The Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) announced today that multiple Academy Award® winning actor and humanitarian Sean Penn will receive the coveted Golden Icon Award at this year’s Festival, taking place September 22nd – October 2nd. The announcement was made by ZFF Directors Karl Spoerri and Nadja Schildknecht. Serving as the Festival’s most prestigious symbol of recognition, awarded in appreciation of the lifetime achievements of an actor or actress, the Golden Icon Award will be...

THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED You've heard of the Warner brothers and the Baldwin brothers.....well, make way for the Safdie brothers, the directorial team of Benny and Josh Safdie, American indie's dynamic duo. The BAMcinématek located at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York has turned the asylum over to the inmates for the eclectic film series titled Emotional Sloppy Manic Cinema: Films Directed and Selected by Benny and Josh Safdie. The series, a collection of 19...

The Smogdance Film Festival will expand its program this year to include informal discussions with filmmakers, whose work will be screened during the three-day festival, April 24 to 26, at the historic Pomona Fox Theater in Pomona, California. Among the filmmakers scheduled to attend are Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Saul Landau; director Paul Hendry (and most of his cast and crew) from the comedy, The Re-Bourne Identity; and Mexican director Alonso Alvarez Barreda, whose film, The St...

6th Zagreb Film Festival www.zagrebfilmfestival.com hosted Aida Begic, Bosnian female film director, with her post war story “Snijeg” (“Snow”). Her first film “Snow” is actually pretty narrative feature, and is a winner of The 2008 Cannes Critic’s Week Grand Prize. It’s a story about the recent blood stain of ex Yugoslavian Bosnian history-the massacre of Bosnian Moslem. The traumatic impact of which is still being felt by its widowed and orphaned survivors. Even if the film is v...