“Yes, Freida has come to attend to a personal matter. But she will attend the screening of the film at the Toronto film festival, which is later this month.”

I hope everything is okay with the Pinto family, and you can be sure that Freida Pinto Fan will cover the Toronto International Film Festival with info, photos, videos and more!

There’s a brand new look at the Freida Pinto Forum! I have also deleted tons of spambots that were registered. To make it harder for them to register and start attacking the boards again I have now decided to manually approve all members. Hopefully this will help. Feel free to head on over the the forum and register your account for free today!

In the news-bar at the forum (at the top) you will see when we approved members. If you still haven’t got a message saying you got approved, enter your details again as you might have been mistaken for a spambot (choose a “normal” username to make sure you won’t be!). I’m looking forward to getting to know more Freida-fans. See you there!

Remember, these are only a first look at reviews for Miral, I will make another post of reviews where top industry critics are included closer to the release date.

While any film addressing the Israeli-Palestinian divide can expect a measure of controversy, few hearts or minds are likely to be stirred by Julian Schnabel’s inoffensive, well-intentioned “Miral.” Schnabel’s signature blend of splintered storytelling and sobering humanism feels misapplied to this sweeping multigenerational saga of four Arab women living under Israeli occupation, the youngest of which, Miral, emerges a bland totem of hope rather than a compelling movie subject. A year-end Stateside release date will raise expectations unlikely to be borne out by either passionate critical response or sustained arthouse biz.
[...]
Bound to raise perhaps the most criticism is the casting of Pinto, the Indian actress-model who came to fame in “Slumdog Millionaire,” in the role of an Arab Everygirl — an odd choice for a drama predicated on specifics of cultural identity. While Pinto looks appropriately willful, driven and occasionally fierce as Miral clashes with her loving guardians (and is later whipped in prison for her suspected terrorist involvement), neither she nor the material convincingly demonstrates why, of the countless stories that have been told about the conflict, this one was worth singling out.

• Justin Chang, Variety

Some of the dialogue in Miral is portentous in the extreme. Characters deliver lines like “this is a very crucial moment for our country – our people can’t take it any more” rather than speaking in anything that remotely resembles normal speech. There are distracting cameos from stars like Vanessa Redgrave and Willem Dafoe, who are on screen for a few moments and then disconcertingly disappear from the story without trace. Schnabel is covering three generations but his storytelling style is more cumbersome than nimble. At its most leaden, this is more like a school lecture in Middle Eastern history than it is a piece of drama. Newsreel footage is thrown into the mix in heavy-handed fashion and characters – as they age – suddenly go very grey. Quiet domestic scenes and climactic political moments are juxtaposed in seemingly random manner. Even so, it’s hard not to root for Husseini (played with great dignity by Abbass) as she tries to educate the orphan kids and thereby save them from a rootless existence in the refugee camps. Miral herself is played very engagingly by Freida Pinto as a mischievous and idealistic teenager with an acute sense of natural justice.

• Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent

Enlightening neither as emotional essay nor as straight-up history lecture, then, “Miral”‘s tricksy oat-bran filmmaking seemingly lands shy of every imaginable target audience: it’s too dry for the middlebrow awards set that might otherwise thrill to its superficially good intentions, too didactic for the highbrow intelligentsia that turned out for the director’s previous outings, and too dull for just about everybody. “I feel so useless, I really want to do something,” frets Miral midway through the movie; it’s representative of the film’s minimal emotional investment in its protagonist that the reply to this confession is: “You have beautiful eyes.”

• Guy Lodge, In Contention

Clearly, Schnabel was stirred by this book to bring it to the screen, but Slumdog Millionaire star Pinto, while gorgeous, is not an expressive actress. (She likely helped to raise funding for the film produced by Jon Kilik with financing from Israel, Italy, India and France, which The Weinstein Co. will release stateside.) Her story remains expositional and flat, filled with long debates with her boyfriend Hani (Omar Metwally) about alternative routes to a Middle East solution. “What they really want is all of Palestine without Palestinians,” says Hani. “With them here there is no future for us.”

