Rangbhoomi follows the filmmaker as he attempts to trace Dadasaheb Phalke’s life in Varanasi, where Phalke withdrew, disillusioned with the world of cinema, and decided to take up theatre. During his life there, Phalke wrote a semi-autobiographical play titled Rangbhoomi, which forms the core of this film.Read More »
Pour la suite du monde, or “when cinema recreates life, old gesture and future…”
Film Reference Library wrote:
For centuries the inhabitants of Île-aux-Coudres, a small island in the St. Lawrence River, trapped beluga whales by sinking a weir of saplings into the offshore mud at low tide. After 1920 the practice was abandoned.
In 1962, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault, and a team of filmmakers from the NFB, arrived on the island to document life on Île-aux-Coudres and the resumption of the traditional whale trapping practice.Read More »
At Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest congregation of religious pilgrims, a troupe of theatre actors stage a play based on the origin myth of Hinduism – the churning of the cosmic ocean. The legend tells of an epic battle between the gods and the demons for an elixir of immortality. The mela (or fair) is celebrated at the site where the elixir was believed to have fallen. Today, millions of Hindu pilgrims gather there to bathe in the holy river over a two-month period.Read More »
Quote:
In 2017 I invited Jerome Hiler to the Harvard Film Archive to present Cinema Before 1300, an illustrated lecture he had delivered on several occasions whose title and subject intrigued me. A talk on medieval stained glass, accompanied by Hiler’s own still images taken over the years, principally in those cathedrals in France and the UK that today remain among the last repositories of this now lost luminary art and craft. The event that unfolded was mesmerizing and moving, a meditation on stained glass as a popular and devotional art, and as a precursor to cinema.Read More »
Margarethe von Trotta is one of the few German female director icons and is internationally revered as a star director. In 2022 she will celebrate her 80th birthday. Her works are among the most important German films and have written German (film) history. Margarethe von Trotta asserted herself early on in a purely male domain. In 1981 she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for “Die leaden time” and thus started her world career.Read More »
Quote:
A film about people who have survived the irradiation of war and is recommended to those who believe they are immune to it. An extreme, necessary film that penetrates the eye and heart with unyielding force.Read More »
Susumu Hani’s six-year-old daughter Mio plays an orphaned Japanese girl who, for some reason, ends up in Sardinia. She starts going to school, quickly learns Italian, and befriends a boy named Raphael. One of Hani’s stranger concepts for a film, made enjoyable by the great naturalistic acting that’s found in most of his work.Read More »
It is June 2021 and the end of the school year at the Hénin-Beaumont high school. Linda and Irina are best friends. Between TikTok videos and science classes, they confide in each other about their family, their future, and other teenage preoccupations. But Linda has to move house yet again, and will not be here next term. In spite of her mother’s advice, this time she has grown attached to a friend, and their separation will be a painful one. As the summer begins, her heart is sore.Read More »
