In a pivotal encounter in Teuvo Tulio’s Song of the Scarlet Flower, a lovesick Olavi seeks solace in a brothel and instead finds himself confronting past transgressions when his abandoned lover Elli, now working as a prostitute, challenges him to follow through on his empty promises of marriage by arguing that, in her provocative dress […]
The recurring imagery of turbulent waters in Teuvo Tulio’s films reflect a kinship with early Norwegian (and more broadly, Scandinavian) cinema in the use of rugged landscape as a metaphor for the paradoxical nature of the human condition. In Tulio’s Song of the Scarlet Flower, a daredevil log ride through the swift currents of a […]
Recalling Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in its atmospheric, if tempered historical epic on the bloody reign of sixteenth century Moldavian despot, Alexandru Lapusneanu, Malvina Ursianu’s Return of the Banished is a trenchant allegory on the moral corruption and madness of absolute power. Unfolding though a series of flashbacks and flash forwards, the film opens […]
Refining the theme of documented reality and reconstructed history introduced in his earlier film, Moroccan Romance, Carlos Velo’s reflective and ecstatic Torero is equally an autobiography on charismatic Mexican bullfighter, Luis Procuna, and an unvarnished examination of bullfighting culture. Presented as an extended interior monologue as an anxious Procuna prepares to return to the ring […]
Carlos Velo and Fernando G. Mantilla’s quietly observed documentary, Almadrabas loosely prefigures Agnès Varda’s La Pointe courte in capturing the rhythm and rituals of a small fishing village. Ostensibly titled after the Moorish word describing the structure of nets, the film follows the product cycle of canned tuna – from the fishermen who go out […]
Filmed during the Spanish Civil War, Carlos Velo and Enrique Domínguez Rodiño’s Moroccan Romance (Romancero marroquí) bears the imprint of Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic documentaries in its distilled (if manipulated) images of a distant, exotic – and exoticized – culture. Part colonialist travelogue on aspects of life in contemporary Morocco (and implicitly, the benefits of imposed […]