One of the experimental works created from the cadre of radical, emerging artists financed under the rubric of Zanzibar films that captured the spirit of May 68 and the counter culture revolution, Philippe Garrel’s silent film Le Révélateur is a fractured and elliptical, but instinctive, elemental, and haunting rumination on the process of awakening, maturation, […]
Each day, a decorated war veteran and landmine victim named Vitório, having been discharged from the military after the government issued troop demobilization orders at the end of the 30 year civil war, waits in the wings of an overcrowded, physical rehabilitation hospital to see if his petition for a prosthetic leg has finally been […]
On the day of his father’s funeral, the curious and meddlesome adolescent Nadav (Aviv Elkabeth) peeps in through the window of the funeral home where the rabbi is making last minute preparations for the burial, a task that involves calling an unreliable, impatient repairman during a torrential rain in order to fix a chronically squeaky […]
Having looked the beast of the past in the eyes, having asked and received forgiveness…let us shut the door on the past – not to forget it – but to allow it not to imprison us. – Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission A haggard, visibly distracted, and apprehensive middle-aged man and […]
During an early conversation in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), having only recently met her young son, Simon’s (Simon Iteanu) new minder, Song (Fang Song), a student from Beijing who moved to Paris to study film, expresses her gratitude for lending a copy of a short film that she […]
After two films that admittedly left me uncertain over the direction of Hou Hsiao Hsien’s cinema, it was particularly satisfying to see Hou incorporate his earlier (and specifically, more overtly political) films with his recent expositions into more distilled and highly elliptical mood pieces. Evoking Chantal Akerman’s Toute une nuit in its essential distillation of […]