Even with the landscape bathed in warm hues and verdant fields on a summer day, accompanied by the lushness of a textured Mozart adagio, clad with airy wispiness of draped muslin, and emphatically punctuated by a picture-perfect sunflower in full bloom that suggests an aesthetic symbiosis with the vibrant, saccharine images of husband and fellow […]
Francisco Vargas’s admirable first feature film, The Violin deceptively starts on a seemingly tangential, wrong note by opening to an underlit, vérité-styled shot of what has become an all too familiar (and arguably gratuitous) image of military atrocities in the face of guerrilla warfare – the arbitrary round-up and brutalization of civilians in an attempt […]
Refining the theme of documented reality and reconstructed history introduced in his earlier film, Moroccan Romance, Carlos Velo’s reflective and ecstatic Torero is equally an autobiography on charismatic Mexican bullfighter, Luis Procuna, and an unvarnished examination of bullfighting culture. Presented as an extended interior monologue as an anxious Procuna prepares to return to the ring […]
Carlos Velo and Fernando G. Mantilla’s quietly observed documentary, Almadrabas loosely prefigures Agnès Varda’s La Pointe courte in capturing the rhythm and rituals of a small fishing village. Ostensibly titled after the Moorish word describing the structure of nets, the film follows the product cycle of canned tuna – from the fishermen who go out […]
Filmed during the Spanish Civil War, Carlos Velo and Enrique Domínguez Rodiño’s Moroccan Romance (Romancero marroquí) bears the imprint of Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic documentaries in its distilled (if manipulated) images of a distant, exotic – and exoticized – culture. Part colonialist travelogue on aspects of life in contemporary Morocco (and implicitly, the benefits of imposed […]
In hindsight, the expressionistic collaborative feature Seagulls Are Dying in the Harbor by Flemish filmmakers Roland Verhavert, Ivo Michiels, and Rik Kuypers proves especially suited as a milestone film for Belgian national cinema, carrying the international distinction as the country’s first feature film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in postwar Antwerp, […]