Name Javrer Bardem Birthdate and birthplace 1 March 1969. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Canary Islands. Spain.
Background The youngest member of a family of Spanish cinema actors. Bardem was six years old when he appeared in his first feature film. Made famous by his studly role in JJ Bigas Luna's JamOn, JamOn and Golden Balls. he was determined not to be typecast in beefcake roles. He went on to win many accolades for his phenomenal turns in films like Perdito Durango. Before Night Falls and Collateral.
What he up to now? He's in Alejandro Amenabar's impressive biopic The Sea Inside about Ramon Sampedro. who fought a 30 year campaign in favour of euthanasia and his own right to die.
What he says about playing Sampedro ‘Being stuck in my own body I got a small idea of how he must have felt. It was easier than it looks thOugh. it was just abOut breathing deeply. concentrating on that and putting the energy up there. And not be overwhelmed by any emotion. When you or I get angry we can lash out and leave the room. But when he got angry he couldn’t so it was important to avoid high emotions or even down emotions. It was like more equanimous.‘
Interesting fact Javier, his mother. Pilar Bardem and his siblings. MOnica Bardem and Carlos Bardem. often appear in each other's films.
I The Sea Inside is on selected release from Fri 77 Feb. See interview. page 4 7 and review. page 45.
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fields. which they then trade to middlemen at a bazaar. As with Samira Makhmalbaf‘s Blackboards. which also unfolded in a no man‘s land near the lraqi border. this
film’s impact derives from the stark potency of its
The first feature film to emerge from Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. the anguished Turtles Can Fly is set in a refugee camp on the Iraqi-Turkish border. just before the US invasion in the spring of 2003. Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi (who made an impressive debut with A Time for Drunken Horses) focuses on a handful of orphaned children in their efforts to survive the appalling conditions. They include the entrepreneurial 13-year-old fixer Satellite (Soran Ebrahim). the armless clairvoyant Henkov (Hirsh Feyssal) and the latter‘s traumatised sister Agrin (Avaz Latif), herself responsible for a blind toddler called Rega.
Turtles Can Fly vividly immerses the viewer in the nightmarish realities of daily existence in this makeshift community, which is situated amidst a forbidding natural landscape. There's no running water or electricity, there's
final tragedy.
cinematic imagery. A long-shot shows what appears to be livestock grazing near a jagged tree. before a close- up reveals that the animals are in fact youngsters collecting mines. Flashbacks reconstruct the suffering endured by Agrin at the hands of Saddam's pillaging soldiers. while Henkov‘s prophetic dreams portend the
Using an entirely non-professional cast. Ghobadi shows how his characters. despite the terrifying circumstances in which they exist. display a touching concern for one another's safety and well being. Unlike the American ‘liberators'. who drop leaflets from helicopters proclaiming: ‘We will make this country a paradise . . . We are here to take away your sorrow.‘ only to drive in their tanks and trucks through the chaos of the Kurdish settlement, presumably in search of their
the risk of gas attacks. and kids use their bare hands (and next military objective. (Tom Dawson) sometimes teeth) to defuse land mines in the nearby I -4 ' ~ - .' ..' ' -' - v' -' ~ ' - -'
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