Film
Halvorssen co-produced the film Freedom's Fury which was executive produced by Lucy Liu, Quentin Tarantino, and Andrew Vajna. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film relates the story of the popular uprising against dictatorship that occurred in Hungary in 1956.
Halvorssen executive produced Hammer & Tickle, a film about the power of humor, ridicule, and satire as the language of truth under Soviet tyranny—jokes as a code to navigate the disconnect between propaganda and reality and as a means of resisting the system despite the absence of free speech. This film premiered at Tribeca in 2006 and featured Lech Wałęsa, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Roy Medvedev. The film won Best New Documentary Film at the Zurich Film Festival.
Halvorssen is listed as producer of the documentary Indoctrinate U, "a documentary about left-wing bias on college campuses" which targets "the anti-intellectual, intolerant culture of campuses". American Literary Theorist Stanley Fish wrote in the New York Times "the academy invites the criticism it receives in this documentary" and the film received positive reviews from the Wall Street Journal, London Telegraph, New York Post, and CNN.
Halvorssen is producer of the film The Singing Revolution, a film about Estonia's peaceful struggle for political independence from Soviet occupation. The film premiered at the Black Nights Film Festival in December 2006 where it received a 15-minute standing ovation. Since then, it has become the most successful documentary film in Estonian box-office history.
Halvorssen produced The Sugar Babies, a film about human trafficking in the Dominican Republic and the plight of its migrant farm workers. The targets of the documentary are wealthy and politically connected sugar barons who live in West Palm Beach: The Fanjul Family. The film previewed at Florida International University where a heated exchange with the Dominican diplomatic envoy resulted in police presence. It received numerous negative reviews claiming the film's portrayal of big business and its relationship with the Dominican government was part of a campaign against the country's reputation. Death threats against the film's director and a bribery scandal involving the Dominican embassy have made the film a subject of intense media interest.
He is listed as sole producer of 2081, the film adaptation of author Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron", a dystopian film about a future in which a tyrannical government arrests, imprisons without trial, and tortures those who disagree with the government policy of enforced sterilization and enforced handicapping. It premiered at the Seattle Film Festival and stars Academy Award nominee Patricia Clarkson, Julie Hagerty, James Cosmo, and Armie Hammer. The film's music was composed by Lee Brooks and recorded by Kronos Quartet.
Read more about this topic: Thor Halvorssen Mendoza
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“A film is a petrified fountain of thought.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They’re obliged to overstate their own importance.”
—François Truffaut (1932–1984)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)