2011-2020

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Winter, spring, summer, autumn…and then? La cinquiememe saison (The Fifth Season) is an apocalyptic tale which does not need to make use of extraterrestrial aliens or natural catastrophes to impress the viewer. Humans and nature have a very fragile connection – what if nature suddenly decided to cut this connection?

Set in a little rural village in the Ardennes, the inhabitants are preparing for the local feast to celebrate the end of the winter. But something goes wrong: the fire that was supposed to light up the bonfire refuses to burn, a bad omen for the whole community. We do not see the end coming at first but season after season we gradually witness a slow but implacable process of decay: the crops do not grow, the animals become sterile, people fall ill and the trees collapse. The two young protagonists Alice and Thomas, the outsider Pol and his paraplegic son, and all the others can do nothing other than be spectators to this silent disaster.Read More »

The film critic Tatti Sanguineti arrives in Palermo to find out what has happened to Franco Maresco’s unfinished movie: Belluscone. Una storia siciliana. A film that was supposed to tell the story of the unique relationship between Berlusconi and Sicily through the misadventures of the Palermitan impresario of Neapolitan “neomelodic” singers and organizer of street festivals, Ciccio Mira—an undaunted supporter of Berlusconi, nostalgic for the old days’ Mafia— and two artists in his stable, Erik and Vittorio Ricciardi, who perform in the squares of Palermo a song entitled “Vorrei conoscere Berlusconi” (“I Want to Meet Berlusconi”). The film focuses on three failures: the political and human one of a Berlusconi now on the wane; that of the unfortunate and “slapdash” Ciccio Mira, rooted in an old but tenacious culture; and finally, the artistic one of the director, who chooses to disappear after realizing that tilting at political windmills is pointless, in a country that has long identified with Berlusconian “culture” and probably continues to do so.
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One on One: After a high school student is murdered, the seven suspects are hunted down by members of a terrorist organization.Read More »

This is the “Bonus Disc Extras” of Memento Films’ BD release of “Winter Sleep”.
Bonus Disc Extras includes:
Behind the Scenes (2:18:56) in Turkish with French soft-subs.
Winter Sleep at Cannes (0:10:35) in French & English
Trailer (00:01:40) (no subs) Read More »

Synopsis

A story about a chance encounter that momentarily destroyed a successful and happy family life. All of a sudden the woman found passion and desire more important than her loving husband and cherished child. The father and son suffer from the realization that they are no longer needed, but try to understand and forgive. The woman, who failed to become happy, is in turmoil.Read More »

Blackfella Charlie is out of sorts. The intervention is making life more difficult on his remote community, what with the proper policing of whitefella laws now. So Charlie takes off, to live the old way, but in so doing sets off a chain of events in his life that has him return to his community chastened, and somewhat the wiser.Read More »

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One of several triptychs showing in this year’s Wavelengths program, Peter Hutton’s Three Landscapes zeroes in on the industrial terrain ringing Detroit (where he grew up), the bucolic pastures of the Hudson River Valley (where he now lives), and Ethiopian salt flats (where he travelled under Robert Gardner’s sponsorship). The most obvious link between the three is labour, but the film functions less as a thesis statement than a poetic meditation, a haiku-like attempt to distill the landscape using a few sparing, echoing graphic forms. The Detroit sequence is the most immediately arresting, its subdued colour palette and precise graphic calculations of grass, clouds, sky, smoke, and industrial architecture leading to a dramatic chain of images of two men inching across a high ladder—a vision of meditative calm in struggle. Workers and clouds are combined to more expressly lyrical effect in a superimposition punctuating the Hudson River Valley sequence, a marvelous bit of photochemical guesswork (albeit one now rendered in DCP projection). If the Ethiopia sequence seems comparatively uncertain about itself, its final long take of a line of camels stilled by distance and heat closes the film with an eloquent appeal to the necessity of limits. After the screening Hutton remarked that he takes special pleasure in those landscapes in which you see clouds moving faster than the workers, a point of view that goes a long way towards restoring the link between the documentary and spiritual connotations of this word “observe.”Read More »

In 1985, filmmaker Richard Linklater began a film screening society in Austin, Texas, that aimed to show classic art-house and experimental films to a budding community of cinephiles and filmmakers. The Austin Film Society raised enough money to fly in their first out-of-town invitee, visionary experimental filmmaker James Benning. Accepting the invitation, Benning met Linklater and immediately the two began to develop a personal and intellectual bond, which has lasted through the present. After the cult success of “Slacker” (1991), Linklater has gone on to make award-winning big budget narrative films including “School of Rock” (2003), “Before Midnight” (2013) and “Boyhood” (2014). Benning, meanwhile, has stayed close to his modest roots and is mainly an unknown figure in mainstream film culture. Combining filmed conversations and archival material, “Double Play” explores the connections between the work and lives of these two American visionaries.Read More »

‘It for Others’, 2013, (16mm film transferred to digital video, 54 minutes)

Duncan Campbell produces films that look at representations of the people and events at the heart of very particular histories – figures such as John Delorean and Bernadette Devlin. Combining archive material with his own footage, his work questions the authority, integrity and intentions of the information presented. For Scotland + Venice 2013, Campbell has taken Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ 1953 film ‘Les Statues meurent aussi’ (Statues also Die) as both source and artefact, to pursue a meditation on the life, death and value of objects.  In the exhibition, Campbell presents the older film alongside his new work, a social and historical examination of cultural imperialism and commodity that combines filmed footage, animation and archive footage.  ‘It for others’ includes a performance made in collaboration with Michael Clark Company that seeks to illustrate the basic principle of commodities and their exchange.Read More »