Word: directors
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...corners of Asia - and define a new generation of filmmakers. First there's Beijing's Zhao Liang, who used a decade of handheld shooting to create Petition, which chronicles the Kafkaesque torment of Chinese citizens seeking official redress for endlessly unanswered grievances. Then there's Burma VJ, the Danish director Anders ?stergaard's dazzling pastiche - marred at times by dull dramatic reconstructions - of material shot at great risk by underground videographers from Burma's democracy movement...
...there's anything to criticize in the 33-year-old director's sophomore effort (a follow-on from 2006's equally pastoral Stories from the North), it's that his high-definition images - all darkening clouds and lustrous green paddies - are too beautiful. Despite its share of grumbling about corrupt politicians, Agrarian Utopia quickly moves beyond some heavy-handed message movie toward Buddhist meditation. Uruphong's oppressed peasants are as much victims of their own restlessness as they are of meager rice prices. With a poet's eye, the sights and sounds of their close-to-nature existence are transformed...
...Europe and India. Khan's specialty is adding a layer of unexpected depth and tenderness to an otherwise opaque character - the interrogator in Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire, a Pakistani police captain in A Mighty Heart, the remote immigrant father in The Namesake. Danny Boyle, the British director of Slumdog Millionaire, believes that as other Western studios try to replicate the film's success with movies set in India, Khan will be even more in demand - quintessentially Indian, and yet something else besides. "He is a touchstone connecting two worlds," Boyle says. More than Shah Rukh or Aamir or Salman...
...final year, a young director casting her first feature - a cinema verité take on slum life in Bombay - came to the school scouting for talent. "One of the things I'm slightly proud of is kind of discovering Irrfan," says Mira Nair, who cast Khan as a letter writer in Salaam Bombay! His role was edited down to a fleeting appearance, but Nair says that even then, Khan was different. "I was very, very struck by his being in the part rather than acting," she recalls. "He wasn't striving. His striving was invisible...
...decoration. (Although the international trade in tigers and tiger parts is illegal, few countries have taken steps to actually enforce the ban.) "Unless we can crack down on the illegal trade and on poachers in the wild, tigers have very little chance of survival," says Keshav Varma, the program director of the World Bank's global tiger initiative. (See a cheapskate's guide to Valentine...