Independent Filmmaker Ali Selim
to be Artist in Residence at St. Olaf, fall 2008.
Award-winning Media Artist Will Bring Filmmakers to Campus
This fall, St. Olaf student film enthusiasts will have the opportunity to work with the man The Minneapolis Star Tribune named the 2006 Minnesota Artist of the Year: Ali Selim will be teaching Screenwriting in the Department of English as an Artist in Residence at the college. This fall, Selim will not only be teaching Oles, but plans are underway for him to bring noted independent filmmakers to campus to screen their work and meet with students.
Selim spent many years as a successful advertising commericial director--his work received the Gold Lion—advertising’s most coveted award—from Cannes Advertising Film Festival, and a Gold Award from D&AD (British Design and Art Directors organization), and can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But his greatest love is filmmaking.
Critical Acclaim for First Feature Film
Here's what critic Rob Nelson wrote about Sweet Land in The Village Voice:
"this gorgeously realized romance . . . follows a German mail-order bride (Elizabeth Reaser) and her intended, a Norwegian-immigrant farmer (Tim Guinee); the two slowly fall for one another while working on the land and against their insular Lutheran community's ample prejudices in the wake of World War I. But Sweet Land is equally the story of a filmmaker in love with his actors and his material."
complete text of Village Voice review of Sweet Land
Sweet Land stars Alan Cumming, Ned Beatty, John Heard, Alex Kingston, Lois Smith and Paul Sand, and features Elizabeth Reiser and Tim Guinee. It has accumulated an impressive roster of recognition: the only screenplay selected for the inaugural year of the Cyngus Emerging Filmmakers Institute, it received the 2005 Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature Film at the
13th Annual Hamptons International Film Festival, and won six additional Audience
Awards and three Best First Film Awards at other leading film festivals in the United
States. Sweet Land was nominated for two 2007 Film Independent Spirit Awards, for Best
First Feature and Best Female Lead, and named one of the Ten Best Films of 2006 by over a dozen critics, including the Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly.
click here for the official Sweet Land web site
Autobiographical Influences: The Immigrant Experience in America
In an essay about Sweet Land, Selim cites his father's experience as an Egyptian immigrant arriving in the U.S. in l953 as a strong influence on the film. “This is the story I carried with me while making Sweet Land, a story about food, language and culture. A story that taught me how intrepid, progressive and perhaps precarious it is to leave what is known and immerse oneself in the unfamiliar.” (By the way, Selim's father did find a home in Minnesota--he recently retired after 50 years as a professor of Economics at St. Thomas University in the Twin Cities).
