On a quiet pedestrian street in Kars, is the run-down delapitaded house where Yeghishe Charents, (1897 - 1937) one of the greatest Armenian poets was born and lived.Both his primary and secondary schooling took place in Kars.

His patriotic pleas to unite Armenians against Stalinism ended him in prison, where he died at the age of 40.

The Rose of Rhodesia (1918), one of the earliest feature films made in South Africa, presented at this year's Giornate del Cinema Muto is a five-reel romance cantered on a stolen diamond, an interracial friendship, and an anti-colonial uprising, The Rose of Rhodesia impressed contemporary reviewers with its daring realism, spectacular outdoor locations, and casting of African actors in prominent roles. Considered lost for most of the last century, the film may claim to be the first fictional treatment of Zimbabwe in cinema.

Abel Gance's J'Accuse (1919), a politically an d stylistically daring anti-war drama produced while the trench warfare of World War I was still grinding up soldiers on both sides of the battle, opens with the title spelled out by the bodies of soldiers striding into formation, like a marching band at a half-time show. Then they collapse, as if dead, to startling effect. Appropriating the cry leveled by Emile Zola during the Dreyfus affair, Gance levels his accusations at war itself.

Guests clucking over a glass of champagne were bowled over Tuesday night at the Majestic Hotel when to the tune of the national anthem of Thailand, they caught a glimpse of Her Royal Highness Princess Ubolratana Rajakanya of Thailand gliding into the Salon Croisette in a glamorous fluffy white strapless evening gown and silver pumps, followed by the Ambassador of Thailand in Paris, and dignitaries from the Entertainment sector of that country. Also in attendance at the reception was the Mayor of CANNES, Monsieur Bernard Brochand.

The Million Yen Girl shown at Udine Far East Festival involves a 21 year old student who heads for the road after experiencing disappointment with her family and disillusionment with the difficulty of earning a living in Tokyo. Wanting to become independent, she co-rents an apartment with a total stranger who throws out a kitten she adopted, after which she tosses all his owning out the window and gets the book for alienation of private property. After a short term in jail, her welcome home is cold and she can count on no support from her family or friends, neither moral nor financial.

Right after Mao, in Communist China early 1980s, director Buming XU recalls the situation in most households where a standard toilet was a luxury and people used "potties". A young Chinese girl Dan, lives in a stifling environment with her family in a house without toilet and has to empty her obnoxious younger brother's waste after he spends most of the day sitting on the loo.

BEHIND THE FORBIDDEN DOOR

Indonesian Cinema was supposed to be dead ! After a flourishing of interesting films in the sixties in that country, little has been known about the sector, but the presence of several NEW WAVE filmakers in their 30s at Udine FarEast Festival

Frozen Flower, an epic blockbuster of a love triangle involving the King and Queen of the Goryeo Dynasty with a General, directed by young Korean, Yoo Ha, takes you into a world of betrayal, honour and feudalism in ancient Korea, at war with China.

In an extraordinary series of videos made for the Museum of the Moving Image, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz discusses the filmmakers, authors and even comic books that have shaped the films of Wes Anderson. This is surely one of the most imitated filmmakers of the 21-st Century, so it's fascinating to see where he gets his inspiration from.

Festival de cinema do Brasil in Paris.

The first week of this 9th two-prong event (feature competition and then documentaries) has ended at the L'Arlequin Cinema in Paris 'trendy Quartier Latin with the presence of top-knotch Brazilian filmmakers, actors and producers, flown over for the event to present each of the two dozen films in competition.

Big names of Brazil's 'cinema novo' period such as Miguel Farias, Carlos (Caca) Diegues, Sergio Rezende, Joao Batista de Andrade boasted a vigorous older-generation slate of works to compete with talented newercomers like Tata Amoral, the only female feature director, Heitor Dhalia, Karim Ainouz and Cao Hamburger.

We're only in the third month of the year, and already we've seen high-profile remakes of three different horror movies: My Bloody Valentine, Friday the 13^th and, most recently, The Last House on the Left. What's surprising about these movies isn't the fact that they're all remakes. Nothing is sacred in Hollywood, not even The Host and Oldboy - easily two of the best films of the decade, both slated to be streamlined and repackaged thanks to Tinseltown's recycling plant. No, what's surprising is that exploitation movies have entered the mainstream at all.

The teaser for Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited WWII epic, Inglourious Basterds, comes out today. You can catch it before the new Friday the 13th remake, which is appropriate enough given that Basterds (the misspelling is Tarantino's doing, not mine) looks like it's going to be a splatter-fest.

Is there anything worse than a movie that's been made for only one purpose: to win Oscars?

I'm talking, of course, about Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon and David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Here are two handsomely mounted productions that take no risks, offer no insights, and are just polite enough to win the Academy's favor. That's not to say these movies are bad, but they ARE boring. Don't let anyone tell you any different.

When it comes time to hand out the best-of-the-year awards, movies released in December get all the love. This is partly due to the fact that studios have been saving some of their best products for the holiday season, but sometimes it seems like movie critics and members of the Academy Awards of Arts and Sciences suffer from memory loss. So I thought it might be fun to see what the first 11 months of the year had to offer and make a best-of-the-year list from that. Keep in mind that I still haven’t seen some of the most anticipated films of the season, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon and Milk. I’ll write about those movies in future blogs. For now, here’s my nowhere-near definitive look at the best movies of 2008, listed in order of preference:

We all know filmmaking is a team effort. Nowadays almost everybody's seen the DVD features and the behind-the-scenes of their favorite movies and perhaps been overwhelmed by the number of people who are involved in the filmmaking process. Camera teams, lighting teams, post-production teams, stunt teams, wardrobe teams, animal wranglers and so on, we are all aware of the seemingly infinite amount of names and titles that keep scrolling up during the credits. Unfortunately, most people choose this time to stop sucking on those unpopped-popcorn seeds and start walking out of the theater (or turn the TV off, if you were already home), even though it's probably the only real public moment of acknowledgement that the "rigging gaffer" or the "second-second-second-assistant director" will get!

I started working in projection booths in 1999, the year Fight Club came out. As FC fans know, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) has a night job as a projectionist, which he uses as an opportunity to splice frames of pornography into Disney flicks.

The Japanese are building robots, holograms are appearing on the cable news, and Barack Obama is going to be the forty-forth President of the United States. Are we living in the future? Dunno, but what I do know is that pop culture has helped pave the way for the election of America's first Black president.

Searching the Internet on a daily basis for high quality short films & videos can be an arduous & strange task at times. Let’s face it: there’s a lot of crap out there. On average, you have to watch about 50 bad videos in order to find just one good one. From tutorials on how to make a peanut butter & jelly sandwich to a man giving his dog a haircut, there are no shortages of completely pointless, unwatchable videos populating the Internet today.