2011-2020

Cesta Ven tells a story of a young Romani couple, Zaneta and David, the parents of little Janicka. Their efforts to live a decent and dignified life run up against the “Romani social trap,” which is racism, the society’s prejudices.Read More »

An unusual J-horror film written and directed by Hiroshi Takahashi, best-known internationally as the screenwriter of The Ring. A day in a group meeting of a Bolshevik cult in a warehouse in present day Japan. Members confess their past transgressions as ways of summoning the dead and bringing about revolution, and perform prayers and group exercises to the spirits of Lenin and Stalin.Read More »

Being shelved for four years over censorship issues sounds like a death knell for any film, and yet in the case of Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land, it may actually have been a considerable boon : indeed, the four-years delay meant that the film came out after the comedy Lost In Thailand, which starred two of the leads of No Man’s Land (Xu Zheng and Huang Bo), and thus became positioned as their follow-up to what is still the all-time highest-grossing Chinese film in China. It did however lose its potential status as China’s very first modern-day set western – with Gao Qunshu’s Wind Blast having been released in the meantime – though in truth it is closer to a film noir than a western, with moody voice-over and a cynical outlook on human nature. It tells of an arrogant big city lawyer (Xu Zheng) who travels to the far west of China to plead the case of a falcon trafficker (Togbye), then tries to rush back to the city to close a book deal on that very case.Read More »

Seven years ago, a mysterious monster was found deep in a rural coal mine. Since then, rumors of a plague spread through the small town, and people experience an unexplainable mental illness.Read More »

Lonesome, middle-aged virgin Antonio Farfán is picked on and ridiculed as a matter of course, whether by coworkers or his bullying mooch of a brother (who only calls when he needs money). An employee of a notary’s office, his status improves a bit when his new boss—and strangely affable doppelganger—takes an interest in him. But Farfán’s deep-seated shyness and insecurity are only partly assuaged. And when he joins a self-improvement group, he slowly confirms what the undulating lines of this sly, involving rotoscope story suggest: everything is in motion, and change is inevitable. The question becomes what use one makes of it.Read More »

In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, some technologists saw computers as machines of communism and cybernetics as an answer to the difficulties of a waning centrally planned economy. After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks these Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future.Read More »

An old man is haunted at a movie theater where he works as a janitor.Read More »

A look within the walls of the New York Public Library.

Quote:
The director’s latest magisterial study of a public institution is a tribute to the power of education and the importance of community, characteristically ambitious yet surprisingly brisk.

Patience is a virtue; it is also a lion. One hundred and sixteen years old, the white marble beast has guarded the steps outside the main branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL) with her identical counterpart, Fortitude. The principles they embody have sustained Frederick Wiseman across the half-century of his unique career, which arguably culminates in this, his 42nd documentary film. A quietly magisterial enterprise, over the course of 197 minutes it visits the myriad buildings and activities which serve the city under the NYPL’s banner and lion-head logo.Read More »

Karol, Junior, Ronaldo and Caio are in their last month of school at a public institution in Rio de Janeiro. Immersed in the tangled wires covering the slum’s sky and the sudden blackouts, these four youngsters are affected by the city crisis and reinvent themselves in the face of adversity.Read More »