film diplomacy
The world has a new epidemic on its hand: drug-resistant tuberculosis. We're not talking about the kind of TB that doctors can cure with a few weeks of standard antibiotics. This disease is way more dangerous. It outwits the best medicines we have against it and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to kill in a single person. Drug-resistant TB is on the rise around the world. And it's even cropping up here in the United States.
Monzer Darwish is a 23-year-old graphic designer and metal fan from Al Salamiyah, Syria, a district near Homs. For the last five months he’s been travelling around the country and visiting refugees in Lebanon for a documentary he’s making about underground metal bands in war-torn Syria. Needless to say, it's a tough gig.
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Three Arab countries have banned the Hollywood film "Noah" on religious grounds even before its worldwide premiere and several others are expected to follow suit, a representative of Paramount Pictures told Reuters on Saturday.
Roughly half of Venezuela's TV audience was not able to watch supporting actor winner Jared Leto express solidarity with all the "dreamers" in Ukraine and Venezuela as he accepted his Oscar. That's because the private channel Venevision, for the first time in several decades of carrying the Academy Awards, did not broadcast the show Sunday night.
The American director of the chilling Indonesian documentary “The Act of Killing” has won dozens of awards so far for the film and could add one of the movie industry’s most coveted honors Sunday at the Oscars. But so far, the director, Joshua Oppenheimer, has not succeeded in accomplishing what he considered a greater goal — jump-starting a debate in Indonesia that will compel the government to finally open a formal inquiry into one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.
Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron appears among the odds-on favorites to take home a Best Director Oscar on Sunday for his space thriller “Gravity.” The 52-year-old Mexico City native, Cuaron gained fame for his 2001 film “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” an insightful look at Mexican youth struggling with class, prejudice and sexuality issues.