At the Museum
Goings-on at Museum of the Moving Image
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.
At the heart of Benning’s practice is an unmistakably avant-garde thesis: ordinary ways of experiencing reality need to be transcended with the help of cinema.
Cobbled together from home movies that the Brazilian director amassed throughout four decades living in Paris, the film constructs an autobiography of sorts from what its author happened to film over the years.
It’s an expansive visual travel journal—Chidgasornpongse rode all of Thailand’s train lines over the course of six years—though on screen it seems as though it’s all happening in a single day (represented in 102 minutes of footage).
Through its oversaturated, auto-exposed, and coarsely textured images, Let the Summer Never Come Again makes visible the mechanisms of its fiction.
Syrian filmmaker Ziad Kalthoum has created a study of men anguished by conflict without ever exploiting their predicament.
In just 50 minutes, nooks and crannies of humanity are explored with a deftness and potency it would normally take a six-part TV series to uncover.
Spanning three visits to Chongqing over the course of one year, the film focuses on three of Shibati’s residents as they reckon with forced displacement and the dismantling of their homes and businesses.
Shot in Poland for 35 days over the course of a year, this debut feature unfolds in a measured and unvarnished style that reflects the anthropologist eye of director Anna Zamecka.
Ghost Hunting, which won a special prize at the 2017 Berlinale for Palestinian filmmaker Raed Andoni, is a relatively cool and sober restaging of interrogations and tortures suffered by prisoners in the Israeli interrogation center Moskobiya.