backEmail us at [email protected] with your name, postal address and phone number. Include ‘Giveaway’ and the name of the item in the subject line.
 |
DVD: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature cultivates a mysteriousness beginning with its setting, the fictional Bad City, a Persian-speaking semi-rural town where dead bodies are daily dragged into a ditch on the outskirts with no explanation. Bad City is simultaneously of the East, with its language, glimpses of Islamic TV and title character’s chador; and of the West, with its stylistic nod to the Western and its allusion in name and noir-ish graphic aesthetic, to Frank Miller’s quintessentially American comic and film series, Sin City. Katerina Sakkas (see the full review).
5 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
 |
DVD: Rosewater
Fans of The Daily Show will know the story behind the making of this labour of love by host Jon Stewart. Starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Rosewater is based on the memoir Then They Came for Me by Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari (with Aimee Molloy), charting Bahari’s imprisonment for 118 days in Iran’s Evin Prison as a consequence of participating in a satirical interview with Daily Show regular Jason Jones. At a time when journalists around the world are subject to harassment, imprisonment and, often, murder, Rosewater is an important film.
5 copies courtesy of Transmission Films
 |
DVD: Leviathan
Directed by the maker of The Return and Elena, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Leviathan was Winner of this year’s Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film, if little appreciated in Putin’s Russia because of the film’s focus on the destructive tensions created by class, faith and corruption and their intertwining. The Mayor of a coastal village near the Barents Sea in a Northern Russian town is in cahoots with developers to compulsorily acquire land, but the owner fights back with the help of a lawyer friend from Moscow. A bold psychological and socio-political thriller, Leviathan is beautifully shot and powerfully acted.
3 copies courtesy of Madman Entertainment
 |
Book: Copyfight
Copyfight is an important book, a response in cultural terms to the demolition of artists’ incomes, and thereby the arts, occasioned by illegal downloading reinforced by Copyleft rhetoric about creative freedom—the freedom in fact for people who otherwise would not steal to righteously plunder the works of filmmakers and writers, and freedom for the likes of Spotify to make the most out of content providers’ copyright property by paying them as little as possible. Editor Phillipa McGuinness’ witty, informed introduction surveys the issues and the vigorous essays that follow, by Linda Jaivin, Joes Borghino, Marc Fennell, John Birmingham and others, assay both sides of the argument.
3 copies courtesy of NewSouth Publishing
RealTime issue #127 June-July 2015 pg. 56
© ; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]
