[LCM Events] Fwd: "Falling from Earth" in New York

[Philippe Charles Saad]

If you happen to be in New York,
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.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: chadi zen <chadizen at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 5:29 PM
Subject: "Falling from Earth" in New York
To: psaad at alum.mit.edu


After Dubai, Rotterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen now in the Big Apple and at the
Museum of Modern Art :)

   "Falling from Earth" just landed at the New York Film Festival
  "Don't miss it !" ....if you can make it :)
  New Directors/New Films

http://www.moma.org/calendar/films.php?id=8102&ref=calendar

April 2nd at MoMA

http://www.filmlinc.com/ndnf/program/fallingfromearth.html

April  1st  at Walter Reade Theater

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.

Falling from Earth. 2008. Lebanon/France.
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.
*New Directors/New Films*

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.
*Variety
*
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.
>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.
*Mahmovie!*

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.
*Nick Shager*.

Thanks

PS: some of the Arabic articles will be posted soon

www.fallingfromearth.com
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