The panning shot of an anonymous city street establishes the tensile, yet integral relationship between citizen and environment in Guy Debord’s dense and minimalist essay On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, describing the rows of generic apartment buildings as places of refuge from the constant social immersion […]
Ostensibly an allegorical, cautionary tale on religious fundamentalism, Uttara is also a bracing and incisive examination of the provincialism, anachronism, moral and social quandary, and inherent contradictions that continue to shape contemporary Indian culture. Composed of seemingly unrelated narrative threads – a pair of bored, train crossing signal operators, Nemal (Tapas Pal) and Balaram (Shankar […]
A disoriented, lumbering man named Shibnath (Mithun Chakraborty), recently released after an eleven-year incarceration (which he served, in part, at the prison asylum) for the death of a British officer during the country’s anti-colonialist resistance movement, is escorted on a train ride home by a former comrade – now a successful businessman and aspiring politician […]
There is a palpable spirit of Robert Bresson (most notably Pickpocket and L’Argent) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment at work in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L’Enfant, so it comes as no surprise that during the subsequent Q&A, the brothers remarked that one of the images that they had wanted to capture in the film […]
The film opens with a chaotic scene: Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne), dismissed from her station after her employment trial period has elapsed, refuses to leave the factory, and is escorted off the premises by security guards. Shot through a handheld camera, the confusion seems to continue as we follow Rosetta as she crosses a busy intersection, […]
There is a childlike euphoria that comes over Igor’s (Jeremie Renier) face as he and his friends run a noisy, traffic-impeding go-cart down the busy city streets. But Igor is far from the image of a naive innocent oblivious to the ways of the world. At the age of fifteen, he has left school, works […]