On the idyllic Sicilian fishing village of Acitrezza, generations of the Valestro family have upheld the traditional vocation and simple existence of their ancestors, despite economic hardship and personal tragedy. The men (and even boys) earn their subsistence as hired fishermen for wealthy, opportunistic wholesale merchants who collude with rival merchants to depreciate the market […]
For the impoverished villagers of Prasanna Vithanage’s Death on a Full Moon Day, the civil war is an abstraction, a distant reality removed from the struggles of everyday life. The idea of war as self-reinforcing, interwoven ritual is prefigured in the opening sound of a Buddhist chant (alluding to the solemn observance of the full […]
A transplantation of Leo Tolstoy’s turn of the century novel, Resurrection from Tsarist Russia to modern day Sri Lanka, Prasanna Vithanage’s Dark Night of the Soul also finds kinship with Shyam Benegal’s Ankur and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The President in its potent examination of class division, spiritual desolation, and moral anxiety. Alternating between past and […]
Part coming of age story set in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, and part personal testament by lead actress Krystyna Janda on her husband, Edward Klosinski’s battle with cancer during filming, Andrzej Wajda’s poignant, if disarticulated Sweet Rush, on the surface, suggests kinship with the metacinema of Abbas Kiarostami in exploring the interpenetration between […]
A successful international journalist, Jerzy Michalowski (Zbigniew Zapasiewicz), makes a guest appearance on a televised variety show to reflect on his life and work. Candid and self-assured, Jerzy’s evasive comments on the limited freedom of the Polish press on domestic issues causes concern to a programming official who believes that the serious topics discussed in […]
Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda) is a determined and tenacious film student who believes that she has found the ideal subject for her diploma film: an investigative documentary on Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), a postwar working-class hero who fell into government disfavor and disappeared into obscurity. Her producer (Boguslaw Sobczuk) reluctantly agrees to give her 21 days […]