1990s

Presents highlights of a workshop for young directors conducted by the Polish director Krzysztof Kiewslowski (1941-1996) in Amsterdam during the summer of 1994. The theme of the workshop was the direction of actors. For a fortnight, various groups worked every day on a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s scenario `Scenes from a Marriage’. The sessions with the directors Leif Magnusson and Francesco Ranieri Martinotti were filmed for the documentary, and an interview with Kieslowski was filmed before the sessions. The workshop was entitled `Six Actors in Seach of a Director’. The actors were Reinout Bussemaker, Pamela Knaack, Shaun Lawton, Matthias Maat, Dulcie Smart and Nelleke Zitman. Read More »

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Mother and Son is one of those films that provides a genuine challenge to anyone trying to clearly define exactly what it is that makes it so damned special. As a reviewer you get used to dealing in the traditional elements of narrative cinema, things like pace, story, humour, dialogue, action and tension. But consider the following plot summary:

A loving and dutiful son comforts his dying mother in her final days.

And that’s it.Read More »

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Gabbeh is a brilliantly colorful, profoundly romantic ode to beauty, nature, love and art. Mohsen Makhmalbaf originally traveled to the remote steppes of southeastern Iran to document the lives of an almost extinct tribe of nomads. For centuries, these wandering families created special carpets – Gabbeh – that served both as artistic expression and autobiographical record of the lives of the weavers. Spellbound by the exotic countryside, and by the tales behind the Gabbehs, Makhmalbaf’s intended documentary evolved into a fictional love story which uses a gabbeh as a magic story – telling device weaving past and present’ fantasy and reality.Read More »

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Angelo is an orphan who grew up with a nomad woman. He reacts to his pain over the death of his best friend for overdose, thanks to the encounter with Serena. She survives being a prostitute, but she has not lost hope. Angelo moves along an axis of characters in a desolate and poetic day without end.Read More »

A portrait of socialist Poland circa 1971 that recounts the last years of Polish poet Rafal Wojaczek, a rebel who became a legend.Read More »

from the Fantagraphics website:
“Ghost World avoids all the clichés of the gen-X genre, presenting a melancholy, affecting portrait of two teen-age girls, best friends whose intertwined lives afford them a certain sanity, while the threat of separation brings home the tenuousnes of their shared reality.”

“[Clowes] demonstrates that the medium, in the hands of an expert, can generate narratives as complex and textured as any work of fiction”
—SPIN ONLINE

“Clowes’s comics unsettlingly combine scathing hilarity and queasy, misanthropic nastiness.”
—WORLD ART

“Clowes creates serious dramatic work that happens to be in comics form… It could well make him the famous artist that he might not want to be.”
—PRINT

“[Clowes] spells out the realities of teen angst as powerfully and authentically as Salinger did in Catcher and the Rye for an earlier generation.”
—VILLAGE VOICERead More »

Based on the novel of the same title by the Strugatsky brothers

“Konstantin Lopushansky was a student of classic Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, and master’s influence is highly visible in “The Ugly Swans” — not just as a ghost in the background, but as full-fledged foreground presence. Which is not to deny Lopushansky his originality. More than anything, it’s a sign of a certain artistic style being handed down over the generations… The film is …aesthetically outstanding and emotionally moody in a way that’s very hard to gauge… Tarkovsky would have been proud.” (Tom Birchenough, “The Moscow Times”)
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The great Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, whose Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible stand as masterpieces of world cinema, is the subject of this eccentric and puzzling production. Though based on memoirs Eisenstein wrote before his death in 1948, most of this film is barely a documentary at all, but rather a composite of images, many of which are fascinating and arresting. Eisenstein himself was known for startling and memorable images (perhaps the most famous of which is the shot of the baby carriage rolling down the steps in Potemkin), so memorializing him with clips from his own films interspersed with readings from his memoirs seems somewhat appropriate. But the voice-over in Russian (with English subtitles) is quite sparse, and at times the images onscreen, which include clips from Buster Keaton films and Hollywood musicals from the 1930s, are utterly mystifying.. –Robert J. McNamaraRead More »

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“Eternity and a Day” won an overdue Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes International Film Festival for the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, whose style of drifting metaphysical reverie is at its most accessible here. All things being relative, this is a dreamy, lulling film but also a more concise and straightforward one than the magnificently grandiose “Ulysses’s Gaze”, the Angelopoulos opus that directly preceded it. “Eternity and a Day” is simpler, the haunting poetic valedictory of an artist whose memory leads him across the landscape of his life during his last day on earth.Read More »