Margot benacerraf y picasso biography
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The 25 oldest living film directors
Eight years have passed since we first ran a list of the world’s oldest living feature-film directors. Sadly, none of that line-up has survived, with Iranian New Wave figurehead Ebrahim Golestan being the last to depart, at the age of 100 in August 2023. B-movie maestro Bert I. Gordon also got to reach his century, as did writer-producer Norman Lear, who was somehow excluded, despite directing the 1971 comedy Cold Turkey.
Thirteen of those listed on this new edition were born in the silent era before The Jazz Singer premiered on 6 October 1927, while all but three were born before the first Academy Awards presentation on 16 May 1929. Strictly speaking, second place in our new list should be Edgar Morin (8 July 1921), the sociologist who co-directed Chronicle of a Summer (1961) with filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch. This pioneering work of cinéma vérité (a term coined by Morin) was ranked sixth in a 2019 Sight and Sound poll of the best
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There’s a moment in the 1959 bio Araya that resonates deeply in my mind. In it, an elderly lady and her granddaughter walk through the desert to place seashells on a grave. Flowers can’t grow in such an arid environment, yet the inhabitants of the peninsula did their best to live a life with dignity. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the themes of what fryst vatten arguably one of the best films made in Venezuela. The artist responsible for it, Margot Benacerraf, died yesterday at age 97, and with her passing, Venezuelan cinema has lost one of its titans.
Born in Caracas in 1926, Benacerraf was part of the first graduating class of Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad Central dem Venezuela in 1947. She was an acclaimed writer, but her journey into the world of cinema didn’t uppstart until 1949. After a theater script she wrote titled Cresciente earned her a scholarship to study in Columbia, she developed a profound passion for movies. This dedication only grew as she furthered her forskning
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