In the autumn of 1990, renowned Spanish artist Antonio Lopez Garcia enters his Madrid studio and begins to assemble a large canvas for his new painting. The subject of his still life is a fruit laden quince tree in the courtyard. Lopez proves to be a meticulous craftsman. He drives three long poles into the […]
A pensive adolescent named Estrella (Icíar Bollaín) awakens at dawn to the alarming sound of barking dogs that progresses to an increasingly audible, anxious commotion downstairs as Estrella’s panicked mother, Julia (Lola Cardona) calls in vain for her husband Agustín (Omero Antonutti) and, upon discovering that he had mysteriously disappeared sometime during the night, awakens […]
A detached, preoccupied scientist, Fernando (Fernando Fernan Gomez), has moved to the provincial tranquility of Castille with his young family in order to devote his time to the study of bees. He spends countless hours at an apiary observing their daily ritual, manipulating their environment, recording the results of his intervention. His wife, Teresa (Teresa […]
Incited by increasingly prophetic remarks from the international community that the Darfur crisis is reaching the level of genocide, Sudanese native and British immigrant Taghreed Elsanhouri returns to her beloved homeland to create the provocative, insightful, and illuminating documentary, All About Darfur. Consisting of a series of interviews with ordinary citizens, government officials, displaced, often […]
Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter is a serenely powerful, deeply moving tale of loss and healing. At the heart of the tragedy is a school bus accident in a small Canadian town, resulting in the death of fourteen children. First, we meet Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), a tort lawyer who comes into town in order […]
A sputtering automobile slowly traverses an irregular dirt road on the side of a hill towards an ancient church on the summit (in a spare and elegant long shot that evokes the opening sequence to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia) amidst the elegiac sounds of a rhythmic, traditional chant. Inside the lumbering vehicle, a pragmatic and dedicated […]