In the highly competitive corporate environment of modern-day Denmark, Hamlet (Pirkka-Pekka Petelius) is the heir to his father’s (Pentti Auer) majority stake in the family’s diversified commercial enterprise. His father’s business partner and senior board member, Klaus (Esko Salminen), is negotiating a delicate, multilayered transaction with rival companies to sell off less profitable ventures in […]
Every morning at the break of dawn, Nikander (Matti Pellonpää) and his co-worker (Esko Nikkari) conduct their silent ritual by making their way through a maze of trucks parked in the depot of a waste management company, picking up their daily itinerary, settling into their assigned vehicle, driving to their designated industrial areas to collect […]
A fascinating chronicle of the landmark tort case brought against Unocal on behalf of fifteen displaced Burmese villagers who were raped, beaten, enslaved, tortured, and even killed by the Burmese army in service to Unocal for the construction and security of the Yadana pipeline linking southern Burma to Thailand, Total Denial is a dense, intimate, […]
Rome, NY (Ada Bligaard Søby) It is unfortunate that the first program of the festival would prove to be so flaccid, and made even more unappealing by the almost grotesque level of derision and contempt (and arrogant superiority) exhibited by the two local tour guides enlisted by Søby to guide her through the struggling, working […]
Ssitkim: Talking to the Dead (Soon-mi Yoo) My favorite entry from the festival so far, Korean filmmaker Soon-mi Yoo visits Vietnam to examine the suppressed history of the South Korean military’s involvement in the annihilation of a rural village during the Vietnam War (due in part to President Park Chung Hee’s efforts to win political […]
Mother, Father, Son (Oliver Hockenhull) Composed of a series of family photographs and military archival footage, Hockenhull traces his father’s reluctant participation in the assault of Dresden as a navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force (a bombing that his father would subsequently describe as a “war crime”) and in the process, creates a powerful […]