In its fractured, interpenetrating (or rather, colliding) realities, Ying Liang’s The Other Half foreshadows Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City, capturing China’s transforming industrial landscape through its alienated and displaced humanity. The opening frontal shot of job seeker, Xiaofei being interviewed by an off-camera recruiter establishes a sense of division – the unseen economic, social, educational, and […]
In an illuminating episode in Peep TV Show, an androgynously dressed young man sits in his favorite area of the street corner after he has placed a small yellow gift box on the sidewalk nearby (a ritual that he has repeatedly performed during the course of the film) – his jacket pulled over his head […]
Filmed during American postwar occupation, The Ball at Anjo House is a curiously atypical Japanese film that hews eerily closer to the privileged, dysfunctional families and moral abandon of The Magnificent Ambersons or a Douglas Sirk melodrama than a Shochiku middle-class shomin-geki: the proud family patriarch, Tadahiko (Osamu Takizawa) who continues to harbor the illusion […]
From the first images of Applause, Martin Zandvliet seeks to capture a rawness and immediacy in his complex, if familiar portrait of a recovering alcoholic. Shot in grainy, desaturated medium and close-ups with a handheld camera, a middle-aged woman (Paprika Steen), seemingly under the influence, makes a candid assessment of her relationship with her husband. […]
Ready To Wear Imm Ali (Dima El-Horr) is a delightful, understated comedy that like Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention and Randa Chahal Sabag’s The Kite, finds brittle humor in the absurdities of everyday life under a protracted occupation. Ostensibly chronicling an enterprising woman’s efforts to launch a fashion boutique in a bucolic farming village and her […]
In a way, Ruxandra Zenide’s debut film, Ryna suggests Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa in its allegorical tale of a young woman coming of age under a moral vacuum of isolation, lawlessness, and repressive authority. Set in a poor rural community along the Danube delta where the town’s depressed economy is as tied to the commerce of […]