A week-long festival of African film has opened in Rome, bringing stories of love, music, but mainly of the pains and ravages of war from the African continent. The Panafricana Festival opened Wednesday evening with the showing of "Sometimes in April," a film on the 1994 Rwandan genocide directed by Haiti's Raoul Peck and co-produced by US cable channel HBO. Agence France Presse reports.

Gail Berman, who has crafted the prime-time schedule for the Fox Broadcasting Co. since 2000, was named president of Paramount Studios Wednesday. The announcement had been expected since last week, when Paramount said it was considering Berman for a position at the movie studio and Fox named Peter Ligouri to succeed her at the network. Berman will start her new role sometime in May. Gary Gentile reports for A.P.

It's one of the most popular sporting events in the world. You've probably never heard of it. The Baja 1000 is the longest point-to-point race on the planet. On Wednesday night, the documentary "Dust to Glory" premiered, celebrating that 30-year racing tradition. The Baja 1000 is an off-road sprint that starts in the northern part of the Baja California peninsula in Ensenada along the Pacific Ocean and finishes in La Paz at the southern tip of Baja along the Sea of Cortez. Michael Cidoni reports for A.P.

Dogme, the back-to-basics film credo, is 10 years old. But did it really change the way movies are made? Steve Rose talks to some of its friends and foes. The Guardian reports.

This assault on our precincts is the Fearless Tales Genre Fest. San Francisco is traditionally a haven for the international or social-issue film festival, but this marks the largest horror-fantasy showcase in memory for movies that dare to deal with humankind's darkest side. It opens Tuesday at the Victoria Theater (16th near Mission) and Thursday at the Castro and continues at both venues through Saturday. It will be a decidedly odd mixture of classics and untested fodder with 29 features and 17 short subjects. John Stanley reports for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The action comedy Kung Fu Hustle and Wong Kar-Wai's drama 2046 were the big winners at this year's Hong Kong Film Awards, which took place on Sunday.
Both films won six awards each, with Kung Fu Hustle, which had a record 16 nominations, being named best film. BBC reports.

California State University in Chico suspended a fraternity after its members admitted they participated in an adult film at their off-campus residence. The national chapter of Phi Kappa Tau also suspended the school chapter and is investigating the taping several months ago by Shane's World, an adult film producer known for using college students in its videos. The Associated Press reports.

The Walt Disney Studios and Bob & Harvey Weinstein announce agreement concluding the Weinstein's current deal with Disney. The Weinstein's will remain co-chairs on a non-exclusive basis through September 30, 2005, while new Miramax Films management to be announced by Walt Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook in July.

The Weinsteins will launch their new company and begin production, development, and acquisition for the new venture. More details on specifics to be announced in the coming weeks.

Disney to retain Miramax Films name and Miramax and Dimension libraries,
while the Weinstein's will take the Dimension label to new company.

San Francisco independent filmmakers Xandra Castleton and David Munro are working to get a feature-length comedy, "Full Grown Men," into production. Here is the latest installment of their diary..

Dear Diary: Thursday at midnight David and I found ourselves walking through the set of the filming of "Rent," which was occupying several blocks surrounding Tomkins Square Park... The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The producer of an Academy Award-nominated documentary short claims that this year's Oscar-winning film in the same category deceptively used. In a letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, "Sister Rose's Passion" producer Steve Kalafer said that "Mighty Times: The Children's March" failed to disclose which parts of the film were re-enacted. The academy allows documentaries to contain some recreations. A.P. reports.

Bll Heidbreder, a cinephile who lives in Manhattan, catches 10 art films a week on average, a quota maintained for the last 20 years, ever since his college days in Berkeley, Calif. For someone who doesn't make a living as a film critic, that is a lot of leisure time spent in front of a screen. To gratify his habit, he stints on food: dinner is often just two slabs of wheat bread mortared together with peanut butter.

Some of these details about Mr. Heidbreder are already a matter of public knowledge, at least to that tiny segment of the public acquainted with his role in the film "Cinemania," a study of five compulsive New York cinephiles. The documentary's creators, Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak, somehow inveigled this collection of loners to tell their stories directly to the camera. Howard Kaplan reports in the New York Times.

