PLOT: The action of the film evolves around the rooms of a house as one of the main characters, Lisiska, is waiting and is studied in depth as she prepares herself for a meeting & The film attempts to display sexual barriers and misconceptions, and about the role-playing and the confusion around the whole question of sexual and sensual involvement. The essence is the confrontation with self-deception, lies and the real fear of contact with both sexes.’ Based on the German playwright Frank Wedekind’s play Tod Und TeufelRead More »
Quote: A powerful experience which delves into territories of madness and transcendence, The Garden is a statement about director Derek Jarman’s anger over the AIDS crisis. Produced by James Mackay (Blue, The Kingdom of Shadows), it is an intellectual, thought-provoking, and visually imagination experience that fans of the filmmaker won’t want to miss. A must-see gem.Read More »
Scripted by and starring Jane Arden, Separation concerns the inner life of a woman during a period of breakdown – marital, and possibly mental. Her past and (possible?) future are revealed through a fragmented but brilliantly achieved and often humorous narrative, in which dreams and desires are as real as the ‘swinging’ London of the film’s setting, complete with Procol Harum music and Mark Boyle projections.Read More »
Made while director Kaori Oda was studying at Béla Tarr’s Film.Factory in Sarajevo, Aragane is, on the surface, a documentary about a Bosnian coalmine. As Oda takes us underground, the surroundings are illuminated solely by the available light of the miners’ headlamps, creating a state of sensual semi-blindness that both attunes us to the dangers of the mine and — with the beams cutting arcs of light through the blackness and casting shadows on the cavern walls — becomes an organic metaphor for the roots of cinema itself. It is not surprising that commentators have drawn similarities between Oda’s work and that of Harvard’s renowned Sensory Ethnography Lab: as in such films as Leviathan and Manakamana, in Aragane Oda attempts to understand her subjects through an embodied presence that moves beyond distanced knowledge and towards intimate entanglement.Read More »
Sanzgiri’s father was 18 when India ousted the last remaining Portuguese colonisers from Goa in 1961. Combining 16mm with drone footage, desktop screenshots, and Skype interviews with his father, Sanzgiri utilises various modes of seeing at a distance to question identity, the construction of memory and anti-colonial solidarity across continents.Read More »
Ben Russell explores how we experience time in his latest striking and hallucinatory short film. Between Carpathian Mountains, Vilnius punk clubs, a Belarusian Independence Day celebration, and Marseille, hovers in a limbo of drone and fog, then descends into stroboscopic clusters of moments and movements.Read More »
From the cover: In this small film, shot in Estepona in the south of Spain, Jørgen Leth and Ole John pursue the principle of asynchronisation and the juxtaposition of disparate elements. The images are footage from a barbershop, a talking man’s face and black film. The sound likewise embraces three elements: a story of how cement is made, which has neither head nor tail; a recording of a shave; and Louis Hjulmand’s score. The tight framing lends the mundane act of a shave a beauty of its own. Meanwhile, in the juxtaposition of near-rambling monologue and music, something else emerges, something more. As a viewer, you try to connect the two, but because no such connection exists, you have to surrender to the pure “experience” of images and sound. The title, a Danish Social-Democratic election slogan, is meaningless in this context. However, if you play around with the juxtaposition of the world “security” and the shots of the man’s soft skin and exposed neck under the barber’s sharply honed razor, the mock meaning rubs up against an altogether different one.Read More »
