In the book The Essential Mystery: The Major Filmmakers of Indian Art Cinema, John W. Hood proposes that the Bengali famine in 1943 was a watershed event that would deeply mark then 20 year old Mrinal Sen and lead to his politicization and involvement with the left-leaning Indian People’s Theatre Association. In hindsight, this convergence […]
Moussa Sene Absa’s epic and sprawling urban tale Teranga Blues appropriately opens to the shot of a Senegalese musician, Madiké “Dick” Diop (Lord Alajiman) being escorted by French authorities in handcuffs before a brief, procedural handover with local immigration officials releases him into their custody, and back out to freedom into the streets of Dakar […]
Albert Serra’s understated first feature, Honor de Cavallería loosely channels the melancholic wanderlust of such contemporary, dedramatized road films as Marc Recha’s Days of August and Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos to create an organic, rigorous, and often frustrating, but indelible and penetrating chronicle of the interiority and profound alienation of picaresque adventure. A de-romanticization of […]
One of my favorite recent DVD purchases is Belgian animation filmmaker Raoul Servais’ L’Intégrale des courts métrages anthology from France. In addition to the ten short films in the collection (some of which can be viewed at Atom Films), there are also extracts from all of his remaining films (including his one feature film, Taxandria), […]
A collaboration between famed Korean Kazakhstanian novelist, Anatoly Kim and filmmaker Ermek Shinarbaev (who was also on-hand to present the film and participate in a subsequent Q&A session), Revenge is a sumptuous and intricately structured epic tale on the contaminative, destructive, and overreaching consequences of revenge. Structured in thematically spiraling, narratively overlapping novellas, the film’s […]
A well-crafted riff on Yasujiro Shimazu’s familiar shomin-geki films, this time transplanted to a group of Western opera stage actors working in the bustling theater and entertainment district of Asakusa in old downtown Tokyo, The Lights of Asakusa is a charming and elegantly realized ensemble slice-of-life serio-comedy. Centering on the acting troupe’s attempts to harbor […]