Each morning, a fastidious and unassuming copy shop owner named Alfred Kager (Johannes Silberschneider) wakes up in his empty apartment and begins to silently perform the empty, familiar rituals of his mundane existence: a brisk facial wash, a cursory survey of pedestrians in the street, a fleeting glimpse of the pretty flower girl (Elisabeth Ebner-Haid) […]
tx-transform, 1998
Film is empirically defined as 24 frames per second. However, if the functional variables were to be transposed such that each frame instead represented 24 seconds of a fixed space (defined by the bounds of the frame) – the shift in perspective would capture a behaviorally dissimilar relational interval – a spatial “snapshot” that illustrates […]
Brave Men, 2008
In its tale of childhood friends who grow up to be on opposite sides of the law, Edoardo Winspeare’s Brave Men is an all too familiar one. A prominent judge, Ignazio (Fabrizio Gifuni) returns to his hometown to bury his friend Fabio (Lamberto Probo) who died from a drug overdose, and, in an attempt to […]
Road to Guantanamo, 2006
Something of an aesthetic hybrid between an impassioned cinéma vérité and the bracing docu-fiction of Peter Watkins, Road to Guantanamo is a provocative, confrontational, and impeccably crafted, if oddly sterile and incongruously stylized re-enactment of the plight of the Tipton Three, a group of working class, British Muslim young men on holiday from the West […]
Compadre, 2004
At the 2003 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, I had the privilege of seeing an unassuming, underseen film shot in cinéma vérité style by Ditsi Carolino entitled Life on the Tracks (a film that quickly made my short list of favorite films for the year) on a family from the province who had come […]
Eros, 2004
Almost ten years ago, Time Magazine had featured an article of ten great international films from the late 80s to early 90s that had (up to the publishing date) not been released in the U.S. There were two films on the list that were also very high on my wish list: Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue and […]