A quartet of deaf musicians rehearsing in a studio provides an appropriately lyrical and enchanting prelude to In the Land of the Deaf as they interpret an orchestral arrangement through a series of sweeping, rhythmic cadence: at times, in interacting and overlapping ‘instrumental’ solos, and at other points, in unison, as the articulated symphony intensifies […]
Continuing in the vein of Justice, Maria Ramos’s examination of the Brazilian justice system, Behave is an equally potent and sobering social inquiry into the state’s juvenile re-socialization program. Working within the limitations of protecting the identity of the young offenders’ identities, the film is predominantly shot facing Judge Luciana Fiala, a conscientious juvenile court […]
In the subtly insightful opening sequence of the film, a disabled parking attendant is brought before a judge in a Rio de Janeiro criminal courtroom for a preliminary hearing stemming from a police arrest on a burglary charge. The defendant begins to provide an explanation for the circumstances of how he came to be at […]
During the Q&A for the film, filmmaker David Redmon explained that the initial concept for Mardi Gras: Made in China revolved around the idea of exploring the interconnection between pop culture, ritual, and globalization. To this end, the idea of tracing the origin of a disposable commodity – Mardi Gras beads – seemed ideally suited […]
In one of several, equally heart-rending and inspiring segments in Videoletters entitled Vlada and Ivica, Vlada and his father Zoran, a Serbian, finishes recording his videotaped message and begins to reflect pensively on their family’s inevitable estrangement from the intended videoletter recipient, Vlada’s childhood friend Ivica and his father Zeljko Krilcici, a colleague and long-time […]
Alternately humorous and heartbreaking in its candid and unflinching portrait of the exploited lives of low rate prostitutes living in the shantytown of La Línea in Guatemala City (an emblematic place of abject poverty built along the marginal buffer zones of railroad tracks that also evokes Ditsi Carolino’s Life on the Tracks), Chema Rodriguez’s The […]