A peculiar, quasi-religious solemn ceremony – in a drolly surreal sequence that even manages to insert Luis Buñuel’s notorious foot fetish – sets the metaphoric theme for the often (uncomfortably) over-intimate societal relationship between parishioner and priest (and more broadly, the individual and the church) as a dashing aristocrat, Don Francisco (Arturo de Córdova) assists […]
With its rough hewn sequences of temps morts, odd length cuts, idiosyncratic characters, and sedate humor, Janez Burger’s debut feature, Idle Running unfolds like a Jim Jarmusch film, an upended road movie of sorts chronicling a young man’s proverbial journey (albeit in baby steps) towards self-discovery. As the film begins, perpetual university student and resident […]
A smuggled video footage of a communal market in North Korea provides a profoundly sobering context to the grave, protracted, man-made humanitarian crisis caused by the government’s systematic diversion of international food aid to party loyalists at the expense of ordinary citizens (often from the rural provinces) as children scour the mud for occasional morsels […]
Based on author, choreographer, activist, and filmmaker Lydia Chagoll’s autobiography A Childhood in the Japanese Camps and historical essay Hirohito: Emperor of Japan, The Little White Girl Had to Bow Her Head for Emperor Hirohito is a lucid and impassioned examination of the postwar geopolitics that have led to the cultural amnesia and historical whitewashing […]
Composed as a fiction film based on Buyens’s autobiographical novel, re-enacted with the intimacy of a documentary, but framed from the observational distance of an essay, Frans Buyens and Lydia Chagoll’s Less Dead Than the Others resists facile categorization – alternating between poignant crystallization of living memory in the aftermath of his younger brother’s accidental […]
Learning Stalls (Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin) A compedium of special effects-type technical experiments involving rudimentary, morphing, Flash-type animation superimposed onto human forms and exercises on multiple exposure, the amateurish video unfortunately overplays the novelty of wire meshing, image compositing, and dynamic, spirograph-like digital renderings to the point of abstraction and tedium. The […]