Tian Zhuangzhung’s Springtime in a Small Town is a visually sublime and nostalgic film that is somewhat reminiscent of Satyajit Ray’s exquisite Charulata in understatedly depicting the repercussions of emotional betrayal. The film takes place in the ruins of a large rural mansion in postwar China, as a physically fragile aristocrat (Wu Jun) is reunited […]
Tietou’s (Xiaoman Chen) young life has been affected by China’s political climate from the moment of his birth. His mother, a schoolteacher named Chen Shujuan (Liping Lu), and his father, a librarian named Lin Shaolong (Quanxin Pu), were compelled to delay their wedding plans out of reverence for the death of Joseph Stalin, and his […]
My introduction to Robert Todd’s cinema was through the experimental short, Our Former Glory, a film that juxtaposes clinical, often destabilized shots of urban architecture with footage from a makeshift missing persons posting center turned public memorial on a promenade overlooking a still smoldering World Trade Center site to create a powerful and provocative rumination […]
In a way, Robert Todd’s Rising Tide represents a continuation on the themes of obsolescence and disposability that runs through Our Former Glory and In Loving Memory, a reverent, quietly observed collage on the changing face of manual labor that, like Johan van der Keuken’s Springtime: Three Portraits, captures a way of life that is […]
During the Q&A for Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro commented that he conceived the image of Pale Man, a child-eating creature who could only see by raising his hands up to his face (as if paradoxically covering his eyes), as an allusion to the perverted image of stigmata – an affliction often associated with enlightened […]
An anonymous, gaunt young man (Le Van Loc) pedals his rented cyclo (pedicab) through the crowded streets of Ho Chi Minh city (modern day Saigon) in search of a fare, stopping periodically to rest and to clean away the grime and dust of pollution from his feet. It is a legacy of meager livelihood that […]