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 »
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Abbas Kiarostami has recently been exhibiting his black-and-white landscape photographs at venues around the world, and Roads of Kiarostami is both a companion piece to these exhibits and an extension of them. Static shots of his photos alternate with footage of Kiarostami’s car winding through mountain roads, as the Iranian filmmaker muses in voice-over on the significance of the journey and on the path of his work and Persian literature as a whole.Read More »
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 communist party control committee interrogates a worker and party activist who is to be excluded from the party.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 »
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Made at the sanatorium of Sokolowsko in Lower Silesia, this film looks at individuals suffering from pulmonary disease and is a moving portrait of those living with illness. @culture.plRead More »