Farhadi won the Silver Bear for best director two years ago for his film “About Elly.” “Nader and Simin” was widely seen as a shoo-in for the Golden Bear, both for its outstanding quality in a year of insipid competition fare and the spotlight thrown on Iranian cinema by incarcerated director Jafar Panahi, for whom the festival kept an open jury seat for the duration of the festival.

The international jury of the 61st Berlin Film Festival, presided over by actress Isabella Rossellini, jointly awarded the Silver Bears for acting to the ensemble cast of “Nader and Simin.” Among the six actors and actresses who shared the two statues was the director’s teenage daughter, Sarina Farhadi. In the film, she plays the daughter of a feuding couple who is faced with choices of loyalty and ethics. The other honorees were Sareh Bayat, Leila Hatami, Peyman Moadi, Ali Asghar Shahbazi and Babak Karimi.

The Grand Jury Prix went to Bela Tarr’s sparse and minimalist “The Turin Horse,” about a coachman and his daughter going about their daily routine while an apocalyptic threat looms. The film has divided critics. Personally, I found the film’s purity and visual beauty masterful. But to be honest, the sparsely of dialogue, repetition of mundane actions and slowness make for an outstandingly difficult film to sit through (and I’m saying that as someone who watched all 7 ½ hours of “Satantango” in rapt concentration).

The separation itself is somewhat of a MacGuffin and does little more than set all the pieces in motion. The most we hear about marital disputes is in the tense opening scene, a single static shot that shows the spouses pleading their cases, from the perspective of the marriage clerk’s desk. Simin explains that she wants to take their eleven-year-old daughter to study and live abroad. Nader insists on staying behind to tend to his Alzheimer-afflicted father.

“El Premio” is a slow, meditative piece with a political back story and a headstrong protagonist too young to understand the danger that her family is in. Incidentally, these aspects are shared by last year’s Golden Bear winner, the Turkish production “Bal.” For a festival whose award choices are often seen as political, “El Premio” is exactly the sort of film that Berlin loves.

Last year in Cannes I remember seeing a youngish filmmaker […]

“Midnight in Paris” a new film by Woody Allen, will […]

By ALI NADERZAD – January 7, 2011 As a longtime […]

In a noted moment of chutzpah the Italian press, led by Paolo Mereghetti (pictured), has been up in arms about the American raid on the most consequential awards at the Venice Biennale with Sofia Coppola winning for “Somewhere” and Monte Hellman for “Road to nowhere.”

I admit, I knew that neither film was a shoo-in for the top nods, especially with the wealth of prime cinema on the Lido this year. Coppola, who was previously in a relationship with jury president Quentin Tarantino, makes watchable movies but is often afraid of scratching beyond the surface; characters sometimes appear smaller under her microscope. Monte Hellman was an early mentor of Tarantino's (video store geekdom oblige) whose place in cinema history next to Roger Corman is secure--as a cult-movies director.

Today I spent almost half the day inside movie theatres. I started with Korean director Lee Changdong’s "Poetry," competing for the Palme D’Or. Even though I will confess to being less inclined to liking Korean films lately, this was an important film to watch because it is in competition and also I’ve never missed the 8:30am screening. “Poetry” did not disappoint. As much as I did not appreciate the other Korean film in Cannes this year, “House Maid,” the aptly-named “Poetry” is a winner. Mija lives with her grandson in a provincial town—she’s slightly eccentric, dresses chic and takes a poetry course at the city’s cultural center. In her quest for beauty (since that’s the class assignment ) she finds cruelty and deviance. Top honors for best feminine interpretation for Yun Junghee? Bet.

James Franco’s short film “The Clerk’s Tale” will close Critics’ Week at Cannes. Screen Comment’s Ali Naderzad did a close reading with Franco on the Spencer Reece poem it is based on.

Ali Naderzad - “The Clerk’s Tale” has a hint of sweet hopelessness. It reminds me of Thoreau’s famous sentence “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”I found the following sentence especially striking:

He does this because his acceptance is finally complete—and complete acceptance is always bittersweet. And then, there’s the extraordinary. We are changed when the transactions are done— older, dirtier, dwarfed."

“Dog Pound,” twenty nine year-old French director Kim Chapiron’s account […]