Eleanor Burke and Ron Eyal’s debut feature film Stranger Things has won the Grand Jury prize for Best Narrative Feature at the 2011 Slamdance Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2010 Woodstock Film Festival where it won the festival’s award for Best Narrative Feature. Additionally, Burke and Eyal were recently selected as one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine. Please see www.strangerthingsfilm.com for more information.

 

Set on the south coast of England, Stranger Things tells the story of Oona (Bridget Collins), a young woman who returns to her mother’s house, a small run-down cottage in a quiet village on the south coast of England. Her mother has died several months previously and Oona is left to sort out her belongings and deal with the property. While there, she reaches out to a stranger, Mani (Adeel Akhtar, Four Lions), a mysterious homeless man of Middle-Eastern origin, whom she invites to stay in her garden shed. Despite the space between them, Oona and Mani gradually form an unusual intimacy. However, Mani also has a past that pulls upon him, and threatens to disturb the bubble Oona and Mani have created around them.

By Ed Meza

BERLIN – Cine Foundation International, the recently launched film shingle and human rights NGO, has joined the call for the release of Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof with a wide-ranging initiative that includes protest films and an innovative tool for the global film community to protest their imprisonment.
 The two filmmakers were sentenced by an Iranian court in December to six years in prison for “propaganda against the system” and banned from making films for 20 years.