2011-2020

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Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organized in part by the royal cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put together a side program showcasing the medium in all its shapes and forms: surrealist film, absolute film, dadaist films, abstract film,… The side program would soon become a festival in its own right: ‘EXPRMNTL’, dedicated to experimental cinema, and would become a mythical gathering of the avant-garde…Read More »

Written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Miss Representation exposes how mainstream media and culture contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America.

The film draws back a curtain to reveal a glaring reality we live with every day but fail to see – how the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls makes it difficult for women to feel powerful and achieve leadership positions.Read More »

Ben Rivers is an artist and experimental filmmaker based in London. His work has been shown in many film festivals and galleries around the world and has won numerous awards. His work ranges from themes about exploring unknown wilderness territories to candid and intimate portrayals of real-life subjects.Read More »

The final part of Heinz Emigholz’s “Streetscapes” series is a triptych. A prologue examines 3 buildings by Julio Vilamajó in Montevideo. The main part of the film is a cinematic documentation of 29 buildings by the Uruguayan architect and shell-construction master Eladio Dieste (1917-2000).Read More »

Dream English Kid is a collage of what Leckey calls ‘found memories’ made from sources such as adverts, TV programmes and music as well as reconstructions using props and models. He made the film after he found a recording on YouTube of a Joy Division concert he attended as a teenager and realised that many of our personal memories can now be found online. While acting as a form of self–portrait for the artist, the film also seeks to connect us all through shared memory and experience.Read More »

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A love story between a building-site labourer, whose best friend suddenly drops dead, and an overstressed, underpaid nurse.Read More »

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Chinese comedy superstar Huang Bo (“Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons”) makes a good first stab at directing with “The Island,” an entertaining if overlong dramedy about company workers splitting into rival factions after being shipwrecked on a desert island. This mix of broad humor, survivalist drama and romance opens brightly and ends with a bang but stutters a little in the middle. Huang’s name and a cast including box-office draws Shu Qi and Wang Baoqiang should ensure strong domestic business, while the universally accessible “Lord of the Flies”-like premise ought to help attract audiences in offshore markets. “The Island” opens in China, North America, and several other international territories on Aug. 10.Read More »

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Montreal-based actor-turned-filmmaker prodigy Xavier Dolan’s third feature is a terrific character study for its first two hours — and then there’s the third one. That’s starting to be a routine for the young director: Dolan’s gently affecting debut, “I Killed My Mother,” was a remarkably insightful portrait of a young gay man’s relationship to his mother, but his two follow-ups have suffered from an overindulgence in style in spite of their many strengths. In the case of “Laurence, Anyways,” Melvil Poupaud delivers a stirring performance in the title role as a high school teacher who confesses to his hip girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clément) that he has a penchant for cross-dressing. The story tracks Fred’s transition from anger to acceptance as the couple attempts to keep their relationship intact. Dolan’s screenplay is sharply attuned the nuances of human behavior, and strikes an intelligent note between intimacy and a grandly expressionistic vision that dramatizes the emotion of the scenario with boisterous music cues, fantasy sequences and a lavish color scheme.Read More »

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The Wild Pear Tree is a gentle, humane, beautifully made and magnificently acted movie from the Turkish film-maker and former Palme winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan: garrulous, humorous and lugubrious in his unmistakable and very engaging style. It’s an unhurried, elegiac address to the idea of childhood and your home town – and how returning to both has a bittersweet savour. As in his previous film, Winter Sleep, he draws on the spirit of Chekhov. But his style is all his own: not Chekhovian, but Ceylanian. There are scenes in which people placidly watch TV: largely histrionic soaps whose contrast to the film itself is a type of comedy the director playfully allows us to notice. In fact, The Wild Pear Tree is not unlike a telenovela of family life, taken at a very high-minded, andante pace.Read More »