On desolate road near the Spanish-French border, a pensive African immigrant from Benin, Dah (Isaach De Bankolé), waits in the darkness for a poultry truck to arrive for an appointed evening rendezvous. Aboard is an old friend, Jocelyn (Alex Descas) who has recruited him to act as an intermediary and handle the business affairs of […]
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is Jacques Demy’s experimental film about love and loss. It is a visually stunning musical tale told in three acts: Departure, Absence, and Return. Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) is the daughter of an umbrella shop owner who falls in love with Guy (Nuno Castelnuovo), a garage mechanic. Despite her mother’s (Anne Vernon) […]
A mild-mannered and unassuming clerk named Jean Fournier (Claude Mann) accepts a ride from his co-worker Caron (Paul Guers) who, much to the financially struggling young man’s puzzlement, was able to afford a new car despite earning a similar limited salary at the local bank. Caron appears evasive, but eager to reveal the source of […]
My final screening in the retrospective is also coincidentally Zeki Demirkubuz’s latest feature, Destiny, a brooding and elegantly rendered film that takes on an even richer texture within the context of the creative evolution (and maturation) of his body of work. The story of Destiny proves to be an already familiar one: a shy, but […]
During the panel discussion on Turkish cinema, Zeki Demirkubuz cited Friedrich Nietzsche’s (paraphrased) statement that the more a person understands the world around him, the more isolated he becomes. This sentiment also seems to form the creative ideal for the fictional director, Ahmet (played by Demirkubuz himself) in The Waiting Room, the final installment of […]
One of the highlights from the Zeki Demirkubuz retrospective for me was the discovery of The Confession, the second installment of his Tales of Darkness trilogy, a taut, minimalist, and deeply moving portrait of the dissolution of a marriage. A pair of mundane, quick greeting calls to the office for public works engineer, Harun (Taner […]