As in Eva Mulvad and Anja Al-Erhayem’s Enemies of Happiness, James Longley’s Sari’s Mother, the edited “fourth fragment” from Iraq in Fragments, is a sobering portrait of the pervasive confusion and uncertainty that continues to define everyday life under postwar occupation, and its unseen toll on the weakest and most vulnerable. In this segment, Longley […]
Composed of three self-contained chapters that integrally represent the figurative image of the country divided, not only by ethnic and religious sectarianism, but also by the further destabilization of an undefined and politically – and culturally – intrusive occupation, James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments exquisitely fuses the aesthetics of Godfrey Reggio in the artful presentation […]
Francisco J. Lombardi’s What the Eye Doesn’t See is a convoluted, yet acutely illustrative fictionalized account of the desperate, intertwined lives of several Peruvian citizens who represent a cross-section of the country’s socio-economic strata during the uncertainty of the ever-increasing scandal surrounding the intricate web of corruption woven by presidential adviser Vladimiro Montesinos that eventually […]
Favorably recalling the experimental narrative strategies of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Erik Lochen’s remarkably light and agile, yet ingeniously constructed and elegantly realized film, The Hunt similarly plays on the author’s recurring themes of memory, atemporality, and psychological reality. Prefiguring Alain Resnais’ collaborative film with Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad (the film was made in the same […]
In the poor, working class coal mining town of Barnsley, an adolescent boy named Billy (David Bradley) sharing a cramped bed with his older brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher) is jarred awake by the sound of his Jud’s alarm clock. Prodding his soporific brother to rise, he seizes the opportunity to comfortably stretch out on the […]
On the surface, Peruvian filmmaker Claudia Llosa’s gorgeous, provocative, and idiosyncratically rendered dark fable Madeinusa seems to have little in common with Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl beyond an artful eye towards creating a similarly foreboding atmosphere with which to present a dysfunctional, contemporary coming of age tale. While Martel uses loosely interwoven […]