2001-2010

A volley of rapid visual associations from the mind of Robert Breer, animating collage, drawings and snapshots in a playful, but rigorous manner. What goes up must come down.Read More »

Quote:
Her Heart is Washed in Water and Then Weighed is a meditation on motherhood and mortality that takes its title from a procedure in the autopsying of a human corpse. Subtle juxtapositions evoke parallels between static monuments and living families to suggest what is lost to time and age. When you die, everything you know – including this – disappears.Read More »

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The action of the film is unfolding not in the real world, but in subconsciousness of the heroine, professor of anthropology.
The woman-anthropologist researches roots of the human evolution. Psychic childhood trauma, caused by the death of her father, the captain of a submarine, in the W.W.II, periodically throws her out of balance. Phantoms of the prehistorical past and father’s violent death collide in the scientist’s subconsciousness and bring to life an unexpected theory of human evolution.Read More »

Matt Zoller Seitz (The New York Times) wrote:
Elmore Leonard once said that the key to telling an exciting story was leaving out the parts that people skip. The “Don Quixote” adaptation “Quxiotic/Honor de Cavalleria” is composed of little else.

In adapting Miguel de Cervantes’s novel about the senile would-be knight, Don Quixote (Lluís Carbó), and his sidekick, Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat), the film’s writer and director, Albert Serra, favors landscape imagery and natural sounds over dialogue and music.Read More »

Set in a breath-taking primitive landscape in the mountainous provinces of Vietnam, the film tells the story of a Hmong tribe girl named Pao. She was raised by her stepmother, for her real mother left her when she was little. One day, her stepmother dies in an accident, and she begins to track down her birth mother. But her journey turns out to disclose an unsealed sentimental drama of the family in the past.Read More »

A young man in southern China has killed his lover. He starts a lonely escape across the whole country towards his land of wonder, a snowy village at the northern border. Sitting at his desk in Beijing, a scriptwriter is writing that man’s story. It is through his characters that his life gains its weight, meaning and freedom. His imagination blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction. The snowy village lies on the quiet border between China and Russia. Old villagers fish under the ice, school children study English text about America. They endure the long winter nights waiting for the sun to come back…Read More »

Yufit continues themes from Silver Heads, this time featuring an artist who paints insects, and who discovers evidence of scientific experiments aimed at understanding and controlling the progress of man. Specifically, what caused man to stand upright, thus moving away from a more practical and natural lifestyle and into a modern, intellectual one. The experiments attempt to recreate this effect or fuse the advantages of both. He moves into an old house with his family, is haunted by strange visions and dreams, but when his children uncover a film archive documenting the experiments, and a strange old man disturbs his peace, he loses his simple pleasures and his mind regresses into a form of insanity. While he slowly unravels the truth, experimental bipedals (naked crouched men) roam and terrorize the countryside chased by the government. By far Yufit’s most conventional narrative, with odd, mildly interesting but simplistic meditations on humankind.

— The Worldwide Celluloid MassacreRead More »

Michelange Quay’s stunning first feature seductively begs the viewer to abandon the rules of traditional storytelling and instead embrace a poetic,… Michelange Quay’s stunning first feature seductively begs the viewer to abandon the rules of traditional storytelling and instead embrace a poetic, cinematic language. Eat, for This Is My Body tells of the evolution of power in Quay’s native Haiti and the colonial relationship between black boys and white women.Read More »

Renowned French photographer and Nan Goldin disciple Antoine D’Agata offers this visual essay of Tokyo prostitution circuits that isn’t for the easily offended. By exploring the prostitutes’ filthy working rooms and capturing the sex workers as they service clients, shoot heroin, and masturbate with their own blood, D’Agata effectively shatters the standard perception of the porn industry. ~ Jason Buchanan, RoviRead More »