During the introduction for the film, Marko Nabersnik mentioned that he had graduated from the New York Film Academy fourteen years earlier and, to some extent, the screening of his film in Lincoln Center was a culmination of that journey. In a way, that experience would also shape his well constructed, entertaining, and pleasant, if […]
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 […]
Mikio Naruse’s elegantly distilled early silent film Every Night’s Dreams provides an archetype for the filmmaker’s recurring themes: pragmatic, determined women who tenaciously hold onto their failing relationships, weak men who lead a life of increasing dependence on the women they mistreat, life stations that grow baser as characters paradoxically strive to improve their situation. […]
Juvies, 2004 (Leslie Neale) Juvies is a compelling, powerful, and unsentimental examination of the California juvenile correction system (and the American juvenile correction system in general) that, rather than provide a structure and process for rehabilitating young offenders in order to deter them from becoming career criminals, are increasingly deferred and processed through the adult […]
Channeling the spirit of Italian neorealism in its bleak and unrelenting portrait of abject poverty, Peter Calin Netzer’s Maria is a provocative and articulate social interrogation on the role of globalization, international charity, and the media on the socioeconomic polarization of the working class. Based on a true story (an sad truth that is reinforced […]
A thoughtful and remarkably comprehensive examination of modern day human trafficking, Jezza Neumann’s China’s Stolen Children opens to a portrait of Detective Zhu, an overworked, former police officer who left his post in order to dedicate his time trying to find some of the 70,000 children who are abducted each year. With a predominantly poor […]