While James Benning’s 13 Lakes captures the materiality, self-equilibration, and memory of water, the film’s equally rigorous and abstractly hypnotic companion piece, Ten Skies illustrates the mutability, ephermerality, and transience of nature. Shot in Val Verde, California, the film consists of ten minute, stationary shots of ten isolated skyscapes set against the ambient sounds of […]
Composed of a series of episodic, stationary long takes, each recording an uninterrupted, ten minute shot length and punctuated by an extended, interstitial black screen, James Benning’s structuralist film, 13 Lakes is a rigorous and demanding, yet hypnotic and transfixing meditation on diurnal rhythms, climatic changes, and the implications of (irreversible) man-made transformation. The opening […]
A frequently recurring theme in the NYAFF Shorts Program, Emerging Voices from the Maghreb – and perhaps, in the entire festival – is the history of culturally enabled marginalization of women in contemporary society, and this theme clearly resonates in Ali Benkirane’s Amal, an understated portrait of a cheerful and precocious girl living in a […]
Revisiting the irreparably splintered middle-aged couple Marianne (Liv Ullman) and Johan (Erland Josephson) of Scenes from a Marriage as they reunite 30 years later, Saraband represents a continuation as well as a culmination of Ingmar Bergman’s spare, late period films, most notably in the purgative confessions and emotionally resigned acceptance of Autumn Sonata. Opening with […]
A refreshingly optimistic, humorous, captivating, and deeply humanist portrait of perseverance and family, Julie Bertuccelli’s Since Otar Left centers on three generations of women – the inimitable grandmother, Eka (Esther Gorintin) who wistfully reminisces over life under Stalin, her widowed daughter Marina (Nino Khomassouridze), and her multilingual, well-educated granddaughter Ada (Dinara Droukarova) – living under […]
Favorably recalling the rigorous imagery, desolation, and despiritualized landscapes of Chantal Akerman (most notably, in the opening sequences of the U.S.-Mexican border wall and off-camera interviews of From the Other Side), Wall is an evocatively shot, visually understated, and meditatively paced exposition on the social, political, economic, and psychological repercussions of the Israeli government’s long-term […]