Spell My Name, 2005 In the opening sequence of Tawanda Gunda Mupengo’s Spell My Name, a self-assured schoolteacher from the city, newly arrived into the village school and appearing immediately out of place in the rural farming community in her sharply tailored dress, encounters an introverted girl under a tree who ignores her request for […]
A droll and acerbic fictional corollary to Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution, Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue, like Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is an odyssey through the crumbling institutions and broken social systems of a country […]
At dusk, the impressive sight of a steam engine passenger train bisects the horizon, traversing an empty stretch of track under construction near a rural train station. The train engineer Zapora (Zygmunt Listkiewicz) and his junior assistant Nowak (Roman Klosowski) perform a station check of the semaphores and, upon seeing only one light on, proceeds […]
Prefaced as a heroic symphony in two parts, Eroica is a darkly comic, intelligent, and unorthodox chronicle of the Polish resistance against the Germans in World War II, a movement commonly referred to as the Warsaw Uprising. The first movement, Scherzo alla polacca, opens to a shot of an apprehensive and reluctant militia soldier named […]
Coincidentally, like Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a film that is also characterized by the element of subverted expectation, but this time, to indelible and bracing effect. Set in Romania during the waning days of Soviet bloc communism under Nikolai Ceaucescu in the late 1980s where […]
Something of a cross between Julie Bertucelli’s Since Otar Left and Bohdan Slama’s Something Like Happiness in its wry and affectionate portrait of Eastern European diaspora after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cristian Mungiu’s refined and ingeniously constructed first feature film, Occident also evokes the spirit of Krzysztof Kieslowski in its bittersweet, delicately interconnected […]