A seemingly rational, well mannered artist named Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ernesto Alonso) recounts the moment of revelation of his fated destiny as he methodically turns the pages of a photography book of war casualties. On an ominous evening during an unnamed civil insurrection, a spoiled young Archibaldo is entrusted to the care of a […]
A peculiar, quasi-religious solemn ceremony – in a drolly surreal sequence that even manages to insert Luis Buñuel’s notorious foot fetish – sets the metaphoric theme for the often (uncomfortably) over-intimate societal relationship between parishioner and priest (and more broadly, the individual and the church) as a dashing aristocrat, Don Francisco (Arturo de Córdova) assists […]
Based on author, choreographer, activist, and filmmaker Lydia Chagoll’s autobiography A Childhood in the Japanese Camps and historical essay Hirohito: Emperor of Japan, The Little White Girl Had to Bow Her Head for Emperor Hirohito is a lucid and impassioned examination of the postwar geopolitics that have led to the cultural amnesia and historical whitewashing […]
Composed as a fiction film based on Buyens’s autobiographical novel, re-enacted with the intimacy of a documentary, but framed from the observational distance of an essay, Frans Buyens and Lydia Chagoll’s Less Dead Than the Others resists facile categorization – alternating between poignant crystallization of living memory in the aftermath of his younger brother’s accidental […]
Part whimsical fable and part affectionate human comedy, José Luis Cuerda’s The Education of Fairies is a slight and effervescent, but charming and thoughtful demythification of a “happily ever after” romantic ideal. The opening transition from a graphically illustrated title sequence to a live action shot of a father recounting a bedtime story on the […]
The premise of a creating a film based on true events – particularly one for a deeply polarizing issue – can sometimes be a conveniently coded minefield for agitprop filmmaking, so it is particularly refreshing to see that Saverio Costanzo’s Private manages to strike a bracing, yet thoughtful and delicate balance between sympathy and outrage […]