At a picturesque, remote estate in turn of the century Russia, a jovial physician, Nikolai (Nikita Mikhalkov) recounts an indelicate tale – momentarily stopping to inspect his reflection on a silver carafe – of his truncated courtship of a young woman named Ksyusha Kalitina following an embarrassing encounter with the deaf, elderly nurse at the […]
Composed of a series of diverse, and often contradictory images of mundane rituals of everyday life juxtaposed against historical footage of protest and revolution in Iran, Thierry Michel’s Iran Veiled Appearances is a compelling and insightful documentary on life in modern-day Iran 23 years after the Islamic Revolution. The film opens to the disturbing image […]
The title of Paul Meyer’s compassionate, sincere, and deeply personal feature film on immigrant labor, cultural assimilation, and exile, From the Branches Drops the Withered Blossom, is a line from a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo pondering the inevitability of change. Initially commissioned by the Ministry of Education to promote the integration of immigrant children into […]
Paul Meyer’s short film, Klinkaart, opens to the image of two sisters attempting to retrieve a fallen fruit drifting downstream of a river. The older sister then joins the other women from the village as they walk to the brickyard for her first day of work: removing the clay bricks from forms, laying them into […]
Peter Mettler’s rigorous and organic meditative essay is (perhaps intentionally) a mind numbing ethnographic collage of people, places, ideas, and discoveries that collective encompass humanity’s innate desire for escapism, commutation, euphoria, and existential transcendence. Originating locally from Mettler’s sad and implicitly tragic reunion with a childhood friend who has led most of his inutile adult […]
Composed of a series of informal conversations between screenwriter Namir Abdel Messeeh and his reticent, introspective father, Waguih, a reformed Communist and former political prisoner during the early years of the Egyptian Republic, Toi, Waguih evokes Chantal Akerman’s recurring theme of parental silence – a silence of personal history borne of unarticulated trauma (in the […]