Alain (Maurice Ronet) silently observes his lover Lydia (Léna Skerla), struggling to decipher the elusive meaning beneath the wistful, attentive eyes, lingering beyond the point of reassuring tenderness to where the potentiality of the moment of connection has irretrievably slipped away, and all that is left is the inscrutable, opaque gaze. Confronting the awkward silence, […]
A poor, Afgan immigrant well digger named Nasim (Moharram Zaynalzadeh) distractedly watches on with his son as a friend performs his daredevil motorcycle act. Nasim’s thoughts are consumed by his gravely ill wife, and the hospital’s reluctance to continue to provide treatment without receiving payment for her incurred medical expenses. Unable to raise enough money […]
The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator is a fascinating, offbeat, and engagingly idiosyncratic examination of love, betrayal, world history, psychology, and criminology. The film opens to Dr. Aleksander Kostic’s droll lecture on sexuality, and cuts to the images of several provocative artworks. It serves as a comical prelude to the meeting of a shy, […]
Un Certain Matin, 1991 A farmer named Tiga’s seemingly uneventful trip to the woods sets the stage for an unexpected collision between truth and fiction, reality and celluloid, that is illustrated to wry, comic effect in Fanta Régina Nacro’s first feature, Un Certain Matin. Setting out one morning from his native village on the Mossi […]
There is an early moment of recognition in Marathon when the heroine of the film, Gretchen (Sara Paul), scans one of the crossword puzzle clues (from a handful of puzzles that she has taken with her on the train) and traces the words “Lamb’s pen name”, a perennial New York Times crossword entry (Elia) that […]
A young, impoverished boy named Amiro (Majid Niroumand) observantly stands on the shoreline, his eyes transfixed on a large white ship in the distance, visibly mesmerized. Almost mechanically, he waves his arms repeatedly and calls to the silent, slow moving object. The brief episode is a fleeting, tangential distraction from his daily ritual of survival. […]