Au Revoir les enfants is a touching and nostalgic film about the loss of innocence. Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) is an awkward, fanciful adolescent who is sent by his doting mother to a provincial Catholic boarding school. Set in 1940s war-torn France, there is an underlying sense of hardship and uncertainty in this idyllic countryside: […]
Alain (Maurice Ronet) silently observes his lover Lydia (Léna Skerla), struggling to decipher the elusive meaning beneath the wistful, attentive eyes, lingering beyond the point of reassuring tenderness to where the potentiality of the moment of connection has irretrievably slipped away, and all that is left is the inscrutable, opaque gaze. Confronting the awkward silence, […]
A poor, Afgan immigrant well digger named Nasim (Moharram Zaynalzadeh) distractedly watches on with his son as a friend performs his daredevil motorcycle act. Nasim’s thoughts are consumed by his gravely ill wife, and the hospital’s reluctance to continue to provide treatment without receiving payment for her incurred medical expenses. Unable to raise enough money […]
The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator is a fascinating, offbeat, and engagingly idiosyncratic examination of love, betrayal, world history, psychology, and criminology. The film opens to Dr. Aleksander Kostic’s droll lecture on sexuality, and cuts to the images of several provocative artworks. It serves as a comical prelude to the meeting of a shy, […]
Shot from the austere interiors of a disused housing project that has been scheduled for demolition on the outskirts of Paris, Kamal El Mahouti, returns to the “home”of his youth in My Lost House where, in 1970, at the age of six, his family had immigrated from Morocco to France and lived at the housing […]
Down the Wire, 2004 (Pip Starr) A group of activists descend on the Woomera Detention facility on Good Friday in 2002 to protest the involuntary imprisonment of refugees at the remote camp in the Australian desert, leading to an impulsive act of civil disobedience. Starr’s short film is an inspiring portrait of activism, advocacy, and […]