2010s

Synopsis
In their new film somniloquies, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel overcome the boundaries between inner dreamscapes and human bodies. At the start, flowing forms can be seen and a gentle, undefinable sound made out in the background. McGregor’s voice appears and makes an invitation: “I have expected you, come-on in, I said I would grant an interview”. The more we listen to him and enter into his dreamworld, the clearer the contours of the sleeping bodies become, before they seem to dissipate once again. The dreaming man speaks with people who are sawing open his body, removing his organs and stitching him back up. As we find out how painful he finds the stitches, we ask ourselves for how long we’ll want to follow the camera, which sometimes seems to caress the bodies tenderly, but at other times seeks to pierce them almost brutally, like an x-ray. Just in time, we hear his voice: “Let’s go to future land (…) it’s shining near the corner”. In this case, sleeping in the cinema means pushing forward to its very limits.Read More »

Nicolás Pereda / Mexico-Canada, 2015 / New York, Toronto / 53′

Two young men and a young women occupy a flat in Mexico City. They spend their days reading alone, reading aloud, and sleeping. From time to time, a maid arrives to tidy their quarters. Time and even space cease to exist; there is only the present somnambulant moment, drifting between sleep and wakefulness.

A wraithlike fantasy capturing the languorous texture of privilege, Minotaur studies both the nearly-obsolete ritual of cloistering oneself from the world to read, and the social status that would make such an activity possible. Nicolás Pereda’s seventh film premiered at both the New York Film Festival and Toronto.Read More »

Quote:
Super close Mother LYN and daughter IONA (Dafty One and Dafty Two) are excited for their new life in a new town. Determined to make a success of things after a tricky start, Iona becomes ‘best friends’ with KEELY, STACEY and CHELSEA. Used to being Iona’s bestie herself, Lyn feels left out. So Lyn also makes friends with BELINDA, her neighbour. As much as Lyn and Iona pretend to each other that things are going great, things aren’t going great for either of them. Iona struggles with the girls, who act more like frenemies than friends, and Belinda won’t give Lyn her stepladders back. Both Mother and Daughter retreat into fantasy and lies.Read More »

Documentary about one of the most extraordinary directors in the history of German film.Read More »

Inspired by live performance of Inconsolable Ghost at OT301, Amsterdam.

Images by Makino Takashi.
Music by Inconsolable Ghost
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Most likely my favourite film of all time; the greatest sensory experience I had watching a film. Makino Takashi is probably the most formally interesting filmmaker working today and this is a great intro to his work. Watching his films are looking at the universe from outer space, falling into decay, destruction and beauty – and interesting sound collaborations.Read More »

When Alejandro “Mono” dies, his brother and two closest friends, a tight-knit group since childhood, are left to figure out how to take care of his young daughter, Guadalupe. They want to give her all the love they felt for Mono and secure her future, but there isn’t a single peso left in the bank. Mono invested all of his money in a promising soccer player whose promise hasn’t panned out, and the three hundred thousand dollars Mono spent on his transfer is soon to be lost for good. Read More »

This evocative tribute to the mother of American avantgarde film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Friends and contemporaries float through her homes, recalling in tiny bits and pieces words of Deren’s architectural and personal interior space. Clips from her films are projected back into the spaces where they were originally filmed. Fluid light projections of intimate space provide an elusive agency for a filmmaker most of us will never know.”
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Synopsis
Measuring Change consists of two shots, which run for about 30 minutes each. The camera is completely still and its placement seems to be exactly the same for both. The film revisits Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, his landmark 1970 sculptural work on the northeast shore of the Great Salt Lake, which the director had already interacted with in Casting a Glance (2007). The filmmaker seemingly repeats the vantage point of one of the shots he made ten years before, allowing the jetty to spiral towards the center of the frame. Yet, there are two major differences. While Casting a Glance was shot on 16mm, and dealt with the durational limitations of the film reel, Measuring Change is shot on digital, which allows one to watch Smithson’s work through Benning’s camera for a much longer period of time (in the Q&A after the screening, he mentioned that he actually prefers the digital image over film – something one doesn’t hear often coming from filmmakers). The other difference is that this time the lake has receded so far back that the Smithson’s piece is completely surrounded by land, while the shore gets lost in the horizon.Read More »

An Anthropological Television Myth is an excuse to introduce television anthropology into the culture debate, reading the history of a country and its people through the archives of hundreds of private TV stations scattered throughout Italy.

MUBI’s take wrote:
A great example of how seemingly mundane footage can be reused to create a work of social importance, this exercise in visual history-telling uses a medium representative of popular culture as a tool for the reading of social movements and citizen engagement in a Sicilian city.Read More »