-old Fadime Sahindal, who was murdered by her brother and father because she had a Swedish boyfriend. Sahindal immigrated to Sweden from Kurdistan as a little girl.
Several new French documentaries were screened at the festival. Judith Butler, philosophe en tout genre by Paule Zajdermann explores a visit by the UC Berkeley gender studies professor Judith Butler to France in 2005. Les Tomates Voient Rouge, by Andréa Bergala, takes up the globalization of alimentation, noting, for example, that there are only seven varieties of tomatoes that remain in France today. Love and Words are Politics, by Sylvie Ballyot, is a poetic film essay in which a woman searches for her space in Yemen.
The Créteil festival is at present the largest annual pageant of films made by women in the world. It is generously supported by several government ministries, regional as well as municipal, and a host of corporate sponsors. Créteil has been able to successfully integrate the surrounding area with the festival through student juries from local gymnasiums (lycée) and universities. This jury of the 29th festival was comprised of Noëlle Châtelet, Daniel Vigne, Loïc Magneron, Philippe Grandrieux, Laura Benson, Marylin Alasset and Maryse Wolinski. Seven percent of the world's directors are women and this events presents a panorama of shorts, documentaries and feature films dedicated exclusively to this marginalization.
Photos of Charlotte Rampling, Mira Nair and Xiaolu Guo by Moira Sullivan.
Posted by David Hudson, Greencine DailyBut there is a more general aspect to the example of
This is not a film review, no siree bob, its about a theater production written by Marga Gomez. But she has starred in several indie films including, THE D WORD, a spoof on THE L WORD, and so the work of this multi-talented artist is here for you all to appreciate.Marga Gomez is a household word in San Francisco, and she is back in town, her "creative home" as she puts it. (And MY "mythical home", proclaims CinéFemme!). I managed to catch this über talented performer in Stockholm years ago in a museum built to house the enormous shipwrecked Vasa, which sunk on its maiden voyage in the 16th century. It escapes me what Gomez was up to in Stockholm that year, but the spunk and fire that fuels her performance about oh , 20 years later was in crystalline form. She has only gotten better and better and better, every time I see her.
"Celebrities are very Special people and have a very distinctline of dissemination. They have comm[unication] lines that others donot have and many medias[sic] to get their dissemination through".Not only do celebrities have lines of communication, according to Scientology their utterances are divine and can potentially alter organic matter. That's pretty powerful stuff for someone like Tom Cruise:
L. Ron Hubbard, from Flag Order 3323, 9 May 1973
He who can truly communicate to others is a higher being who creates new worlds.
L. Ron Hubbard
And young and old stars are buying it:
"Tom Cruise's popularity has dropped significantly in the last few months, according to the latest Genius StarPower report. By all measures, the plunge (among 13 to 49 year-olds) is steep for a celebrity of his magnitude:The drop follows Cruise's controversial publicity tour for the release of "War Of The Worlds" and his engagement to actress Katie Holmes. The above figures are from the Genius StarPower Summer 2005 report (covering the six months to July 1, 2005) and the Spring 2005 report (covering the six months to April 1, 2005). Which is great that it is waning, because maybe Cruise and company can afford to be milked for millions by Scientologist but fans without that kind of cash flow will pay heavily for their star worship. But maybe P.T. Barnum is right: " a sucker is born every minute".
* his StarPower ranking plummeted from 12th to 50th
* he went from the 11th most liked celebrity to the 197th
* his fan base (those who like or like him a lot) shrank from 33% to 25%
* he ranks among the top 5 most controversial actors (those who are heavily disliked and liked), along with David Spade, Tom Green, Pauly Shore and Ashton Kutcher."
"A Thetan [alien] assumes a baby's body usually about the time it takes its first breath".Re: proselytizing stars: Who ARE the advisors and what ARE their qualifications for 'star maintenance'? Is Tom one of the mentors? He claims he spends time on the phone 'helping people' even at 2am. Financial hooks in new converts regardless of ability to pay aside, and the rights of Tom to speak out, what about the reproductive rights of mothers--not to mention newborns ? Is anyone aware of this who admits to not knowing much about Scientology?
L.Ron Hubbard
"According to Hubbard, Scientologists should target prominent individuals as their "quarry" and bring them back like trophies for Scientology. He listed the following people of that era as suitable prey: Edward R. Murrow, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, Howard Hughes, Greta Garbo, Walt Disney, Henry Luce, Billy Graham, Groucho Marx and others of similar stature. "If you bring one of them home you will get a small plaque as a reward," Hubbard wrote in a Scientology magazine more than three decades ago. Although the original effort faded, the idea of using celebrities to promote and defend Scientology survived and is now being expanded though Hubbard's successor David Miscavige. [Miscavige befriended Cruise in the 1980´s".Today the advice to treat AIDS, postpartum depression, heroin addiction, and radiation poisoning with vitamins can be heard at a Scientology mission in Hollywood or near you. Where 'trophies' (beyond those already named) include: Karen Black, Linda Blair, the late Sonny Bono - who introduced Mimi Rogers, who introduced Cruise and is ex-wife), Nancy Cartwright - the voice of Bart Simpson, Lisa Marie and Priscella Presley, Chick Corea, Ernest Lehman, Geoffrey , Juliette and Lightfield Lewis. Kelly Preston and John Travolta and Paul Haggis are lifetime members ... and the list also includes lesser known screenwriters actors and professionals in Hollywood.... And so what, it probably doesn't help their careers much . One ex-member (before the murders) was Charles Manson...But mothers and newborn and those with medical emergencies are in trouble.
"Shields should take vitamins".
Tom Cruise.
"Comments like those by Tom Cruise are a disservice to mothers everywhere. To suggest that I was wrong to take drugs to deal with my depression, and that instead I should have taken vitamins and exercised shows an utter lack of understanding about postpartum depression and childbirth in general".
Brooke Shields.
"Since all illness are psychosomatic in the eyes of a Scientologist, members believe that everything from indigestion to AIDS can be cured through auditing (talking through issues while attached to a biofeedback device called an "E-meter" that is similar to a lie detector) and vitamins".
Journal of Clinical Investigation.
"Scientology is the only specific (cure) for radiation (atomic bomb) burns".
Church of Scientology.
Fipresci Awards
Competition Climates Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey-France
Un Certain Regard Paraguayan Hammoc Paz Encina, France/Argentina/Netherlands/Paraguay/Spain)
Directors' Fortnight Bug William Friedkin, USA