Amid the rubble of postwar Germany, a 12-year-old boy named Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) is hired to dig graves at a cemetery, then is chased away when he is unable to produce his work permit. It is Year Zero – the beginning of a divided Germany – and the country is faced with an uncertain future […]
Shortly after the liberation of Italy in 1945, Roberto Rossellini took to the war ravaged streets of Rome and filmed a highly unsettling, yet profoundly affirming story of the struggle and defiance of ordinary people in the face of human adversity, and created the indelible image of Open City. Using narrative, documentary styled filmmaking that […]
Poignant, humorous, and exquisitely realized, Randa Chahal-Sabbag’s The Kite follows the plight of a beautiful and carefree Lebanese girl named Lamia (Flavia Bechara) who, after recklessly tempting fate by briefly trespassing into the mined, Israeli-controlled heavily militarized buffer zone in order to retrieve her kite, is ruled by her village council to be prepared for […]
The Fly-Up Preceding Marat Sarulu’s feature film, My Brother Silk Road is the filmmaker’s short film, The Fly-Up, a quiet observation of a factory furnace worker’s idyllic afternoon of rest as he attempts to escape the oppressiveness of his existence by taking a nap on the rooftop, watching a beautiful young neighbor as she paints […]
On an isolated pueblo in the heart of the Spanish countryside, the seemingly familiar story of fickle young love unravels to incomprehensible tragedy when the spurned lover, Luciana Fuentes, expresses a vengeful wish on her seducer in the presence of her fragmented, devoted brother Jerónimo who, in turn, executes his sister’s wish, resulting in the […]
A prevailing thread that continues to weave through Carlos Saura’s aesthetically fluid, articulate, and refreshingly (re)inventive cinema is in his instinctual acuity to capture society’s moral landscape – invariably transfiguring and adapting conventional film form in unexpected, often groundbreaking ways that, in their bracing novelty, also becomes a refracted, secondary reflection of their culturally rooted […]