2000s

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Pilger tells a story literally ‘hidden from history’.

In the 1960s and 70s, British governments, conspiring with American officials, tricked into leaving, then expelled the entire population of the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean.

The aim was to give the principal island of this Crown Colony, Diego Garcia, to the Americans who wanted it as a major military base. Indeed, from Diego Garcia US planes have since bombed Afghanistan and Iraq.

The story is told by islanders who were dumped in the slums of Mauritius and in the words of the British officials who left a ‘paper trail’ of what the International Criminal Court now describes as ‘a crime against humanity’ .Read More »

A semi-documentary, semi-fictional film of the days following the cold-blooded murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos, a 15 years old boy, by the police at Athens, in December 2008. In the film -among other things- are presented many original street scenes and media stuff of those days. Read More »

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In this dreamlike yet earthbound film, Rahmat the boatman navigates the increasingly brackish waters of a coastal land, collecting the heartaches and tears of its inhabitants. But he remains powerless against their misguided attempts to appease the gods and make the land green again, whether by offering a bride to the sea or forcibly “treating” the eyes of a painter who sees in different colors. Drawing first-hand on the challenges faced by Iranian artists today, writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof’s deeply atmospheric and poetical film is a gorgeous allegory of intolerance, brutality, and mystified routine that resonates far beyond any one state’s borders.Read More »

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A handful of children are left to their own devices in this subtle drama from Argentine filmmaker Celina Murga. Maria (Magdalena Capobianco) is a girl in her early teens whose family lives in an upscale gated suburb. Maria’s parents are going out of town for a week, and rather than leave her with relatives or hire a babysitter, Maria is put in charge of looking after her little sister Sofia (Eleonora Capobianco), with housekeeper Esther (Natalia Gomez Alarcon) serving as a nominal adult authority figure, though for the most part she lets Maria and the others do what they please. With only their parents bedroom off-limits, Maria and Sofia have the run of the house, and soon they and their friends Facundo (Lucas Del Bo), Quique (Federico Pena), Rodrigo (Ramiro Saludas) and Timmy (Mateo Braun) are spending their days exploring the place. As the kids begin creating their own rules to run counter to the ones their absent parents set down, Esther brings a young relative, Fernando (Gaston Luparo), to play with them, and the privileged kids begin to get a notion of the ways of the outside world. Una Semana Solos (aka A Week Alone) was an official selection at the 2008 Buenos Aires Film Festival.Read More »

The overlapping tales of three Iranian women who live in a poor Tehran neighborhood unfold by revisiting certain plot points from different perspectives. Each revisit reveals new insights into the characters’ motivations and struggles. The story centers around the people who frequent Cafe Setareh and who play important roles in the lives of each of the main three female characters.Read More »

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Rostislav sitting on the beach with friend Peter philosophize about who is he – a creation of God or the Devil. Their conversation is interrupted by a naked man from a nearby nudist beach “Paradise”, which is looking for a doctor. At this point it appears that the doctor is both an experimental film’s director.Read More »

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Vive La France by Serge Bozon, a heady experiment full of soul that more than delivers on the allegorical chutzpah of its title. On receiving a troubling letter from her husband, a soldier in the First World War, Camille (Sylvie Testud) sets off to find him incognito, chopping her coif and wrapping her boobs to pass as a lad of 17. Deep in a forest landscape rendered with limpid concentration by cinematographer Céline Bozon, she falls in with a clutch of soldiers mobilized to the front. Or so it seems: Strange things are afoot in La France—like the spontaneous performance of twee, jangling ballads, rendered on scrap-yard acoustic instruments and sung, from an unabashed female perspective, by the harmonizing grunts. Weirder than the arrival of these inexplicable neo-retro-folk jams is how seamlessly they fit into Bozon’s melancholic war fable. Which is to say La France invents a curious and confident hybrid mode to accommodate, even reconcile, disparate modes and strategies: war film and musical, elegiac and avant-garde, cerebral and poignant, rigorous and flexible.Read More »

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There was a joke at Sight & Sound of old, that the designer was holding up the layouts because he needed to ‘kern the folios’ – that’s to say, he was recalibrating the space between the numerals informing us what page we’re on. See for yourself how needful a task this might be – and welcome to the micropolitics of the division of labour in the print-based communications industry, where what the words say is only a part of where brain-time is spent. Helvetica is a san-serif typeface – like the adjacent credit matter, rather than this sentence, it lacks those nice little spikes at letter-ends – and what’s lovely about Gary Hustwit’s documentary is that it not only gets across the passions, absurd and detailed, that shape this world (passions about effects few of us can name and some never notice at all) but also sketches a timeline in changing technologies and fashions over a half-century.Read More »

To avoid being sued, a film director reluctantly agrees to set up and direct the Good Friday celebrations in a small Tuscan town.
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