Features
In the films of Corneliu Porumboiu, seemingly insignificant details, questions, and disagreements ripple outward, like pebbles tossed into a still pond, until they become deep inquiries into history, language, and ethics.
Once There Was Brasilia is a sci-fi epic about assassins from space and the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, achieved on a shoestring budget.
A Few Great Pumpkins
The Invitation, The Ghost Train, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, A Scary Time, Messiah of Evil, Panna a netvor
In this mephitic atmosphere, an assertion of the sanctity of simple domestic pleasures (of pleasure itself) is tantamount to an act of artistic resistance.
The past is always present, but that does not just mean that it haunts or permeates our contemporary world: the past reconstitutes and recombines our very processes, internal and external, our molecules, our narratives.
Blake Williams has achieved a holistic union of his own that speaks at once to the transformative power of the moving image and the oceanic force of its full deployment.
Is Putin the cause or the result of Russia’s systemic ills? A tentative answer might be found in the Russian cinema of the 21st century, which, as it happens, coincides with the beginning and ongoing rule of this postmodern tsar.
The super-fan has progressed to secretary, then understudy, then professional and romantic usurper. Six years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, All About Eve tapped a rich vein of existential panic tied to the theme of replication and replaceability.
What of art then? Is its thrill ever about aesthetics alone? This question is just one of many raised by Barbara Visser’s smart, approachable, and entertaining documentary The End of Fear.
Gibson shows that filmmaking is an extension of a practice that is already proactive and lived. The evolving relationship between filmmaker and subject is retained implicitly in nearly every shot and interaction.
The Breadwinner is a simple story about a young girl who loves her father, but there are layers that acknowledge the complexities of the political situation in Afghanistan, children growing up in conflict, and the fact there are no easy answers.
Filmmakers are actively pushing up against what it means to make a documentary at all, and the True/False Film Festival caters to and nurtures that objective. I am especially thankful to True/False for exposing me to new possibilities for Black cinema.
"It was always really interesting for me that, especially if you are improvising in a film without much preparation for your character, you are drawing on your own life and then your own life is a thing that ends up in the film, and that is . . . complicated."
Berlin 2018: Loznitsa is an assiduous practitioner of observational cinema. One may even argue that his nonfiction filmmaking is to the study of spaces charged with political memory what Frederick Wiseman is to the exploration of institutions.