♦ Introduction
This blog is a place for all contributors of Nisimazine to continue to write, photograph, make video and discuss cinema together after the workshops. An extension of the magazine, this is a free space to keep sharing new insights and experiences through reviews, essays, quotes, interviews and festival reports. You can join any conversation by posting comments. So…, let’s go !

Thursday 10 June 2010
By Agustin Mango (Argentina),
10 June 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]

Last year, the Rotterdam Film Festival did something
that changed the city’s landscape for ten
days. The festival’s Size Matters section commissioned
Guy Maddin, Carlos Reygadas and
Nanouk Leopold to make three films that were
screened on the facades of the tallest buildings
in town. Cinema took over the skyscrapers,
turning Rotterdam into a sort of City of Cinema
with a Blade Runner feel to it (see right):
huge images waving from up high, like huge
holes on the buildings leading to a world of
mystery and amazement. As it was placed over
the buildings’ windows, the notion of the film
screen being a different sort of window – one
that lets us see into another dimension: fiction
– was certainly there, showing Isabella Rossellini
twitched on an electric chair in Guy Maddin’s
disturbing short Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair a
blend of S&M stag, Caligari, and Metropolis.
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Monday 10 May 2010
By Arne Kohlweyer (Germany),
10 May 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
Arne Kohlweyer participated in this year’s European Short Pitch with his project "A day like no other". He interviewed his tutor there, the Romanian scriptwriter Razvan Radulescu. "I wouldn’t even drink a beer with the Romanian film school teachers", gives the tone. Don’t just read but also write history, or how not to compromise your art.
Does the fact that you skipped "film school education" supported a kind of individuality in the way you write your stories? I think this is how (…)
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Monday 12 April 2010
By Bruno Carmelo (Brazil),
12 April 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
“You stupid critic, you have no idea what you are talking about, why don’t you give up writing and try to make films to see how it works, little son of a …”.
Indeed, I haven’t made any film. I don’t even consider myself a film critic either, just someone with a film blog as millions of others out there. However, that did not stop me from receiving about four insults a day after writing some criticism about a brazilian film. It took me a while to find out that these comments came from (…)
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By Donal Foreman (Ireland),
12 April 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
My beginnings in cinema were thoughtless, impulsive and tactile. I started making films with my friends at age 11, initially as an arbitrary way to pass the time but soon developing into an unbeatable creative and social space for us to play in. Writing about film came a few years later, as a way to make sense of this activity that had already become so central to my life, seeking its powers and potential beyond the visceral excitement of the process that had hooked me in the first place. (…)
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By Eftihia Stefanidi (Greece),
12 April 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
In an attempt to undermine the role of the critic, a painter friend of mine said that “critics are only dependent on artists providing material as ‘food for thought’, therefore with no works of art, criticism cannot exist.” Steering clear of such a nihilist supposition, one can wonder how film history would have developed, if observations and reflections on cinematic encounters were not as doggedly written. Unquestionably, there is rigorous, mediocre, and bad criticism: intelligent criticism is (…)
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By Mario Kozina (Croatia),
12 April 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
Imagine a typical middle-European cafe in the beginning of the sixties: murmur of the voices, rattle of glasses and coffee cups, heavy layers of smoke and a group of people gathered around the same table, discussing something more passionately than any other guest. They were regulars at the cafe, and other guests had even got used to their passionate polemics that in some situations bordered on the verge of physical confrontation. "The polemic tone of these conversations sometimes began to (…)
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Monday 15 March 2010
By Joanna Gallardo (France),
15 March 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
François Pirot is a Belgian director and scriptwriter. After two shorts, he just finished writing Mobil-home, his first feature film, which he will also direct. He co-wrote Nue Propriété and Elève Libre with Joachim Lafosse (also Belgian). In fact, he has experienced different productions as scriptwriter, director and…actor!
According to your experience, how does the hierarchy function on set?
Hierarchy doesn’t exist if the task of each crew member is well-defined. If everybody knows what he/she (…)
4 comments
By Barnabás Tóth (Hungary),
15 March 2010
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Mas y Mas
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I must say I basically like to work as a one-man-crew, although as long as I remember my own shootings, the "one man” is never one man. Controlling and recording the picture AND the sound, while watching the whole thing with your own eyes as the first spectator is almost impossible.
But being alone (or very few) has many adventages: first of all: financial - you have to pay only one salary. Second: organisation: no lates, no busy schedules, no transport fees and no catering obligations. (…)
1 comment
By Moa Geistrand (Sweden), Anna Weitz (Sweden),
15 March 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
RåFILM believes in sharing. In addition to sharing cameras and equipment, sharing ideas and knowledge make the process of creating documentaries more inspiring, and within RåFILM there is always someone with a fresh eye to help out when a rough cut needs a new perspective.
Our collective method differs from project to project. Sometimes only two or three of us work together, sometimes, as with Hit Music – Rhythm of the Revolutionary, nearly all of us participate, and sometimes one or two of us (…)
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By Atso Pärnänen (Finland),
15 March 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
In Hollywood there is a person for every step of the way. He who gets the coffee, who prepares the coffee and the one who serves the coffee, while all dream of drinking it.
In Europe, if you are lucky, there’s a coffee machine on the hallway of the broadcasting corp. and a producer who found a couple coins still left in his pocket, or even better, on the floor! On this hallway the crew member will find a safe haven between productions. In Europe "less is more". Less money, less time, less (…)
2 comments

Monday 15 February 2010
By Adrien Lenoir (France),
15 February 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
Talent campuses do not only exist in Berlin or Sarajevo. The phenomenon is strong enough to inspire new projects, new platforms for future filmmakers and film lovers. The role these platforms can take is all the more important in places like Russia where expressing yourself in total independence and freedom may not be as easy as in the rest of Europe. This urge and this desire are beautifully expressed by Anna Gudkova, who is the program director of the Russian International education (…)
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By Mary Carmen Molina (Bolivia),
15 February 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
When Denisse Arancibia (photo) applied for this year Belinale Talent Campus, she thought it could be her first opportunity to express her point of view outside Bolivia. The day Denisse knew her short film project Pis have been selected for the first round of the Berlinale Today Award 2011 competition, she knew the opportunity had become a reality.
The question: Do Latin American young filmmakers always have to take a transatlantic flight to jump into a Talent Campus? The answer was a strong (…)
16 comments

Tuesday 2 February 2010
By Adrien Lenoir (France),
2 February 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
João Cândido Zacharias is one of the directors of the Brazilian TV series Peça Piloto, along with Alice Gomes, Patrícia Fróes, Gustavo Scofano and Bruna Benvegnu. The episodes they made show us young Brazilian fashion designers in their everyday lives and creating processes. The series has style and shows how thin the frontier can be between a TV documentary and a most captivating piece of short film.
Can you tell us how Peça Piloto was created? We all knew each other before. Gustavo, Patricia, (…)
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By Sebastiano Pucciarelli (Italy),
2 February 2010
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Mas y Mas
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[en]
Evidence no.1 A young, non-white and unknown presidential candidate talking of “hope and unity” and winning the election: Obama’s campaign in 2008? No, The West Wing, 2005, NBC.
Evidence no.2 A wife publicly standing by her famous husband after he admits he’s involved in a sex scandal, trying to save her family and life from gossip and humiliation: Hillary Clinton after Bill confessed his “improper physical relationship" with Monica Lewinsky? New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s wife after he (…)
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