Thousands of weeping Egyptians have said farewell to Ahmed Zaki, one of the country's best-loved actors, who died in Cairo on Sunday aged 55. BBC reports.

In the New York Times, Charles McGrath talks with Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro about their new doc, "Murderball," playing this weekend at New Directors/New Films:

"We're not sports guys, and we didn't want to make a sports film," Mr. Rubin says now. "We wanted to make a movie about guys who had broken their necks." "Murderball" does indeed trace the rehabilitations of several players from severe cervical injuries, many of them sustained in freak accidents involving alcohol, but it's a sports movie all the same. It not only touches on just about every theme on the sports flick checklist - teamwork, adversity, joy of victory, agony of defeat, etc. - but also repeatedly makes the point that being wheelchair bound does not necessarily liberate one from the basic jock mind-set.

This year's Cannes festival will feature a new programme dedicated to world cinema, it was announced this week. The event, entitled All the World's Cinemas, aims to promote non-Hollywood productions and foster new talent. "[It] is meant for the young cinéma d'auteur, for all newcomers in their fields, and not just from the developing world," said Gilles Jacob, the festival's president. The Guardian reports.

Their romance captivated the world — an American movie queen, a European prince and their enchanted life in a hilltop palace overlooking the Mediterranean. The mystique of Prince Rainier III and Grace Kelly has endured the two decades since her tragic death, in part because the 81-year-old ruler never remarried and filled his tiny principality with countless memorials to the woman he loved. Some see Rainier's ailing health as the final chapter in the fairy tale of Monaco — a subject that draws a mixture of sadness and smiles in the place where it all started. Jocelyn Gecker reports for A.P.

Ask Los Angeles filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña about Asian American film and she thinks of cleaning products. "When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1960s, I remember seeing a floor wax commercial on TV," she says. "There was one Asian face in it, and my entire family came running out to see this one-minute commercial -- even my grandmother on her walker." Much later, in 1980, when she was just out of college, Tajima-Peña was to remember that rare "Asian sighting" as she became part of a surging societal ferment for a greater Asian American presence in television. The result of that activism, San Francisco's National Asian American Telecommunications Association, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Annie Nakao reports for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The carpets are red, the drinks are flowing and the dresses were in the Oscar acceptance speech mould. Made to make an impression. So why stage the premiere in the middle of an area so blighted by poverty?Well, the event was launching a very special film on the South African public. And there are plenty of reasons why "U Carmen E Khayelitsha" is special. Nick Miles reports about the premiere of "Carmen" for BBC.

When Zézé Gamboa's powerful Angolan film "The Hero" won the World Cinema Dramatic Jury Prize of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, it came as a surprise to many festival attendees that Angola had a film industry, much less one that could command world attention. In fact, it barely does. "The Hero," like many African films, represents a collaboration of European technical skill and African storytelling, and was one of only three films produced by that war-ravaged, poverty-stricken country last year. Dave Kehr reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

Whether they come crawling out of television screens or slither malevolently from gloomy bedroom closets, Japanese ghosts are emerging to haunt movie audiences around the world. The Japanese-directed horror film "The Ring Two" grabbed the top spot at U.S. movie theaters last weekend, following a pattern set by "The Ring," and "The Grudge," two remakes of Japanese horror films that have racked up spooky successes at the box office. Isabelle Reynolds reports for Reuters.

At Film Comment, Amy Taubin hopes to solve the problems with The Sundance Film Festival:

It's not that Sundance actively sold out to Hollywood so much as it put up no resistance when Hollywood invaded bearing bags of gold and took over the festival for its own ends while scores of embedded entertainment reporters gushed about the brave new world of independent film.

My radical solution for cutting back the crowds of suits and hanger-ons, the corporate branding, and the entertainment news coverage would be to internationalize the main competition. Since festivals are identified with their main competition, Sundance could transform itself pretty quickly from a de facto tool of the industry to a champion of worldwide progressive film culture.

Chris Albrecht, chairman and CEO, HBO, and Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, co-chairmen and co-CEOs, New Line Cinema, announced today that the two companies will form a new, jointly-owned, theatrical distribution company to release independent films which will be run by former Newmarket Films President Bob Berney. [Source: HBO/New Line press release.]

