“No one likes to dwell on past failures, but it’s good to see Jack Tanner back again. As a Democratic presidential candidate in the 1988 race, Tanner seemed hopelessly outmatched, a dark horse trailing the pack. But as an ex-candidate returning to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Tanner is blissfully outside the fray, and while we’re following him, we are as well.Read More »
Devastating essay on exile, Là-bas (2006) is a crucial moment of Akerman’s life when she herself was confined to a rental apartment in Tel Aviv unable to bridge the threshold to the outside world, overwhelmed by the flooding of traumatic thoughts, fears and vulnerabilities awakened by her family’s history with the death camps. Impossible not to think of her last work and of the reasons why she left when watching Là-bas today, which was also shot in video and similarly takes the shape of a personal, cloistered chamber piece.
(Based on Andréa Picard’s article)Read More »
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Documentary about the art of film editing. Clips are shown from many groundbreaking films with innovative editing styles.Read More »
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Antonio Bolivar (Richard Dreyfuss) lives a reclusive life in a hut on the outskirts of El Idilio, a far-from-ideal European outpost deep in the Amazon jungle. His main pleasure in life is reading love stories. The jungle holds memories of an earlier time that he would rather forget. Antonio is drawn back into the jungle when the mayor (Timothy Spall) decides to hunt down a grief-stricken jaguar that has tasted human blood and seems determined to kill the remaining population.Read More »
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What is the nature of childhood resilience? Sisters Jin and Bin, ages 6 and 3, live with their mother. Jin likes school and does well. One day, their mother leaves the girls with their father’s sister, a woman they do not know. The mother seeks a reconciliation with their father. She leaves them a plastic piggy bank, promising to return when the bank is full. The girls scrub and clean for their aunt, a tippler who’s often cranky and complaining. She gives them a few coins for their work. They earn more money catching, grilling, and selling grasshoppers. They miss their mother. The bank fills. They watch for her from a mound of dirt. Will she return? Will stoic faces give way to a smile?Read More »
In 2000, the final year of the twentieth century, Nikolaus Geyrhalter and his crew set out with a video camera to film twelve, self-contained ethnographic episodes, each encapsulating a month-long document of the lives of people who perform their quotidian rituals in a figurative Elsewhere, as follow:Read More »
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Through raw images of cruel and unusual news items, gathered from journalists and amateur video directors, director Huang Weikai and his film Disorder take us into the chaos of a Chinese society scarred by an overwhelming urbanization. The film is made like a mosaic of singular stories restoring absurd and hopeless situations, in an urban environment where the weakest seem to be out of place.Read More »
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The languid account of a disaster happening in slow motion. The film charts the bleak daily life of a village in Calabria, which once had a population of some fifteen thousand but is now down to a mere handful. An impassive old man and a retarded girl seem to be simply waiting for time to eat away their lives. They are only occasionally and fleetingly roused from their deep apathy by strange objects and sordid encounters. Read More »
This is a surprisingly good documentary about Arletty, née Léonie Bathiat, her career, times, private life and controversial affair with a German officer during WWII. The film opens with some touching footage of her late in life, then blind, walking along the Seine.Read More »