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“ In the first part, the camera travels around (West) Berlin like a tourist picking out touristic monuments and describing them in terms of their significance to military history….the commentary charts the bleak history of blockade and the cutting of transport links. The filmmaker reads aloud a letter. She is reading it privately to herself but it is the sound of her reading that makes the connection with the viewer. In the second half (in which the commentary also charts the escalation of land frontier sea and air restrictions), a ferry leaves a quayside and sails into the open Strait, it is an image of freedom but also a melancholy image of parting” Helen De Witt, Visionary Landscapes, 2005Read More »

Structured around readings by renowned critic and essayist John Berger, TASKAFA (2013, 66 mins) offers a brilliantly incisive meditation on urban space and city life by investigating the complex history of Istanbul’s street dogs. Despite several major attempts by Istanbul’s rulers, politicians and planners over the last 400 years to erase them, the city’s street dogs have persisted thanks to an enduring alliance with civilian communities that recognize and defend their right to co-exist. Taskafa gathers the voices of diverse Istanbul residents, shopkeepers, and street based workers, all of whom display a striking commitment to the well-being and future of the city’s canine population.Read More »

Quote:

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches (orig French La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes) is a novel by Canadian novelist Gaétan Soucy.

La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes was one of the novels chosen for inclusion in the French version of Canada Reads, broadcast on Radio-Canada in 2004, where it was championed by actor, film director, screenwriter, and musician Micheline Lanctôt.

La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes caused a sensation in Quebec and was immediately translated into more than ten languages. It was translated into English as The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches by Sheila Fischman.Read More »

Rokas and Inga, a couple of young Lithuanians, volunteer to drive a cargo van of humanitarian aid to Ukraine. When plans change and they find themselves left to their own devices, they cross the vast snowy lands of the Donbass region in search of allies and shelter, drifting into the lives of those affected by the war. They approach the frontline in spite of the danger, all the while growing closer to each other as they begin to understand life during wartime.Read More »

When ‘Vogler’s Magnetic Health Theater’ comes to town, there’s bound to be a spectacle. Reading reports of a variety of supernatural disturbances at Vogler’s prior performances abroad, the leading townspeople (including the police chief and medical examiner) request that their troupe provide them a sample of their act, before allowing them public audiences. The scientific-minded disbelievers try to expose them as charlatans, but Vogler and his crew prove too clever for them.Read More »

We are living through a mini-boom in documentaries about North Korea. Film-makers are getting into Pyongyang to shoot – clandestinely, semi-clandestinely and on various pretexts – those vast statues and eerie cityscapes. Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno suggested the North Koreans’ defensive mindset had something to do with living in the shadow of a volcano, Mount Paektu. Norwegian director Morten Traavik told the extraordinary story of how obscure Slovenian art-rockers Laibach became the first Western band to play North Korea. Alvaro Longorio’s The Propaganda Game argued that North Korea is a zombie state, kept alive by the duplicitous interests of great powers, and Ross Adam and Robert Cannon’s The Lovers and the Despot is about the staggering true story of how in late 70s the movie-mad North Korean leader Kim Jong-il actually kidnapped a South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his wife Choi Eun-hee, and forced them to work in his industry.Read More »

Synopsis:
It starts out like a fairy tale: there’s a queen, a king and their beautiful children, Pauline, Anaïs and Guillaume. But it’s a bit more complicated, a little more funky than that.

Review:
Emilie Brisavoine, who was discovered as an actress in independent films such as La bataille de Solférino [+] by Justine Triet and short film Peine perdue by Arthur Harari, presented her documentary Oh La La Pauline! [+] in competition at the Geneva International Film Festival Tous Écrans. The documentary had its world premiere in the ACID section of Cannes.Read More »

A one-handed madman (he lost the hand while escaping a hanging) uses various detachable devices as murder weapons to gain revenge on those he believes have wronged him.Read More »

Les Gommes is an adaptation of the book written by Alain Robbe-Grillet in 1953 and published by Les Editions de Minuit.
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