One of the highlights from Film Comment Selects this year was the screening of Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines’s underseen cinéma vérité film, Seventeen, a reverent and candid cross-cultural portrait of working class high school students from Muncie, Indiana that was once deemed objectionable for broadcast on PBS (the film had been commissioned as part […]
Inasmuch as Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines collaborative documentary, Seventeen provides an intimate and compassionate portrait of teenaged life in middle America, DeMott’s earlier film, Demon Lover Diary – a diary of Kreines’s reluctant involvement with the shooting of a schlock horror film called Demon Lover in suburban Michigan – proves to be its antithesis […]
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is Jacques Demy’s experimental film about love and loss. It is a visually stunning musical tale told in three acts: Departure, Absence, and Return. Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) is the daughter of an umbrella shop owner who falls in love with Guy (Nuno Castelnuovo), a garage mechanic. Despite her mother’s (Anne Vernon) […]
A mild-mannered and unassuming clerk named Jean Fournier (Claude Mann) accepts a ride from his co-worker Caron (Paul Guers) who, much to the financially struggling young man’s puzzlement, was able to afford a new car despite earning a similar limited salary at the local bank. Caron appears evasive, but eager to reveal the source of […]
My final screening in the retrospective is also coincidentally Zeki Demirkubuz’s latest feature, Destiny, a brooding and elegantly rendered film that takes on an even richer texture within the context of the creative evolution (and maturation) of his body of work. The story of Destiny proves to be an already familiar one: a shy, but […]
During the panel discussion on Turkish cinema, Zeki Demirkubuz cited Friedrich Nietzsche’s (paraphrased) statement that the more a person understands the world around him, the more isolated he becomes. This sentiment also seems to form the creative ideal for the fictional director, Ahmet (played by Demirkubuz himself) in The Waiting Room, the final installment of […]