Like Boris Lehman’s autobiographical essay Looking for my Birthplace, Albert Solé’s Bucharest, Memory Lost is a search for identity – the reconstruction of a past that has been lost in the shadows of turbulent history, exile, and parental silence. For Solé, the ambiguity of his nationality as a young boy – his parents having alternately […]
Tag: Essay Film
Sacred Places, 2009
During the Q&A, Jean-Marie Téno remarked that he was inspired to shoot Sacred Places as a result of seeing dramatic changes to the format of the 2009 FESPACO film festival in Burkina Faso, where the practice of holding open-air simulcasts of featured films for public viewing around the festival grounds in Ouagadougou – often, their […]
The Colonial Misunderstanding, 2005
In an early episode of The Colonial Misunderstanding, a reverend from Cameroon who is working towards the restoration and proper attribution of a native Jamaican missionary, Joseph Merrick’s historical importance in the Christianization of the country during the early half of the 1800s (a historical suppression that, in the light of colonialization in the latter […]
Africa, I Will Fleece You, 1993
As a young boy growing up in the newly independent nation of Cameroon, Jean-Marie Téno’s grandfather would tell him a great many tales to fuel his fertile imagination, among them, the story of a land inhabited by larks that, on one auspicious day, was stumbled upon by a group of hunters. Realizing the abundance of […]
Antonio Gaudi, 1984
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudi is a spare, astonishing, and haunting documentary on the designs of famed turn of the century Spanish architect, Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926). A profound influence on the Spanish art nouveau movement, Gaudi’s sensual adaptation of Gothic, Middle Eastern, and traditional architecture is a truly a unique artistic vision. Teshigahara immerses the viewer […]
Novel City, 2008 / Horizontal Boundaries, 2008
Novel City, 2008 (Leslie Thornton) While Leslie Thornton’s 1983 film Adynata posed questions of exoticism and alterity in its cultural examination of China, Novel City represents a different, yet equally jarring notion of otherness – one borne of China’s rapid industrialization, economic transformation, and cultural amnesia at the turn of the century. Interweaving excerpts from […]