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Alright film fans, you may know all there is to know about the great Edward D. Wood, Jr. (or at least you’ve seen Tim Burton’s wonderful 1994 bio-pic Ed Wood), but did you know anything about a similar low budget (not really a “B picture”, but closer to a “Z picture”) director from “south of the border”? Well, the new film The Fantastic World Of Juan Orol will give you a crash course in the colorful life and fairly long (1935 to 1968) directing career of Mr. Juan Orol. After a brief clip with the actual Orol the film jumps to 1982 and the now elderly Juan (Roberto Sosa), dressed in his 1940′s finery, is sitting in the lobby of a movie theatre showing his film retrospective to only a few film buffs. He then begins to regale a young usher with his story. Born in Galicia, he moved to Cuba. After failed attempts in boxing,...

Although it's been called a "pitch perfect tribute" to the titular real life Mexican B-movie maker, the fevered and free wheeling biopic The Fantastic World of Juan Orol (original title: El fantástico mundo de Juan Orol) leaves one with little desire to track down the real Orol's life's work, or to know more about him. Orol himself is depicted as a consistently flabbergasted and put upon purveyor of creatively bankrupt bargain-basement Mexican gangster pictures that showcase an array of curvy showgirls. According to the film, the director would marry and divorce many of these girls (each one more generically hoochie-cooey than the previous) in rapid succession. The world he occupies is precarious, movie-lit, and all too knowing of his bereft skill-set. Pitched as a kind of...

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Suman Ghosh’s Shyamal Uncle Turns Off The Lights, which was picked up by Global Film Initiative (Gfi) at Busan Film Festival recently, will be part of Global Lens 2013 film series. A total of ten award winning films have been chosen in the line up for the tenth edition of the film series.

The Global Lens will run from 10th to 24th January, 2013 and will be followed by a year long tour to more than fifty cities in the United States and Canada.

Shyamal Uncle Turns Off The Lights, produced by Arindam Ghosh, is the story of an eighty year old pensioner who wants the street lights switched off during the day to save waste. The film premiered at the Busan International Film Festival and was screened at the Mumbai Film Festival 2012.

The Global Lens film series was launched in 2003 to support the distribution of unique and critically acclaimed cinematic works from around the world,...