Jafar Panahi Rome Honor
he United States of America, presenting characteristic American landscapes, with the first filmed entirely through a car windshield and the second composed of static observations from across the fifty states. “Even at the age of 80, James Benning continues to be remarkably productive,” said the Film Fest Gent of the director’s latest work Little Boy, a film that looks back at the past to warn about the future, from the perspective of a little boy.
Jafar Panahi will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Rome Film Festival in October, with Oscar-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore set to handover the prize. The Iranian director will also present his Cannes 2025 Palme d’Or winning film It Was Just An Accident as part of the 20th edition running from October 15 to 26. Started out as an assistant to Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi’s debut feature film The White Balloon, won the Camera d’Or in 1995. In 2000, he won the Venice Golden Lion for the The Circle, followed by the Cannes Un Certain Regard Jury Prize in 2003 for Crimson Gold. Panahi became caught in the crosshairs of the Iranian authorities in 2009 after he was arrested while attending a ceremony commemorating a demonstrator killed during protests against the re-election of Mahmud Ahmadinezad. Nonetheless, Panahi has continued to find ways to make films, directing Closed Curtain (2013), Berlinale Golden Bear winner Taxi Teheran (2015), 3 Faces (2018) and No Bears (2022). After spells in and out of jail in 2022 and 2023, Panahi finally made it to Cannes in May 2025 with It Was Just An Accident.
Berlinale Unveils ‘Lost In The 90s’ Retrospective
The Berlinale is lining up a retrospective devoted to the creative surge in cinema in the 1990s in Berlin and Eastern Europe, but also internationally, sparked by the fall of the Berlin Wall for its 2026 edition. Entitled ‘Lost in the 90s’, the program will feature works by Ulrike Ottinger, Harun Farocki, Chantal Akerman, Werner Herzog, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and John Singleton among others. It is curated by Heleen Gerritsen, the new Artistic Director of the Deutsche Kinemathek “The starting point… is Berlin after the fall of the Wall, a period marked by upheaval and new beginnings both nationally and internationally. Genre and visual experiments, and the rebellious spirit of independent cinema characterize the cinema of this next Berlinale Retrospective,” said Berlinale Director Tricia Tuttle. The Retrospective will be divided into three sections, “Berlin”, “East Meets West”, and “The End of History”, with the third part touching on the rise of the slacker and other subcultures and portraits of Generation X, such as Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990), Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991) and the films of Todd Solondz. “Some 430 million people in the early 1990s were simultaneously and directly impacted by the period of upheaval in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of crises and conflicts but, at the same time, borders and archives were opening up. Artists from both East and West reacted to current events and faced each other,” said Gerritsen.