Hi Everybody,
Jason E. led me here and I'm glad he did! This looks like a fun place.
I've had a poster website since December 1993
(
www.musicman.com/mp/mp.html) and have been doing some buying and
selling on the side with movie posters off and on throughout this
period. Recently I've started a new effort to improve the images and
the quality of the entries to improve my site's general accuracy and
appeal.
In the last 10-12 years of so my main poster interest has been in
Egyptian Arabic film posters, both for native Egyptian films and for
foreign films shown in Egypt. I've made a lot of trips there, made
friends with some nice Egyptians and learned a lot about the
Egyptian film industry, which is very old and very rich. One of the
most successful recent Egyptian movies was called
The Yacoubian
Building (2006) starring the great Adel Imam. I couldn't find a YouTube version
of it with subtitles but I did find an interesting interview in English with its
director Marwan Hamed and its lead actress, Youssra:
which I hope will give you
a feeling for a little part of the wonderful world of Egyptian cinema.
A strong secondary interest has been with Persian posters from Iran.
I have never been able to visit Iran but I've managed to acquire quite
a few Iranian posters without going there, again both for Iranian
films and for foreign films that were shown in Iran. One of the
best-known Iranian films in recent years has been distributed in the
West with the title
A Separation, directed by Asghar Farhadi. I
couldn't find any free versions of that film on YouTube but there is a
very nice interview with Farhadi, who is very much the sort of
character one finds in the Iranian film community but totally unlike
the people who occupy official positions in the Iranian government:
and I think this may be
worth watching more than once!
My personal opinion is that Egypt tends to have better posters while
Iran tends to have better movies and better filmmakers. This is only
a general statement because there are exceptions on both sides.
One of the many wonderful things about the Internet is that most of
these old Egyptian and Iranian films can be watched free online, and you
can also find written background material about them in Arabic and Persian.
My blog (
www.mopopoc.com) about movie posters is where I keep a little log
about things I have recently discovered or revisited in my own
collection. My main interest in posters is beautiful art, but of
course I'm also a big fan of the movies themselves and learning more
about the distribution infrastructure.
best to all
John Green
(DarvishJo)
