The second annual Freedom to Create Prize, which was presented in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London last night, has been won by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The internationally renowned and prolific Iranian filmmaker, 52, downed tools earlier this year to become an official mouthpiece outside Iran for the presidential candidate Mir-Mossein Mousavi.
film buzz
ash.smyth
The Regal Cinema is a charming old place. At 300 rupees for a box seat (£1.50 on a good day for the SLR), you can put your feet up, sip your Fanta in style and, peeping through the plush velour curtains that separate you from both hoi polloi and screen (if not from the nouveaux in box 9), get a disconcertingly exact idea of how the place must have felt when the young Queen Elizabeth II sat in this very seat, shortly after the place was built for her.
joe.muggs
It's genuinely sad that last night's proceedings are not higher on the cultural agenda and that the gleaming new Kings Place auditorium was only half full. But as one of the participants pointed out, 50 years on from C P Snow's Two Cultures, there is still an arts establishment for whom sci-fi means Star Trek, and the ludicrous guff of Independence Day touches more of a nerve than Arthur C Clarke's visionary treatment of the same subject-matter in Childhood's End.
sheila.johnston
Upon emerging from Sheffield railway station, one of the first things you clap eyes on is Andrew Motion’s 2007 poem What If? unfurling down the side of one of the university tower blocks and gleaming faintly in the last of the autumn sun. With its exhortation to “greet and understand what lies ahead... The lives which wait as yet unseen, unread,” it’s not a bad incidental epigram for a festival of documentary film-making whose trailer was inspired by the city’s cosmopolitan identity. Doc/Fest opened on Wednesday with Mat Whitecross’s Moving to Mars (pictured below), about a family of Burmese refugees transposed to Sheffield, and, by the time it drew to an end last night, had included 120 films from around the world. But there is a second, almost entirely separate Sheffield Film Festival, running alongside the traditional one of screenings, prizes and audience Q&As, a much more inward-looking one.
ellin.stein
The Victorian Gothic (with 1970s additions) maze of Cheltenham Ladies’ College is a far cry from the sun-blasted soundstages of Los Angeles, particularly at this time of year when it’s surrounded by deep piles of swirling autumn leaves. Nevertheless, this past week saw the high-ceilinged, wood-panelled College corridors filled with over 400 scriptwriters, both aspiring and established, rushing to the seminars, panels and pitching sessions offered as part of the Cheltenham Screenwriters' Festival, the only event of its type in the UK.
Tom Birchenough
Russians are prone to ask the big questions, and among them, resonating periodically and patriotically, from film studio corridors to the Kremlin itself, is, "What is the state of our national film industry?" A partial answer is provided by a fleet of films in three forthcoming British festivals. And the forecast? Much darkness visible. But a rare chance to see five classic Soviet musicals from the 1930s to the 1940s on the big screen in Britain does something to brighten the picture.
sheila.johnston
Last night I was drinking cappuccino with Britain's answer to Robert Redford in a Soho coffee bar. Elliot Grove and I go back a long way: we first met in 1993 when Grove launched Raindance, London's version of Sundance, the premier American independent film festival founded by Redford. Since then Sundance has increasingly been attacked for selling out to Hollywood. By contrast Raindance, now in its 17th year, is still going strong and retains an air of authentic independence.
sheila.johnston
Does Britain have too many film festivals? Not so very long ago, there were only two of these games around: the London Film Festival - which unveiled its full line-up this morning and begins on 14 October - and Edinburgh. Now, though, there are hundreds.