The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| United Nations thanks Hollywood amid fight to save Syria’s heritage Posted: 05 Feb 2014 07:55 PM PST  Appolonio di Giovanni's 'Triumph of Marcus Furius Cammillus, A Cassone Panel' on display at Sotheby's auction house in New York. Paintings looted by the Nazis during World War Two and retrieved by the Monuments Men, were among the tens of thousands of works recovered by the art experts. – Reuters pic, February 6, 2014.The United Nations thanked Hollywood yesterday for raising awareness of cultural crimes during conflict with the movie "The Monuments Men" as the world body tries to stop the pillaging of Syria's heritage during the country's three-year civil war. Unesco, the UN cultural, education and science arm, has in the past month started to train customs officials and police in neighbouring Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan to look for the trafficking of cultural objects out of Syria, said Francesco Bandarin, assistant director-general for culture at the agency. Bandarin said the new Hollywood film - which tells the story of experts tasked with retrieving artistic treasure stolen by the Nazis during World War Two - would raise global awareness of the illegal trade in artifacts stolen during more recent conflicts, such as Syria, Mali and Libya. "I would like to thank Hollywood for bringing this issue to global attention because sometimes Hollywood is more powerful than all the UN system put together," Bandarin said of the film, which opens in North America tomorrow and stars George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray and Cate Blanchett. "This issue of heritage protection will be on everybody's mind and for us this is a tremendous opportunity," he told reporters at the United Nations in New York. The European Union gave Unesco 2.5 million euros (RM 11.2 million) this week to establish a team in Beirut to gather better information on the situation in Syria, to fight the trafficking of artifacts and to raise awareness internationally and locally, he said. Statues, coins Syria's history stretches back through the great empires of the Middle East to the dawn of human civilization, but cultural sites and buildings around the country, such as Aleppo's Umayyad Mosque, have been looted, damaged or destroyed in the conflict. Bandarin said some objects had already been recovered in Beirut, including statues that had been illegally excavated in the desert town of Palmyra. Illegal archeological excavations across the country pose a great cultural threat, he said. "Most of the objects that we saw are essentially statues or parts of statues. We know also that other objects that are more difficult to retrieve, like coins and metal objects, are circulating," he said of what was found in Beirut. The Syrian government has told Unesco it had emptied the country's 34 museums and moved the contents to safer places. Maamoun Abdulkarim, head of Syria's antiquities and museums told Reuters last year that tens of thousands of artifacts spanning 10,000 years of history were removed to specialist warehouses to avoid a repeat of the storming of Baghdad's museum by looters following the 2003 U.S. invasion and overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The United Nations says more than 100,000 people have been killed in Syria's conflict, which began in March 2011 with popular protests against President Bashar al-Assad and spiraled into civil war after a crackdown by security forces. – Reuters, February 6, 2014. |
| Berlin film fest to open with Wes Anderson world premiere Posted: 05 Feb 2014 07:34 PM PST The high-profile opening movie with an all-star cast led by British actor Ralph Fiennes marks a coup for the Berlinale, Europe's first major cinema showcase of the year. The 11-day festival will screen more than 400 productions from around the world in its various sections before a jury led by US producer James Schamus ("Brokeback Mountain") hands out the main awards among 20 contenders. "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is Anderson's eighth feature and follows his bittersweet first-love story "Moonrise Kingdom", which launched the Cannes film festival in 2012 to become a critical and box office hit. It will be the third time in the Berlinale competition for Anderson, who has strived to maintain quirky indie sensibilities while filming with bigger and bigger budgets, following "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and "The Royal Tenenbaums". Anderson has lined up another stellar ensemble cast including Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Lea Seydoux, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton along with Edward Norton, Mathieu Amalric and Owen Wilson to light up Berlin's red carpet. Online buzz from industry types given a sneak preview of "Grand Budapest" indicated that the picture is one of the strongest by Anderson, a three-time Oscar nominee. The Texas-born director, 44, said he took inspiration from film classics by Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder while tracking the escapades of an early 20th-century concierge of the old school, Gustave H, against the backdrop of a continent in turmoil. "When the adventures of the main character begin, I decided to take some orientation from German and Austrian directors who emigrated to Hollywood in the '30s," he told Berlin magazine Tip ahead of the festival. A lost world The story revolves around the theft of a priceless Renaissance painting and the battle for an enormous family fortune left by dowager countess Madame D, played by Swinton who in a film trailer is seen aged with makeup beyond recognition. Fiennes, who reportedly took the lead role when Johnny Depp bowed out, appears as Gustave, who is accused of Madame D's murder by her scheming son (Brody). Murray, who has appeared in all of Anderson's feature films apart from his debut, plays a member of a secret order of concierges which comes to Gustave's rescue. Although set in an imaginary Central European country called Zubrowka, the action in "Grand Budapest" traces a familiarly tragic historical arc from the Belle Epoque to fascism and then communist dictatorship. The film was based in part on the stories and memoirs of Austrian author Stefan Zweig mourning the lost world of his youth, Anderson said. Festival director Dieter Kosslick told reporters last week that apart from being a major new work from a popular director, the movie was the right choice in a year in which Europe marks the 100th anniversary of World War I as well as 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell. "There is a lot of German history in this movie, and that goes for many of the films to be shown here, regardless of where they are from," he said. Murray also stars in George Clooney's "The Monuments Men" about an elite unit of Allied soldiers fighting to rescue precious artworks from the Nazis, which will screen Saturday out of competition at the Berlinale. Both pictures were shot in Germany with themes that resonate deeply in the country, Kosslick noted, pointing to the recent discovery of hundreds of priceless artworks stashed in a Munich flat, many of them believed to have been looted by the Germans during World War II. Another hot ticket outside the race for the main prizes is the extended director's cut of Danish provocateur Lars von Trier's no-holds-barred study of sex addiction, "Nymphomaniac Volume I". Schamus will be joined on the jury by two-time Oscar-winning Austrian actor Christoph Waltz ("Django Unchained"), US actress Greta Gerwig ("Frances Ha") and Hong Kong star Tony Leung ("In the Mood for Love"). Last year the drama "Child's Pose", set among the monied class of post-communist Romania, captured the Golden Bear. – AFP, February 6, 2014. |
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