Over the past two decades, Abbas Kiarostami - the Iranian film director of Where is the Friend's House?, Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees, Close Up, A Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Ten, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love - has appeared regularly at festivals and on campuses, where he has worked closely for several days with young filmmakers, shepherding them and their projects, sending them out with cameras, then screening and discussing the results. Pieced together from notes made over a period of nearly ten years at several of these workshops, Lessons with Kiarostami is a distillation of Kiarostami's filmmaking techniques and working methods, and most importantly a series of practical guideposts for aspiring filmmakers.

For seven days in April 1968, students occupied five buildings on the campus of Columbia University to protest a planned gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, links between the university and the Vietnam War, and what they saw as the university’s unresponsive attitude toward their concerns. Exhilarating to some and deeply troubling to others, the student protests paralyzed the university, grabbed the world’s attention, and inspired other uprisings. Fifty years after the events, A Time to Stir captures the reflections of those who participated in and witnessed the Columbia rebellion. With more than sixty essays from members of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the Students’ Afro-American Society, faculty, undergraduates who opposed the protests, “outside agitators,” and members of the New York Police Department, A Time to Stir sheds light on the politics, passions, and ideals of the 1960s. Moving beyond accounts from the student movement’s white leadership, this book presents the perspectives of black students, who were grappling with their uneasy integration into a supposedly liberal campus, as well as the views of women, who began to question their second-class status within the protest movement and society at large. A Time to Stir also speaks to the complicated legacy of the uprising. For many, the events at Columbia inspired a lifelong dedication to social causes, while for others they signaled the beginning of the chaos that would soon engulf the left. Taken together, these reflections present a nuanced and moving portrait that reflects the sense of possibility and excess that characterized the 1960s.

Between 2006 and 2011, Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami released his selections from and adaptations of four masters of Persian poetry: Nima (1895-1960), Hafez, Saadi and Rumi (all from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). In 2015, shortly before his death, Kiarostami published two further volumes, the thematic anthology Night, his selections from a variety of classical and contemporary poets. These books are in addition to his three volumes of original verse: A Wolf on Watch (2005), With the Wind (2006) and Wind and Leaf (2011). In the Shadow of Trees brings together English translations of all these books.

Before his death in 2016, Abbas Kiarostami wrote or directed more than thirty films in a career that mirrored Iranian cinema's rise as an international force. His 1997 feature Taste of Cherry made him the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Critics' polls continue to place Close-Up (1990) and Through the Olive Trees (1994) among the masterpieces of world cinema. Yet Kiarostami's naturalistic impulses and winding complexity made him one of the most divisive—if influential—filmmakers of his time. In this expanded second edition, award-winning Iranian filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum renew their illuminating cross-cultural dialogue on Kiarostami's work. The pair chart the filmmaker's late-in-life turn toward art galleries, museums, still photography, and installations. They also bring their distinct but complementary perspectives to a new conversation on the experimental film Shirin. Finally, Rosenbaum offers an essay on watching Kiarostami at home while Saeed-Vafa conducts a deeply personal interview with the director on his career and his final feature, Like Someone in Love.

Oh dear. It seems that our furry, feathered, and finny friends have been afflicted with a bad case of the swearing disease! From foul-mouthed Fidos, to pissed-off Pollies, to fish that say "fuck!" the entire barnyard is in an uproar and it's getting out of hand. This miniature masterpiece combines comical and cute animal photos with captions that are sure to appall even the most adoring animal-lovers.

Abbas Kiarostami's films have taken their place alongside the masterworks of world cinema. Respected cinema historian Alberto Elena, using Iranian sources wherever possible, has written a comprehensive and instructive overview of Kiarostami's work.

Gilberto Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write a lively, wide-ranging, penetrating study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form.

'A beautiful and clever book about being human' Russell Brand COMEDY. TRAGEDY. THERAPY. Simon Amstell did his first stand-up gig at the age of thirteen. His parents had just divorced and puberty was confusing. Trying to be funny solved everything. HELP is the hilarious and heartbreaking account of Simon’s ongoing compulsion to reveal his entire self on stage. To tell the truth so it can’t hurt him any more. Loneliness, anxiety, depression – this book has it all. And more. From a complicated childhood in Essex to an Ayahuasca-led epiphany in the Amazon rainforest, this story will make you laugh, cry and then feel happier than you’ve ever been.

A lifetime of cinematic writing culminates in this breathtaking statement on film’s unique ability to move us Cinema is commonly hailed as “the universal language,” but how does it communicate so effortlessly across cultural and linguistic borders? In The Eloquent Screen, influential film critic Gilberto Perez makes a capstone statement on the powerful ways in which film acts on our minds and senses. Drawing on a lifetime’s worth of viewing and re-viewing, Perez invokes a dizzying array of masters past and present—including Chaplin, Ford, Kiarostami, Eisenstein, Malick, Mizoguchi, Haneke, Hitchcock, and Godard—to explore the transaction between filmmaker and audience. He begins by explaining how film fits into the rhetorical tradition of persuasion and argumentation. Next, Perez explores how film embodies the central tropes of rhetoric––metaphor, metonymy, allegory, and synecdoche––and concludes with a thrilling account of cinema’s spectacular capacity to create relationships of identification with its audiences. Although there have been several attempts to develop a poetics of film, there has been no sustained attempt to set forth a rhetoric of film—one that bridges aesthetics and audience. Grasping that challenge, The Eloquent Screen shows how cinema, as the consummate contemporary art form, establishes a thoroughly modern rhetoric in which different points of view are brought into clear focus.

Independent Filmmaking and Digital Convergence: Transmedia and Beyond offers a comprehensive analysis of the technological changes of the past few decades in independent film and media-making, and explores new strategies and practices in media production, exhibition and distribution for independent producers and content creators. The book examines how independent filmmaking concepts have merged with digital and online technologies to create new hybrid multi-platform content creations. It explores key questions like how to reach an audience at a time when media conglomerates and their products dominate the market, and simultaneously, there is an overabundance of content competing for viewer time. The book investigates what kind of stories we tell and why; how the audience has changed, and what their expectations are; what the various niche markets are for independent producers and creators in new media; and new models for media financing and distribution. The content found in this book: Bridges the gap between professional media-makers and amateurs by focusing on new and emerging media models and practices. Provides a holistic view of the new media landscape, and practical advice on producing content in the new multi-platform media environment. Demonstrates how to create financially sustainable models for independent producers and creators in a shifting and unstable environment, providing many challenges, but also opportunities for independents. The author's website (http://www.filmconvergence.com/) supports this book with case studies, news and updates.