World Film Manifestation Program
World Film Manifestation Program, commonly known as WFMP, is a monthly film screening by DUFS at different cultural centers such as the Goethe-Institut Dhaka and the Alliance Française de Dhaka among others. WFMP’s main objective is to introduce classic and contemporary films to film society members. The program is open for all.
The program was started as a “viewer’s forum” in June 1998 at the Goethe-Institute Dhaka. The first session was open to everyone. In the next two years, fourteen more sessions were held in different cultural centers in Dhaka. After various sessions, the initiative was renamed as World Film Manifestation Program (WFMP).
The first 1st WFMP session was held in September 2000 at the Goethe-Institut Dhaka.
Previous WFMP
133rd World Film Manifestation Program
Akira Kurosawa is widely considered one of the best and most influential directors of the 20th century. His cinematic vision, approach to life, reality, fantasy, truth and the creative influence on world cinema is an essential horizon to be explored for any film enthusiast. In his films, this renowned Japanese filmmaker blended the ancient traditions of Japan with a distinctively modern, Western twist—very much like postwar Japan itself.
Kurosawa started his career as a painter but became one of the colossal figures in film history. He transformed the camera into his very own canvas. Akira Kurosawa made his directorial debut with ‘Sanshiro Sugata’ (1943). 50 years later, he ended his career with his final film ‘Madadayo’ (1993). In a career spanning over five decades, he directed thirty movies.
With the title ‘Retrospective of Akira Kurosawa’, the two-days program will start on the 6th of September and end on the 7th, screening seven of Kurosawa’s classics including ‘Rashomon’ (1950), ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954), ‘Ikiru’ (1952), ‘Yojimbo’ (1961).
132nd World Film Manifestation Program
The 132nd edition WFMP celebrated the illustrious career of Emir Kusturica.
Emir Kusturica is a Serbian filmmaker who belongs to the small elite club of directors who have won the Palme d’Or twice. His films are marked by excess, chaos and unapologetic self-indulgence. His ability to seamlessly blend drama, humour, romance, morbidity and surrealism is nearly unparalleled in today’s cinema. Born to a secular Muslim family in Yugoslav Sarajevo, his present-day reluctance to criticize Serbian nationalism, his disapproving description of Hollywood as ‘pure poison’ and his passion for townbuilding projects make him a curious, if not polarizing figure in the landscape of European cinema.
Four astonishing films of Emir Kusturica were screened; Black Cat, White Cat, Underground, Arizona Dream, Time of the Gypsies
131st World Film Manifestation Program
The 131st edition of WFMP celebrated the wonderful career of Jim Jarmusch.
Jim Jarmusch is an American film director, producer, actor and composer. He has been a major player in the American independent movie scene since the 1980s. He has an unhurried, uncompromised and innovatively restrained approach to filmmaking. Jarmusch is noted for successfully stripping down the unnecessary elements in his films and for focusing only on the essentials, namely the great alienation that human beings in every sphere of life are subjected to and the elusive nature of the American dream.
Tom Waits once called Jim Jarmusch a teenager trapped inside a foreign world whose movies reflect the loneliness of the human condition and the urban desolation in the most subtly imaginative ways. His films revolve around idle conversations, aimless strolls through mundane regular life and characters nonchalantly going about their day. He is one of the greatest living directors of our time.
Five significant films of Jim Jarmusch were screened; Mystery Train (1989), Night on Earth (1991),Down by Law (1986), The Limits of Control (2009), Paterson (2016)
130th World Film Manifestation Program
The 130th edition of WFMP remembered Agnes Varda, a Belgian-born French film director, photographer and artist. Her work was pioneering for and central to the development of the widely influential French New Wave, a film movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
We featured four of her films; La Pointe Courte (1955),Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), Le Bonheur (1965), Vagabond (1985)
129th World Film Manifestation Program
The 129th edition of WFMP remembered the late actor Bruno Ganz.
Bruno Ganz was a Swiss actor whose career in German-language film and television productions lasted for more than fifty years. Bruno Ganz died at the age of 77 from cancer, was a wise and contemplative presence- as familiar, consoling and crumpled as a favorite overcoat. He played an angel longing for the visceral joys of mortality in “Wings of Desire” and a defeated Hitler with trembling hands facing his own mortality in “Downfall”. He was sly, pensive, puckish yet woeful, inwardly commanding, almost always intensely becalmed, an actor with a light in his eye that could radiate anything from merry deviousness to the fiercest of existential distress.
Four of his amazing films were screened at the program; The American Friend (1977), Circle of Deceit (1981), Eternity and a Day (1998), Downfall (2004)