Jafar Panahi’s Cannes victory is a wonderful moment for an amazingly courageous film-maker

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Panahi has endured years of harassment from the Iranian authorities but has created a tremendous body of work; his Palme d’Or is richly deserved Iranian director Jafar Panahi wins Palme d’Or at Cannes for It Was Just an Accident In the end, the Cannes Palme d’Or went to the most courageous film director in the world . It was a very satisfying grownup decision, favouring a remarkable and utterly individual film-maker: the director and democracy campaigner Jafar Panahi, an artist who unlike any other director in the Cannes competition really has suffered, taken real risks for cinema and spoken truth to power – and endured arrest and imprisonment for his pains. He has created a rich canon of work which has told the world about Iranian society and the Iranian mind with a subtlety and depth that we are never going to get from the TV news. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/faZuEUS via IFTTT
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Tom Priestley obituary

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Film editor who was nominated for an Oscar for Deliverance and sought to promote his father JB Priestley’s writing

Tom Priestley, who has died aged 91, knew early on that he wanted a career in the arts. “But my father had covered so much territory, there wasn’t much left,” he said. He was the sixth child and only son of the playwright and novelist JB Priestley.

The discipline he eventually chose, and excelled at, was film editing. He won a Bafta for Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), Karel Reisz’s dark comedy about conformity and rebellion, starring David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave. He was also nominated for an Oscar for John Boorman’s thriller Deliverance (1972), with Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight. It was adapted by James Dickey from his own novel about four friends who are terrorised by Appalachian locals while on a canoeing trip.

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