According to Kiarostami, “Homework” is not a film, but rather a filmed inquiry motivated by the Iranian educational problems his own children brought home every night from school. In the delightful result, young scholars are questioned on camera by Kiarostami himself: backs to the wall, framed in close-up, they face the camera and talk about excessive amounts of homework, the allure of TV cartoons, and the punishment that results from temptation.Read More »
Roads of Kiarostami, a documentary that reflects on the power of landscape, combining austere black-and-white photographs with poetic observations, engaging music with political subject matter.
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This banned and rarely seen pseudo-documentary by Kiarostami is a testimony to his seldom acknowledged political shrewdness and his objective, complex perspective on the tumultuous events of the late 70s in Iran, culminating in the revolution. Remarkably, he achieved this without leaving his comfort zone, the classroom setting, and by staying faithful to his inquiring style, with its subtle, imaginative manipulation of recorded reality. Here, he also introduced the interview format into his body of work, putting his finger on the pulse of Iranian society by collaging conflicting viewpoints.Read More »
Abbas Kiarostami is the most acclaimed Iranian film director whose films have won prizes all around the world. In this film he gives a rare and frank interview about his work, and journeys out of Tehran to meet Babak Ahmadpoor the now grown up star of his famous trilogy, which started with WHERE IS THE FRIENDS HOUSE. On the journey Kiarostami picks up the camera himself , producing images of pure poetry.Read More »
From IMDB:
The late, great, Kryzstoff Kieslowski made documentary films for over ten years before his first movie: ‘The Office’, a short shot while he was still at film school, was his first. It’s notable for its fly-on-the-wall style, then something radical and daring rather than the over-familiar device we know today. If you watch this as an extra on the ‘No End’ DVD, you can also watch an interview with a contemporary (and later collaborator) who explains how Kieslowski realized that in communist Poland, everything was political: ‘The Office’ consists of a few minutes of film in a social security office, but says a lot about the system as a whole (though as it happens, social security may have been one field where Poland was not so different to the capitalist world). This film made Kieslowski a legend among his peers, for while it is very brief, the appendage of words and images is striking and there are definite hints in the style of his later work (one thinks here of the scenes in the Post Office in ‘A Short Film About Love’, or in the cinema box office in ‘A Short Film About Killing’). Worth five minutes of any Kieslowski fan’s time.Read More »
a description by one of IMdB members:
This is such a strange and peculiar film. I had assumed it was a documentary and as such seemed to combine two Kieslowski strains – the meeting and the personal narrative. I kept thinking, as the man who was testifying before a Party Committee which was going to decide whether or not to expel him from the Party. As he tells his story, the curriculum vitae or ‘Life Story’ of the title, I kept thinking this was such a perfect Kieslowski story that he couldn’t have done better if it was scripted.
As it turns out ZYCIORYS was scripted. As far as I’ve been able to discover, the story the man tells was scripted, though based on actual experiences. How precisely or what amount of fictionalizing is involved I do not know. The committee is supposedly real, run by the factory secretary, a man of suspiciously movie star looks. Again, according to the material available, they really got into their task, giving an authentic grilling to the fictional offender.Read More »
a description by one of IMdB members:
When a director films, or ‘takes’ a shot, each is identified by having a ‘slate’ or ‘clapperboard’ with the information regarding the shot written in – what shot number it is and which take it is. The clapper is used when making a sound take, the visual information of the clapper closing synchronized with the jump on the graphic read out of the sound track. The sound and visuals are recorded on different media and this is necessary to match sound and visuals or else everything would look like a poorly synced cheapo chopsocky epic. When it comes to editing the final film the states are all cut out of the film.Read More »
a description by one of IMdB members:
A group of veterans recount a horrifying experience when trapped in a minefield, resulting in each losing their sight.
This is an incredibly powerful anti-war film, showing the horrors of war first hand, in stark close-ups without gratuitous gore. The physical injuries are not quite so emphasized as much as the emotional scaring, with the soldiers expressing their deep regret and longing for a better quality of life.
The film is edited in such a way that story becomes one detailed account, with each character providing his piece of the story. Their collective suffering seems akin to witnessing an AA meeting, except that this group wish to make it clear to the world that they were victims of misguided patriotism, with no control over their fate.Read More »
a description by one of IMdB members:
With X-Ray I feel Kieslowski beginning to repeat himself. While his investigations of collective decision making at the workplace are superficially similar, he is mining deeper and deeper at a particular face exposing certain anomalies in Democratic Centralism. Here he collects the stories of men in a tubercular sanitarium which repeats, to a lesser effect, the methodology of Bylem zolnierzem (I Was a Soldier) (1970). After everyone has told their story, and are seen in a long shot sitting on a terrace attended by a very pretty nurse, Kieslowski delivers the punchline- a bus descends into a nearby town whose factories fill the valley with smoke containing who knows what health destroying toxins. Its all as simple as one, two, three.Read More »