On an island in the Indian Ocean, the Comoros archipelago, unoccupied houses await the arrival of their owners. These places without souls and half built abound across the landscape. The myth of eternal return is repeated in the Comorian diaspora.Read More »
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As a documentary filmmaker, Austrian director Michael Glawogger isn’t interested in advocacy or journalistic exposé, and while he allows some scenes to unfold before the camera, he isn’t of the strict fly-on-the-wall vérité school, either. Following up 2005’s Workingman’s Death, his stunning tour through five of the world’s most hazardous labor sites, Whores’ Glory similarly explores a triptych of poverty-ravaged prostitution sites, spending equal time in a Bangkok brothel, the red-light district in Bangladesh, and a complex of bars and single-room barracks called “The Zone” in Reynosa, Mexico. Read More »
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It’s a video of a Chinese family discussing and arguing about what to do with a relative with some kind of severe illness or injury who is in ICU but will soon either die or be in a vegetative state. It’s one long (uninterrupted?) shot with the family bickering but mostly saying the same few things over and over. It\’s probably somewhere between ethnography and psychology, with the comparatively calm or inscrutability of the people compared to how this would play out in a western setting being the most striking aspect to me.Read More »
Mountain ranges lighter than air.Read More »
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Based on true events that took place at the outset of the Georgian Civil War, Dede takes place in the high mountainous community of Svaneti, where there live a people far removed from the modern world. A purely patriarchal society that revolves around forced marriages, pride and tradition dictate the code of daily life. Dina is a young woman promised by her draconian grandfather to David, one of the soldiers returning from the war. Once a marriage arrangement is brokered by two families, failure to follow through on the commitment is unthinkable. Read More »
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The story of Diego, a young and successful photographer that lives in the glamorous world of fashion, shallowness and excess. A tragic accident turns his world around; his partner is now in a coma. Unexpectedly, and right at this terrible time, Diego must take care of his son, Armando. Now, both of them have to adapt to each other; Armando to the unknown, homosexual world of his father, and Diego to the closed attitude of his teenage son.Read More »
Synopsis
In competition at the Cinéma du Réel Film Festival in Paris (March 2016) where it received the Institut français Louis Marcorelles Award, On Call is a film that makes a difference and is necessary as an increasingly fearful Europe faces the influx of refugees and migrants.
In a small doctor’s office, a fixed camera is placed on one side or the other of the room, allowing either the practitioner or the patient to be seen. How is it that the viewer remains glued to the screen for more than an hour and a half with such a minimalist approach? Glued, moved, in total empathy with those men and women, their pain, their suffering?
No doubt, it is what Alice Diop felt from the impact of hearing about these dramatic experiences that speak of the terrible evolution of a world where violence has become commonplace.Read More »
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1975. In Rome, Claude Lanzmann filmed Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto, the only “Elder of the Jews” not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Murmelstein fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, week after week for seven years, managing to help around 121,000 Jews leave the country, and preventing the liquidation of the ghetto.Read More »
In Markus Schleinzer’s long-awaited second feature and true-story drama, a young African boy is abducted, sold, and forced into 18th-century Viennese court life where he must wrestle with the restrictions placed upon him by society.
Inspired by surviving records about the life of Angelo Soliman, an 18th-century Viennese “court moor,” Angelo tells the story of a young African boy who is Europeanized by force. Although director Markus Schleinzer’s grandiose period drama is set back in the courts of the Habsburg empire, its lessons also apply to the present.Read More »