Secrets and Lies is a funny, compelling, and affectionate story of family and reconciliation. At the heart of the film is the profoundly simple idea: that human suffering is universal, and that the only comfort lies in our ability to share the pain with those we love. The story opens with Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a […]
Naked is a harrowing portrait of self-destruction and victimization. It is the story of a drifter named Johnny (David Thewlis) who, fleeing from certain retaliation over a violent tryst, runs away from Manchester to find his ex-girlfriend, Louise (Lynda Steadman). Instead, he meets her roommate, Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), an attractive, spaced-out, and unemployed woman, and […]
Channeling a similar wavelength as Chantal Akerman’s recurring themes of identity, parental silence, and haunted memory, compatriot filmmaker Boris Lehman creates an equally melancholic and autobiographical self-confessional essay film in À la recherche du lieu de ma naissance, a resonant and intimate exposition on the indelible legacy of Nazism, the diaspora, the Second World War, […]
In 2003, South Korean filmmaker Park Ki-yong followed up his atmospheric and textural debut feature film Motel Cactus with the even more haunting, visually austere, and understated Camel(s), a film that subtly, but incisively, articulates the desperateness of (failed) connection between two emotionally unfulfilled people through ordinary gestures, uncomfortable silence, and anonymous – and ultimately […]
While Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry has invited comparison to Bong Joon-ho’s Mother in its tale of morality, filial devotion, and culpability in the absence of memory, its theme of capturing the ephemeral beauty in the quotidian and transforming it into something eternal suggests a closer association with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life. And like After Life, the […]
A flighty, aimless man named Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu), insufficiently dressed in a summer shirt on a brisk winter day, arrives at a major city thoroughfare to wait for a bus, biding his time by cursorily scanning through a rack of inexpensive sweaters peddled on the sidewalk. Arriving at his intended destination, a multi-level urban residential […]