If you happen to be in New York, <br>The movie looks awesome. It is a great opportunity to have a young Lebanese director showing his movie at the Lincoln center. do not miss it.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>
From: <b class="gmail_sendername">chadi zen</b> <<a href="mailto:chadizen@gmail.com">chadizen@gmail.com</a>><br>Date: Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 5:29 PM<br>Subject: "Falling from Earth" in New York<br>To: <a href="mailto:psaad@alum.mit.edu">psaad@alum.mit.edu</a><br>
<br><br><div>After Dubai, Rotterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen now in the Big Apple and at the Museum of Modern Art :)</div>
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<div>"Falling from Earth" just landed at the New York Film Festival</div></td></tr>
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<div>"Don't miss it !" ....if you can make it :)</div></td></tr>
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<div><span>New Directors/New Films </span></div></td></tr>
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<div><a href="http://www.moma.org/calendar/films.php?id=8102&ref=calendar" target="_blank">http://www.moma.org/calendar/films.php?id=8102&ref=calendar</a> </div>
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<div>April 2nd at MoMA</div>
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<div><a href="http://www.filmlinc.com/ndnf/program/fallingfromearth.html" target="_blank">http://www.filmlinc.com/ndnf/program/fallingfromearth.html</a></div>
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<div>April 1st at Walter Reade Theater <br><br>Dedicated to the discovery and support of emerging artists, New Directors/New Films has earned an international reputation as the premiere festival for works that break or re-cast the cinematic mold; including Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodóvar, Héctor Babenco, Terence Davies, Atom Egoyan, Nicole Holofcener, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Sally Potter, John Sayles, Steven Spielberg, Wim Wenders and Wong Kar Wai among others.<br>
<br>Falling from Earth. 2008. Lebanon/France. <br>A true cinema poet, Chadi Zeneddine's poignantly surrealist debut film pays tribute to four lonely people trying to survive their own private wars in Beirut. These seamlessly woven chapters each reflect their own particular time and place. In 1958, a solitary little girl exchanges her world of toys and make-believe for a camera that captures the harsher reality outside. In 1975, a security official grieving over the loss of a loved one finds solace in the graffiti he reads and scrawls in a men's room. In 1982, a woman dances and weeps, waiting in vain for a missing lover. And in the present, Joussef has a magical encounter. Falling From Earth is a moving elegy for a lost homeland from a director whose talent and sensitivity imbue every frame. <br>
<i>New Directors/New Films</i><br><br>An intermittently engaging tone poem about the surreality of life in wartime Beirut, "Falling From Earth" offers four independent chapters (set in 2008, 1990, 1982 and 1975) that don't add up to a greater narrative whole. Debuting helmer Chadi Zeneddine, a Ph.D candidate in cinema studies at the Sorbonne, seems over-influenced by unconventional classics such as Jean Cocteau's "The Blood of a Poet," though he does manage to create some interesting visual textures with montages that incorporate faux homemovies and surveillance footage. Tech credits are adequate, with lensing and editing the standouts.<br>
<i>Variety<br></i><br>A cinematic poem that caters to the senses and strongly provokes memory, Falling From Earth is a new and powerful Lebanese independent film that is currently touring film festivals around the world. Told with a sharp auteur approach, the film makes of every recent Lebanese war a chapter. In each, a character's life plays out in a world where words are few but grand sentiments are expressed in special relationships to personal spaces, which gradually transcend into playgrounds for hopes and fears.<br>
>From abandoned buildings, charming Beiruti alleys, to public toilets, Zeneddine's film becomes an intimate artistic study of the Lebanese's subjection to war, creatively told with elaborate camera movements and punchy colors, free from any war movie clichés of shelling and torn bodies. <br>
<i>Mahmovie!</i><br><br>An oblique rumination on the psychological and emotional wreckage wrought by years of war in Beirut, Falling from Earth is much symbolic gesturing in the dark. That director Chadi Zeneddine makes no concession to traditional narrative ...the influence of and yearning for home, the past, love, and a voice (both personal and political) are topics that freely commingle throughout these tales...Zeneddine's visual acumen allows for a stirring, tangible sense of the city and the sorrow, loneliness, and longing of its inhabitants, which is conveyed most powerfully through measured shots of the rubble-strewn urban landscape framed by windows or explosion-created holes in walls.<br>
<i>Nick Shager</i>.<br><br>Thanks<br><br>PS: some of the Arabic articles will be posted soon</div>
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<div><a href="http://www.fallingfromearth.com" target="_blank">www.fallingfromearth.com</a></div>
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