Quote: Part of a trilogy focusing on the Tohoku region that is comprised of dialogues with victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Ideas on how to share experiences of the disaster with future generations, a challenge touched upon in the previous films The Sound of Waves and Voices from the Waves, is found in folk tales from the region.
Folk storytellers Ito Masako, Sasaki Ken, and Sato Reiko gather at Kurikomayama in Miyagi Prefecture. Folklore scholar Ono Kazuko, founder of Miyagi Minwa no Kai, acts as interviewer as they tell a series of fantastic and outlandish tales, including the story of a girl who marries a monkey.Read More »
Quote: Gates of Heaven is a documentary film by Errol Morris about the pet cemetery business. It was made when Morris was unknown and did much to launch his career.Read More »
Lech Kowalski returns to Utica (New York), where he grew up. He decides to document the struggles of his fellow citizens by offering to pay to hear their stories.Read More »
Through interviews as intimate as they are disconcerting, we meet Delphine, a Cameroonian immigrant residing in Belgium who narrates her life for the camera of Rosine Mbakam, also originally from Cameroon. As in her previous feature film “At Jolie Coiffure” (awarded at Olhar ’19), concise elements become a cinematographic force based on the encounter between black women all at once close and distant. The protagonist’s confessional tone reveals her self-awareness as the conductor of her own story, dealing with patriarchal and colonial scars and striving to assert her own voice.Read More »
Quote: Shot in Grand Teton National Park, this immersive film essay draws together the distinct sensibilities of filmmakers Peter Mettler and Emma Davie and philosopher David Abram to encounter the spaces where humans and animals meet. Images are overlaid with a soundscape of shivering leaves and animal murmurs, rushing rivers and electronic voices, insects and automobiles. In order to capture all this Becoming Animal embraces the sensory tools of cinema. Various tableaus of the wilderness and urbanity are set up: inquisitive antelope and digital billboards are seamlessly contrasted, Buffalo block traffic, moose clash antlers, and a snail’s body becomes a landscape of its own. Conscious of their own complicity with the animal world, the filmmakers invite us to explore this ‘more than human world’. The viewer is given permission to navigate this exquisitely intricate system in which everything is alive and expressive, humans, animals and landscapes are inextricably interdependent, and there is no such thing as empty space.Read More »
Mr. Bachmann and his pupils (aged between 12 and 14) live in Stadtallendorf, formerly the site of a secret Second World War munitions factory and now an industrial town that’s home to generations of economic migrants. The class is representative of this history, with several recent arrivals still struggling with the language of their new home. All the while, their sexagenarian, rock band T-shirt wearing teacher’s effortlessly egalitarian approach encourages students to develop empathy for one another through openness and listening. Shot over six months, Reinhold Vorschneider’s patient cinematography works with the spontaneity of the classroom environment to lend emotional weight to even the most fleeting moments. The pacing and observational method call to mind the work of Frederick Wiseman, yet Speth’s intimate approach creates an engaging and tender drama.
Silver Bear Jury Prize and Audience Award (Berlin 2021)Read More »
Cinema meets art critic. In this film commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Paul Haessaerts is responsible for ensuring that the screenplay (which he wrote together with Henri Storck) and the voice-over are intelligently informative. He provides a definition of Baroque, talks about the images’ composition, refers to Rubens’ life and makes a thematic analysis of his work, its evolution and it’s influence. The content is entirely in line with the demanding guidelines that André Bazin praised when explaining the education role of cinema. The form is innovative and inventive. The animation emphasizes the paintings’ key elements and structure and visualizes the composition. The split screen makes it possible to make comparative analyses of paintings and styles. Notwithstanding this textbook virtuosity Storck develops his own method, using the camera’s movements to enter into the drama of the painting. Tracking shots, exploring the painting, stopping at a detail, fragmentation, the closeness of the bodies and the faces. The first part of the film is analytical and biographical, the second part takes us, lyrically, into the paintings and into Rubens’ world “that the film recreates before our eyes” (Paul Davay). Both parts feature a very prominently present orchestral score.Read More »
”As a break from most other documentaries as of late, the camp-glam filmmaking team of Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey (Party Monster: The Michæl Alig Story) bring you The Eyes of Tammy Faye, focusing on the overly-made up visage of fallen televangelist Miss Tammy Faye Baker, instead of overly-drugged up ravers or overly-f***ed up porn stars. The film takes a peek behind the foundation to show the real life and times of Tammy Faye, best-known as the now 80’s excess ex-wife of preacher Jim Bakker, the other woman to Jessica Hahn-o-rama, and the single-driving force behind the mascara and fake-eyelashes industries. As a whole, The Eyes of Tammy Faye funnily and lively serves to show that sometimes the best movie characters are real ones and sometimes the best Christians are ones who look like crack-whores.Read More »
I Want to Live is a documentary on the lives of Kurdish Refugees from Syria, living in refugee camps in Kurdistan. Shot on location, it is set against the Syrian civil war and the ISIS (Islamic State) attacks upon Kurdistan. Told through the eyes of a young boy, Shndar, living with Thalassemia disease, he searches for an immediate treatment as he ages without losing hope, leaving his home amid simmering ethnic and religious hatred to live the life of a refugee. The film tells stories of daily life on the camp and outside of it. More than being a film on the life of refugees, it is an intimate character study and gripping tale of innocent lost amides wars, a meditation on life, death, war, peace, and tolerance.Read More »
