The title of Paul Meyer’s compassionate, sincere, and deeply personal feature film on immigrant labor, cultural assimilation, and exile, From the Branches Drops the Withered Blossom, is a line from a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo pondering the inevitability of change. Initially commissioned by the Ministry of Education to promote the integration of immigrant children into […]
Paul Meyer’s short film, Klinkaart, opens to the image of two sisters attempting to retrieve a fallen fruit drifting downstream of a river. The older sister then joins the other women from the village as they walk to the brickyard for her first day of work: removing the clay bricks from forms, laying them into […]
Peter Mettler’s rigorous and organic meditative essay is (perhaps intentionally) a mind numbing ethnographic collage of people, places, ideas, and discoveries that collective encompass humanity’s innate desire for escapism, commutation, euphoria, and existential transcendence. Originating locally from Mettler’s sad and implicitly tragic reunion with a childhood friend who has led most of his inutile adult […]
Composed of a series of informal conversations between screenwriter Namir Abdel Messeeh and his reticent, introspective father, Waguih, a reformed Communist and former political prisoner during the early years of the Egyptian Republic, Toi, Waguih evokes Chantal Akerman’s recurring theme of parental silence – a silence of personal history borne of unarticulated trauma (in the […]
The opening sequence of Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay provides an intriguing foil in its organic, intersecting stories that mirror the chaos of the city, as a young working class couple (and new parents) Cecille (Mercedes Cabral) and Peping (Coco Martin) make their way to city hall to get married and, along the way, encounter a news […]
Set in the overcrowded, noise-polluted, bustling city of Angeles, the former location of the U.S. military-operated Clark Air Force Base, the characters in Brillante Mendoza’s kinetic and vertiginous Serbis are, in a sense, integrally connected to fortunes of the city’s postwar history as an entertainment district for the nearby air base. Once owning a chain […]