Before Les Films du Renard released its first installment of an anticipated three boxset Stephen Dwoskin anthology earlier this year, there seemed little room to reconcile Dwoskin’s cinema between the transgressive, borderline pornographic gaze of Dyn Amo and the intimately melancholic Dad (an elegy to his late father Henry Dwoskin) – the only two films […]
Similar to Kazakh filmmaker Serik Aprimov’s perestroika comedy, The Last Stop, Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan is also a chronicle of a young man’s readjustment to a civilian life in the bucolic steppes after an adventure-filled military service that brought him to the far reaches of the former Soviet Republic. Longing for a nomadic life in the […]
A reverent, humbling, and impassioned observation of life among the landless, peasant farmers of the semi-arid Carriri region of Ceará in northeastern Brazil, Jean-Pierre Duret and Andrea Santana’s poetic ethnographic documentary Romances de terre et d’eau bears the deep humanism and trenchant, sociopolitical commitment of its venerable producers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Insightfully filmed near […]
Like Pierre Schöller’s Versailles, François Dupeyron’s With a Little Help from Myself similarly presents a portrait of the marginalized in contemporary France, in this case, the plight of immigrants and the elderly. Shot in yellow hues characteristic of African cinema, as well as vibrant, chaotic milieus and canted angles that invite comparison – albeit to […]
Bruno Dumont returns to the desolate pastoral and emotional landscapes of his earlier features L’Humanité and Life of Jesus in Flanders, an austere, tonal, and visceral exposition into the integral nature of violence, sexuality, desire, and instinctual survival. A rugged young farmer, Demester (Samuel Boidin) impassively harvests his dessicated, autumnal fields before finding his neighbor […]
In the opening remarks for the film, Bruno Dumont described Twentynine Palms as experimental film in articulating sensation without narrative through abstract, dissociated forms, teasingly remarking that “a Manet without figures is a Rothko”. An American photographer named David (David Wissak) and his French-speaking, Eastern European lover Katia (Yekaterina Golubeva) set off from Los Angeles […]