On a lazy summer afternoon at a courtyard café of a provincial hotel, a lone, pensive artist named Nicolas (David Bursztein) abstractly observes a pair of English tourists and rough sketches them onto his journal before being distracted by the mechanical whirring of an actuated instant camera from an overlooking balcony. The surreptitious photographer is […]
Integrating the filmmaker’s familiar elements of whimsical, quixotic adventure (Celine and Julie Go Boating), integrated – but unresolved – conspiracy (Gang of Four, Secret Defense, and The Story of Marie and Julien), and liberated bohemianism (La Belle noiseuse, La Religeuse), Le Pont du Nord is an effervescent, ingeniously constructed, and infectiously affectionate paean to the […]
Behind the cloistered walls of a Paris convent in 1757, a young woman named Suzanne (Anna Karina), the sole remaining unmarried daughter of a prominent attorney named Simonin (Charles Millot) and his wife (Christiane Lénier), is reluctantly brought before the priest in order to take her monastic vows before creating a scandal by willfully (and […]
The Cuckoo is an understated, yet enchanting comedy of errors on the human capacity for empathy and community amidst the chaos and senselessness of war. Set in September 1944 shortly before Finland’s withdrawal from World War II, the film lyrically recounts a fateful encounter between an injured, disillusioned Russian soldier named Ivan and a talkative, […]
A short film on love in the age of internet, On Line Rendez-Vous chronicles the everyday rituals of a middle-aged couple, Franck and Myriam who continue to perform the empty rituals of their loveless marriage in resentful silence: passively trading barbs through uncivil personal messages scrawled on their bathroom mirror, spiking drinks at dinner time, […]
Alternately humorous and heartbreaking in its candid and unflinching portrait of the exploited lives of low rate prostitutes living in the shantytown of La Línea in Guatemala City (an emblematic place of abject poverty built along the marginal buffer zones of railroad tracks that also evokes Ditsi Carolino’s Life on the Tracks), Chema Rodriguez’s The […]