This kind of earnest agit-prop material is tough to adapt to the screen; Schnabel needed a more proficient dramatist to pull this off. He’s an elegant, visual director—he and cinematographer Eric Gautier adopt an unusual blurry technique for the more intense scenes—but this movie, while filmed on authentic Jerusalem locations, too often devolves into dull talking heads. It’s possible that the Weinsteins will fan flames of controversy around this film’s highly-charged subject. Nonetheless Miral—which will also play Telluride and Toronto—will likely remain within a narrow art-house niche.

• Anne Thompson, Thompson on Hollywood

Perhaps because of the delegating, “Miral” falls short of Schnabel’s usual standards. A flatly narrated and sometimes simplistic melodrama, it lacks the mystery and mastery of “Diving Bell.” Schnabel’s judgment seems blurred by his personal feelings.

Where his talent shines through is in the visual effects. Nadia’s abuse is shown through her eyes: A pole representing her bedstead appears on the screen while the camera makes bobbing vertical movements. Subsequent sequences — a belly dance, a drowning — are shot in a swooping, hazy style, as if they were hallucinations.

These artistic touches are a highpoint of the film. So are the Arab cast members, who give the story a lived-in quality, and Schnabel’s daughter Stella, who has a cameo as a fun-loving, open-minded Israeli girl.

The film’s other plus is its timely message: that violence and maximalism are no substitute for dialogue. It’s a message Schnabel seeks to convey for the foreseeable future. He told the assembled media that he’d stop making films for a couple of years, the better to promote this one.

• Farah Nayeri, Bloomberg Businessweek

Freida Pinto Fan will still report from Venice with updates on how the movie’s being received by audiences and critics. Stay tuned for that!

Another Italian magazine alert! Freida Pinto’s also featured in a very special Venice Film Festival-supplement to L’Uomo Vogue’s September issue. She talks about Miral, which is premiering tonight at the festival! Not only is it a new interview, but a new picture as well. She looks gorgeous (though a little unrecognizable) in it, as seen in the preview above. Click on it to see her feature in a slightly bigger size. Thanks to Emmanuelle for the heads up!

If you have the magazine, I’d really appreciate scans or a translation of the interview. Simply e-mail me at freidapintofan.com@gmail.com and you will be given full credit for your help.

The actress reveals how she attained her most challenging role yet, in Miral.

For Miral Schnabel was looking for a Palestinian protagonist. “The casting had already started, but Danny Boyle was good enough to personally direct my video for the audition. The script moved me in an inexpressible way: to a certain degree the story narrated is very similar to what happened when India and Pakistan were divided up. I wanted the role at all costs. I don’t know why Schnabel chose me; I can only say that when I did the audition I so identified with the role that I put all of myself into it.

At a certain point I had to say how much I loved my father: at the end Julian commented: “You really must love your father”. I think my total support for the character convinced him. And I have the feeling that looking a little like Rula Jebreal helped matters too”.

Not only have I worked on a new layout; the biography as well as the entire filmography have been updated with lots of new information (please report broken links, etc). More new things are yet to come (including a new layout for the gallery) so stay tuned. I also want to let you know that the site can be entered via www.freida-pinto.com (very easy to remember, right?) now as well!

I really hope you all will like the changes. Please drop a comment with your opinion before you leave. Thanks!

As promised, I have now replaced the old scans from the September issue of In Style with hi-res ones that I personally scanned for Freida Pinto Fan. Miss Pinto looks absolutely stunning in these photos, and even better in hi-res. ;) Simply click on the preview above to check out the new versions. Enjoy!

Hans R. Ruesch’s 1957 novel South Of The Heart, a fictionalised take on the formation of Saudi Arabia, will form the basis of the story about a well-educated Arab prince who is married to a beautiful princess and “is confronted with the problem of what the discovery of oil will bring to the Bedouins” says producer Tarak Ben Ammar.

Rahim and Pinto would play the prince and princess in the film, described as a “big romantic story about oil, religion, tribes and tradition”. Shooting will take place in Tunisia.

Fingers crossed that Freida will attend the world premiere of Miral at the Venice Film Festival on September 2, as well!