2010s

The Infidel is a feature documentary about a young Bosnian man, Dino, whose father becomes a radical Islamist and takes his family away from their secular town, to Maoča. Dino, albeit unintentionally, gets involved in a terrorist attack and spends time in jail. He renounces Islam and decides to go back in Bihać, his hometown, cut the ties with his radical family and build a new life from scratch. This is where we follow his lonely daily routine and learn his disturbing story as he tries to find peace, struggling between accepting his family or renouncing them for who they are.Read More »

Carl Laemmle is a feature documentary about the extraordinary life story of Carl Laemmle, the German-Jewish immigrant who founded Universal Pictures, and saved over 300 Jewish families from Nazi Germany.Read More »

Empty Metal reveals a political fantasy, an alternative reality whose characters teeter on the dull knife edge that is contemporary American politics, but they refuse to fall right or left. Instead, they lash out from the soul, and under the radar, in an attempt to achieve what their mainstream predecessors have yet to accomplish.Read More »

“Birdshot” is a mystery-thriller film that tells a story of a young Filipina farm girl who wanders into the boundaries of a Philippine reservation forest. Deep within the reservation she mistakenly shoots and kills a critically endangered and protected Philippine Eagle. As the local authorities begin a manhunt to track down the poacher of a national bird, their investigation leads them to an even more horrific discovery.Read More »

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The term “blood quantum” refers to a colonial blood measurement system that is used to determine an individual’s Indigenous status, and is criticized as a tool of control and erasure of Indigenous peoples. The words take on even more provocative implications as the title of Jeff Barnaby’s sophomore feature, which grimly depicts an apocalyptic scenario where in an isolated “Mi’gmaq” community discover they are the only humans immune to a zombie plague. As the citizens of surrounding cities flee to the “Mi’gmaq” reserve in search of refuge from the outbreak, the community must reckon with whether to let the outsiders in – and thus risk not just the extinction of their tribe but of humanity, period. The severe and scathing portrait of post-colonial Indigenous life and culture that Barnaby previously captured in the acclaimed Rhymes for Young Ghouls here deftly collides with the iconography and violent hyperbole typical of the zombie genre.Read More »

Film adaptation of W.G. Sebald’s novel “Austerlitz”, directed by the Czech-born French director Stan Neumann and starring Denis Lavant as Jacques Austerlitz, the film is described as “not so much a filmed book as it is a film about a book, breaking down the walls that divide documentary and fiction, just as Sebald blurred the lines between the two in his writing”.Read More »

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With the innocuously titled Sweet Dreams (Fai bei sogni), Italian director Marco Bellocchio stages a gentle, eminently watchable return to some of the key themes that have haunted his 50 years of filmmaking, particularly the scarring left by a dysfunctional family and maternal love gone awry. The story of a 9-year-old boy who loses his beloved mother is a much simpler, more direct film than the thematically rich My Mother’s Smile (2002), and has none of the churning family anger of Fists in His Pocket (1965). But based on journalist Massimo Gramellini’s best-selling autobiographical novel, it has an emotional unity and urgency that holds the attention, only flagging in the last innings of a surprisingly compact drama running well over two hours.Read More »

A deaf teenager struggles to fit into the boarding school system.

Set in a Ukrainian school for the deaf and mute, The Tribe follows new student Sergey as he gets a crash course in who’s really in charge. The decrepit institution is awash in drugs, prostitution and organized petty crime. This incredible film has one particularly daring aspect: it is acted entirely in sign language without the aid of subtitles or voice-over. The audience follows the story through the physicality of the performances and the emphatic intensity of the signing. Heightened by a hormone-laced narrative, with kids engaging in explicit sex and violence, The Tribe is an unforgettable cinematic experience, from its epic, wordless opening shot to the brutal finale.Read More »

A convict returns to his home town to again torture his family, face his neighbors and try to destroy the local religious fanatics and their plans to keep money from the village people.Read More »