1991-2000

Dietrich Leder, Film-Dienst 24/92 wrote:
In Europe in the fall of 1989, history took place before our very eyes. Farocki and Ujica’s “Videograms” shows the Rumanian revolution of December 1989 in Bucharest in a new media-based form of historiography. Demonstrators occupied the television station [in Bucharest] and broadcast continuously for 120 hours, thereby establishing the television studio as a new historical site. Between December 21, 1989 (the day of Ceaucescu’s last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost without exception. The determining medium of an era has always marked history, quite unambiguously so in that of modern Europe. It was influenced by theater, from Shakespeare to Schiller, and later on by literature, until Tolstoy.Read More »

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Against his father’s wishes, Pedro, a naive kid from Mexico City, joins the Federal Highway Patrol. His simple desire to do good rapidly comes into conflict with the reality of police work.Read More »

One day, Hélène goes to the home of Charles Piétri, a man she once loved and has not seen for twenty years. She meets Julien, Charles’ son, who tells her that his father has died. Shortly afterwards, she breaks off her marital ties with Alexandre, and her professional ties with Georges Birski (who has just commissioned her to restore a painting), to live with Julien and to devote herself totally to him. In the house where Charles used to live and where Irene, Julien’s mother, is about to move in, Hélène discovers disturbing signs, clues and even evidence of a disturbing link that would unite them and that will push her to commit a senseless act…Read More »

“München – Geheimnisse einer Stadt” ist ein Essay über das Leben in Städten, ein Mosaik aus Geschichten, Sehnsüchten und Träumen und eine Liebeserklärung an München – und alle anderen Städte.Read More »

In fourteenth-century England, peasant girl Christine Carpenter is so attracted to a statue of the Virgin Mary that the local priest (who lusts after her) suggests she be walled up in the church as an anchoress, a holy woman with responsibility for blessing the villagers. But when the priest has Christine’s mother tried as a witch, she digs herself out of her cell, a crime for which the punishment is death…Read More »

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A Bolivian immigrant working illegally as a cook in a small restaurant in Buenos Aires suffers abuse and discrimination from its customers.Read More »

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This absorbing and intimate portrait of an ordinary town doctor is characteristic of Michel Deville’s cinema: sombre, slow moving, filled with humanity, and unashamedly naturalistic.

Albert Dupontel is captivating as the film’s central character, Dr Sachs, conveying not just the sense of ennui of a man who is locked into a life he no longer appreciates, but also his yearning for some kind of release, for the fulfilment that has so far eluded him. It is an underplayed, introspective, spiritual kind of film, focused exclusively on Sachs’ daily routine and his matter-of-fact interactions with his patients. The repetitive nature of the consultations, the drab colour scheme and the dreary locations do weigh the film down by they emphasise the sense of aching emptiness that is apparently pushing Sachs towards self-destruction.Read More »

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I’ve been brooding a lot lately about the way in which many of the best movies around have been ravaged by “narrative correctness.” This is the notion fostered by producers, distributors, and critics — often collaborating as script doctors and always deeply invested in hackwork — that there are “correct” and “incorrect” ways of telling stories in movies. And woe to the filmmaker who steps out of line. Much as “political correctness” can point to a displaced political impotence — a desire to control language and representation that sets in after one despairs of changing the political conditions of power — “narrative correctness” has more to do with what supposedly makes a movie commercial than with what makes it interesting, artful, or innovative. Invariably narrative correctness means identifying with the people who pay for the pictures rather than with the people who make them.Read More »

Eric M. Nilsson’s rich and multi-layered masterpiece Anonym [Anonymous] avoids to be categorized. It’s a TV documentary, an essay film and a detective story at once. It starts with a finding in a container in central Stockholm; film strips, photographies, magazines and other leftover objects. Who is the man reappearing with a crossed out face? Why has this unknown man left this seemingly unfinished work and what’s his motif for staying anonymous? What is the meaning behind all this – if there is any?Read More »