Adapted from a play by Jean-Marie Besset, Grande école auspiciously opens to a lavish party and fireworks display in commemoration of Bastille Day, an overt metaphor for the young men and women in the film who have completed their baccalaureate degrees and are about to shed their insular home lives for shared student dormitories and […]
Category: Film Festivals and Retrospectives
Life During Wartime, 2009
During the Q&A, cinematographer Edward Lachman commented that the more aesthetic look to Life During Wartime with respect to Todd Solondz’s earlier work was a result of Solondz’s direction that the film convey a degree of unnaturalness and plasticity. On the surface, this image of conscious construction seems inconsistent with the sense of organic continuity […]
NYAFF Short Films: Young Rebels
The Train, 2005 A chance encounter between a young student, Giusseppe and a recently paroled ex-convict, Ahmed provides the framework for Brahim Fritah’s distilled and muted, yet thoughtful existential allegory on humanity and modern day cultural identity in The Train. Set against the backdrop of a transcontinental train compartment that curiously resembles an apartment living […]
Hop, 2002
The divisive issues of immigration and social integration are also in Dominique Standaert’s visually resplendent, whimsical, and affectionate film, Hop. In the opening scene, Justin (Keita Kalumba), a young immigrant from Burundi, tells a fantastic tale of the pivotal role of the African pygmies in the defeat of the Carthaginian general, Hannibal, during the Punic […]
Valley of Peace, 1956
Overtly influenced by René Clément’s anti-war film Forbidden Games, France Stiglic’s equally poignant and impassioned Valley of Peace captures the horrors of war as seen through the eyes of its most vulnerable victims – a young girl named Lotti (Evelyne Wohlfeiler) and a protective older boy, Marko (Tugo Stiglic). Taken into custody by German soldiers […]
A South African Love Story – Walter and Albertine Sisulu, 2004
In an interview conducted near the conclusion of the film, A South African Love Story – Walter and Albertine Sisulu, a journalist describes Walter Sisulu’s deliberately low-key, but profoundly influential role in the struggle to liberate South Africa from apartheid and successfully lay the groundwork for multi-racial elections in the country as that “not of […]