In wartime Europe, two haggard army deserters attempt to navigate in the darkness through a disorienting forest after escaping from a military train bound for Stalingrad only to witness a mass civilian execution by German soldiers in an open field. Retreating into the woods, Francesco (Piero Di Iorio) expresses anger and regret over his acquiescence […]
On the idyllic countryside of Italy in the 1930s, a humble and mild mannered peasant named Tonino (Giancarlo Giannini) witnesses the brutal execution of his eccentric but affable elder relative, Michael Sgaravento, for undisclosed political agitation by the carabinieri. Entrusted earlier by Sgaravento to hide a mysterious suitcase on his behalf, Tonino decides to uphold […]
Experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka reinforces the idea that film is a tactile artistic medium that, like all forms of art, not only requires hands-on, physical construction and manipulation by the artist, but also serves as a tangible archive (or archaeological artifact) for communicating and articulating a constantly evolving cultural legacy within a specific timeframe of […]
Each morning, a fastidious and unassuming copy shop owner named Alfred Kager (Johannes Silberschneider) wakes up in his empty apartment and begins to silently perform the empty, familiar rituals of his mundane existence: a brisk facial wash, a cursory survey of pedestrians in the street, a fleeting glimpse of the pretty flower girl (Elisabeth Ebner-Haid) […]
Film is empirically defined as 24 frames per second. However, if the functional variables were to be transposed such that each frame instead represented 24 seconds of a fixed space (defined by the bounds of the frame) – the shift in perspective would capture a behaviorally dissimilar relational interval – a spatial “snapshot” that illustrates […]
Something of an aesthetic hybrid between an impassioned cinéma vérité and the bracing docu-fiction of Peter Watkins, Road to Guantanamo is a provocative, confrontational, and impeccably crafted, if oddly sterile and incongruously stylized re-enactment of the plight of the Tipton Three, a group of working class, British Muslim young men on holiday from the West […]