During the Q&A for Local Call, filmmaker Arthur Joffé expressed his great fondness and respect for the works of Nobel laureate author and playwright, Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom he credits as his primary screenwriting influence, and from the complex tragicomic, impassioned, affecting, and deeply humanist tone of the film, the affinity is easy to see. […]
In its portrait of a culture on the verge of erasure with the advent of redevelopment and gentrification, Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City shares kinship with José Luis Guerín’s En Construcción, reflecting the idea of a city built from the rubble of abandoned, forgotten histories. Interweaving first person and composite, fictional interviews with workers, friends, and […]
Marking Jia’s first state-approved film, The World immediately bears the visual imprint of its “official”, non-underground status in its highly polished mise-en-scène: the elaborate pageantry of a flamboyant stage spectacle, ornate costuming, original electronica background compositions, and whimsical, interstitial animation sequences. Following the lives of a group of young adults working at an Epcot Center-like […]
As a poor, underprivileged Catholic boy growing up in Senegal, Jeannot fondly recalls his family’s trips to the idyllic, coastal village of Popenguine where, on the day of the Pentecost, Senegalese Christians would descend en masse to the village on an annual pilgrimage to the site where the miracle of a Virgin Mary sighting had […]
The opening sequence of Vimukthi Jayasundara’s The Forsaken Land suggests a metaphoric, alien landscape – a land transfigured by the buried scars of a decades-long civil war and the ominous disquiet of a fragile, uncertain peace. A lone militia guard, Anura (Mahendra Perera) patrolling the main road to a remote village, passes his idle hours […]
The insidious nature of racism and marginalization that underpins the discourse in It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks also surfaces in Let It Rain, Agnès Jaoui’s third (and lightest) ensemble collaboration with screenwriter and actor, Jean-Pierre Bacri. Having scheduled a visit to her childhood home in order to help her sister, Florence (Pascale Arbillot) sort […]