Brian Brooks' story with initial information has been published on indieWIRE.com.

Africans were the heroes of Austria's national film festival at a time when the far-right's racist slogans are again littering Vienna. Agence France Presse reports.

Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaeki will over the next few months shoot a sequel to his "The Man Without a Past", which won a Cannes film festival (news - web sites) award in 2002, media reported. "Vartija" (The Guard), which will describe "a security guard searching for happiness in the concrete jungle of Helsinki", will be the final instalment in Kaurismaeki's trilogy on unemployment, following "Drifting Clouds" (1996) and "The Man Without a Past," which won the 2002 jury prize at Cannes. Agence France Presse reports.

Many of the movies in the 34th New Directors/New Films series, a joint presentation of the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, reach New York from other stops on the global festival circuit. One imagines their canisters arriving, like old-fashioned steamer trunks, covered with stickers bearing witness to their zigzagging journeys, from Cannes, Toronto and Park City, of course, but often by way of places like Pune, India; Thessaloniki, Greece; Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic; Haifa, Israel; and Pusan, Korea. A.O. Scott reports in the New York Times on the festival (free subscription required to view).

Film premiere glamour arrives in a tough South African township on Wednesday as an award-winning movie of the opera "Carmen" opens for a home audience usually too poor for a night at the cinema. The South African film adaptation, which took top honors at the Berlin Film Festival in February, will open in Khayelitsha -- the shabby Cape Town township in which it is set -- and play in townships across the country before moving to mainstream cinemas. Rebecca Harrison reports for Reuters.

Quebec films and their makers overpowered last night's 25th annual Genie Awards, handily grabbing almost every major prize, including best picture for the quirky 2003 animated feature, "Les Triplettes de Belville." Gayle MacDonald reports in the Globe and Mail.

A film-maker has withdrawn his documentary about Singapore's leading opposition figure from the city-state's annual film festival, after the government warned him its political content could land him in jail. Martyn See's short film focuses on Chee Soon Juan, a frequent government critic who was ordered to pay S$500,000 (£160,875) to Singapore's first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, and former leader Goh Chok Tong for defamation during the 2001 elections. The Guardian reports.

Inside a giant warehouse ringed by trailers and generators on the outskirts of this frozen city, dozens of Mayan warriors stood ready, all armed with spears. The polyglot atmosphere on the movie set thickened at every turn: bare-bottomed men who spoke Mayan received directorial instructions in Spanish from Americans who also have enough French to make nice with the local crew of "The Fountain." The movie is a science-fiction epic that spans three historical periods and rides on a bit of time travel. It is directed by the Brooklyn-born Darren Aronofsky. David Carr reports for the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

Growing up in 1970s Belfast may have had its troubles, but a new film aims to tell a story of hope and friendship. "Mickybo and Me" is being premiered in Belfast on Tuesday, and there are high hopes that it can promote Northern Ireland as a prime location for movie makers. BBC reports.

"End of the Century," which debuted to critical acclaim in theaters last August and is now available on DVD. The band members, whose song catalogue includes such studies of the human psyche as "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment" and "Psycho Therapy," are unflinchingly honest in their self-assessments. "It's accurate," guitarist Johnny Ramone said of the finished product before his death. "It left me disturbed." Larry McShane profiles "End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones" in the A.P.

Woody Allen has the manner of a man who is constantly -- albeit patiently -- explaining himself. High on the list of behaviors the director finds himself compelled to defend is his idiosyncratic approach to moviemaking. For example, he is known for showing his actors only their own parts -- their "sides" -- while keeping them in the dark about the rest of the script. John Clark speaks with Woody Allen at a roundtable for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The success of Oscar-nominated comedy "Sideways" has made wine movies the order of the day, but the director of "Mondovino" says his documentary about the business is no feel-good wine film. Claudia Parsons reports for Reuters.

A film about post-conflict Serbia - with a young, autistic actress in one of the lead roles - is being shown in London as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. "A Midwinter Night's Dream" is a dark piece by Serb director Goran Paskaljevic which focuses on a man still haunted by his wartime memories. Geoff Adams-Spink reports for BBC.

Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures. The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film's bottom line - or a producer's decision to make a documentary in the first place. Cornelia Dean reports in the New York Times (free subscription required to view).

After a brief incarnation in the early 1950s and a short-lived revival in the 1980s, 3-D movies are now getting serious consideration among filmmakers who want to send images leaping off the movie screen and into the audience.
"Star Wars" creator George Lucas and "Titanic" director James Cameron were among those promoting a new digital alteration that converts two-dimensional movies into 3-D. David Germain reports in A.P.

Changes in US movie-watching habits are giving new hope to foreign film producers, according to the organisers of a French film festival being held in New York this week. Seventeen films and stars such as Catherine Deneuve are being used at the "Rendez-vous with French Cinema" week which ends Sunday. Organisers expect about a third of the films to find a US distributor through the festival. Agence France Presse reports.

Woody Allen (news), a comic symbol of neurotic New Yorkers to film buffs everywhere, gives vent to a new syndrome with Friday's release of "Melinda and Melinda." Call it "opus envy" -- a condition in which a highly esteemed comedic artist questions his own value compared to "serious" dramatists. Larry Fine reports for Reuters.

Director George Lucas had a message for fans as he previewed a glimpse of the final tale in the billion dollar "Star Wars" film franchise: leave the lightsabers at home, but don't forget the tissues. "It's not like the first one. It's more emotional," said the director of space adventure, "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," which arrives in theaters May 19. Edie Riggins reports for Reuters.

Lars von Trier is taking a break from film-making to write a sitcom. The Palme d'Or winning director has teamed up with top Danish comedians Casper Christensen and Frank Hvam to create a single episode of their improvised comedy Klovn (Clown) for television channel TV2 Zulu. Paul Arendt reports for The Guardian.

With sexually explicit scenes featuring full-frontal nudity and oral sex, Tsai Ming-liang knows "The Wayward Cloud" is pushing the limits of Taiwan's censors and his audience. But, to his surprise, the award-winning film will be shown in its entirety when it premieres in Taiwan on Friday. Alice Hung reports for Reuters.

The second-most popular film in Japanese history is set for a U.S. release in June, but it's unclear whether American audiences will fall for its magical charms. "Howl's Moving Castle," an animated fantasy, is the latest work from Hayao Miyazaki, whose previous film "Spirited Away" was Japan's biggest-ever box office hit. Reuters reports.

Frustrated with a languishing stock price, media conglomerate Viacom Inc. announced late Wednesday that it is considering a plan to split into two companies to allow investors to value its businesses separately. A breakup of the New York-based media company, whose properties include CBS, MTV, VH1 and the Paramount movie studio, would also solve the question of who would succeed Sumner Redstone as CEO. The company said it would provide more details on its plans in the second quarter. Seth Sutel reports in A.P.

If you want to start a fight, mention the documentary "Mondovino" to people in the wine business and step back. The film, by Jonathan Nossiter, argues that the homogenizing force of global commerce is threatening the distinctiveness of local cultures. But like "Fahrenheit 9/11" it has so polarized its audience that attention has veered away from the issues it raises. Instead debate has centered on Mr. Nossiter and whether he has portrayed his subjects responsibly or used them unfairly to further his argument. Eric Asimov reports in the New York Times on the film and its controversy.

Actor Bruno Ganz wouldn't be the first person to come to mind to play the part of Adolf Hitler, but he does just that in "Downfall." Here's a chat with the actor. G. Allen Johnson reports in the San Francisco Chronicle.

[The British government said it] will introduce tax reliefs to benefit both low- and large-budget British films. Draft legislation announced last year proposed new tax relief that would fund 20% of production costs for British films with budgets up to £20 million. BBC reports.

Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" on Tuesday was cited by a report as the cause of an upsurge last year in Canadian anti-Semitic attacks, now running at a record pace. Etan Vlessing reports for Reuters.

Family crowds spoke louder than fans of racy stories or shoot-'em-up action flicks last year at movie theaters, with PG-rated films hauling in more money than R-rated ones for the first time in 20 years. David Germain reports in A.P.