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  • Isabella Rossellini Sees Her Mother Everywhere at Cannes

    Isabella Rossellini has had a very special Cannes experience this year. The Cannes organizers have hosted a documentary on Isabella Rossellini’s mother, classic Hollywood film actress Ingrid Bergman. The documentary is called Ingrid Bergman – In Her Own Words.

    Ingrid Bergman is famous for her roles in Murder On the Orient Express, Stromboli, The Bells of St. Mary’s, and of course Casablanca. Her role opposite Humphrey Bogart in that film came 10 years before Isabella Rossellini was even born.

    Ingrid Bergman was married three times. Isabella Rossellini is the product of Ingrid Bergman and her second husband Roberto Rossellini.

    Her mother’s ubiquitous presence over the Cannes Festival is a treat to Isabella Rossellini.

    “She is everywhere. She is the official poster of the festival and she has enormous spread all over Cannes. It’s wonderful,” Isabella Rossellini said. “[it was] very emotional, the size [of the poster] surprised me, and the fact that’s she’s everywhere, in every shop.”

    “She’s like a big angel over Cannes,” Isabella Rossellini’s own daughter Elettra Wiedemann said.

    Putting together the documentary was aided by the fact that Ingrid Bergman made a priority of documenting her life.

    “[She] kept everything, she kept diaries and she kept letters” Isabella Rossellini said..

    One of the topics covered in the documentary is that of a scandal involving Bergman and Isabella’s father, Roberto Rossellini. Both were still married when their affair began. She was seen by many in the United States as a “sexual predator.”

    “Mama wrote a letter to my father saying ‘I want to work with you’ and she ended the letter saying ‘in Italian I can only say ti amo (I love you)’ and of course the press used that to say women are sexual predators,” Rossellini said.

    “In 1949 they made a first film together, Stromboli, and they fell in love and my mother became pregnant with my brother Roberto before she could obtain a divorce.

    “This created a big scandal and she was chased out of America because they felt that foreigners and stars, we come to America, and then behave immorally and are bad examples to the younger generations.”

    “Mama of course was very hurt because she could not see her daughter (Pia) from her first marriage,” Rosellini said. “She was hurt by the scandal, she felt she paid such a high price for it but eventually it was resolved. She made peace with it.”

  • Leila Hatami Scandal One Example of Iranian Misogyny

    Leila Hatami Scandal One Example of Iranian Misogyny

    We told you recently about the scandal that has erupted in Iran over famous Iranian actress Leila Hatami. While attending the Cannes Film Festival , Hatami was greeted by Festival president Gilles Jacob with a customary two-cheek kiss. The kiss was filmed and photographed, as everything surrounding the festival is, and ended up being seen by the folks back home in Iran.

    That’s when the Sharia hit the fan.

    Iranian deputy culture minister Hossein Noushabadi issued a strongly worded statement, accusing Leila Hatami of bringing shame on all Iranian women for her brazen act of public display of affection.

    “Those who attend international events should take heed of the credibility and chastity of Iranians so that a bad image of Iranian women will not be demonstrated to the world,” Noushabadi said.

    Gilles Jacob rode to Hatami’s rescue, claiming that he approached her and greeted her as was his custom, implying that she did not return the kiss.

    But women in Iran are often subject to all manner of rules and denigrations that Western women would never put up with.

    For example, a recent viral video showed girls in Iran dancing to the Pharrell Williams’ hit song “Happy”. The problem was, these women were not wearing the required hijab head covering for women. Now, according to Iranwire, some of these women have been arrested.

    Tehran Chief of Police Hossein Sajedinia said his security forces, “were able to identify [these young people] within two hours, and within six hours had arrested them all.”

    The girls confessed on the evening news that they had been deceived into appearing in the video. The families of the girls were all told that their loved ones would not be released from police custody if they talked to the press about the charges at all.

    The Iranian morality police arrested Zuhara Bani, a 27-year-old medical student, for walking in the park with her boyfriend. Bani hanged herself in the detention facility where she was being held after her arrest.

    Ahmad Ruzbahani, chief of the morality police, said, “If someone walks in the street with his partner and commits an offense, we will deal with it.”

    Image via YouTube

  • The Cannes Film Festival: Why All The Booing?

    The prestigious Cannes Film Festival has earned a reputation for being the place where people come to boo movies.

    That’s not an exaggeration or a joke.

    Every single year there are reports of movies, actors, and directors being roundly mocked and heckled.

    This year victim Ryan Reynolds was so embarrassed by the treatment of his film The Captive that he reportedly skipped an after party for the cast.

    Here’s the kicker: Not all the movies booed are terrible. In fact, some movies go on to be hits or even classics.

    There was one Martin Scorsese film starring Robert DeNiro that was loathed by the Cannes audience but is today quoted by practically everyone and their brother.

    It is a film that went on to be nominated for Four Academy Awards and is considered one of the best movies ever made. Here’s a trailer for that movie:

    Though Taxi Driver received the festival’s Palme d’Or award, the selection of the movie for the honor was booed by attendants at the time.

    Some movies are booed for being bad, but many agree that the hyper criticism of films and awful heckling often goes above and beyond what the actual film deserves.

    So what gives?

    Don Steinberg wrote in his Wall Street Journal article titled Why They Love To Boo At The Cannes Film Festival that “the French are passionate about film” and that “disagreeing with the Cannes jury is an ongoing form of French Resistance”.

    I suppose that’s a polite way of saying the attendants are rude and obnoxious because it’s fashionable to be so and that the entire festival is a tribute to pretentiousness.

    For all the fuss and fanfare, Cannes continues to court a reputation based on a love of tearing down cinema as the ultimate form of appreciating it.

    It sounds like the attendants wouldn’t have it any other way.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Leila Hatami in Trouble in Iran Over Kiss

    Iranian actress Leila Hatami co-starred in the 2011 film, “A Separation,” which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. But now she is in the world spotlight for a very different reason.

    Leila Hatami was attending the Cannes Film Festival where she was greeted by the president of the Cannes Film Festival, Gilles Jacob, with a customary two-cheek kiss. Most of those kisses never even make contact with skin. So what is the big deal?

    “Those who attend international events should take heed of the credibility and chastity of Iranians so that a bad image of Iranian women will not be demonstrated to the world,” said Iranian deputy culture minister Hossein Noushabadi.

    Conservative religious leaders in Iran, those who hold the real power in Iran’s government, interpret the laws that govern the daily lives of Muslims to mean that a woman should show no public sign of affection, even something as nonchalant as that kind of kiss, to anyone other than her husband.

    In fact, there is a severe limit on what couples may do in public, which is enforced by a morality police. One woman was arrested for walking in the park with her boyfriend.

    “If someone walks in the street with his partner and commits an offense, we will deal with it,” said Ahmad Ruzbahani, chief of the morality police.

    That woman, Zuhara Bani, a 27-year-old medical student, hanged herself in the detention facility where she was being held after her arrest.

    Knowing Iran’s draconian stance on such things, Gilles Jacob did the gentlemanly thing and insisted that Leila Hatami did not kiss him. He kissed her.

    “I kissed Mrs Hatami on the cheek. At that moment, for me she represented all Iranian cinema, then she became herself again. The controversy over a usual custom in the West has therefore no reason to be,” he wrote on Twitter.

    Image via YouTube