The coronation of Queen Beatrix on the eve of May Day in 1980 provides a salient point of departure for Johan van der Keuken’s The Way South, a cultural interrogation into the intertwined sociopolitical landscape of immigration, dislocation, underprivilege, and class division. Continuing on the prevailing theme of economic disparity between the continental north and […]
A muted, yet provocative composition on the changing face of the labor movement – or more appropriately, its immobility – in Western Europe in the 1970s, Johan van der Keuken’s Springtime: Three Portraits articulates the struggle of the working class under the protracted climate of an austere, stagnant global economy (stemming in part from the […]
While shadows and empty spaces pervade Naomi Kawase’s search for her absent father in Embracing, the images in Katatsumori are tactile and suffused in light – a stark contrast that conveys Kawase’s deep affection towards her 80 year old maternal great aunt and adoptive mother, Uno. In hindsight, the implied coldness of the film’s preface […]
Naomi Kawase’s Embracing is both an evocation of, and disjunction from, Jonas Mekas’s diaristic memory films, a journey in search of a lost past through the empty spaces and resigned silence of an unreconciled – and incomplete – present. This sense of absence and longing is revealed in the film’s opening sequence: the sight of […]
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 […]
It is unfortunate that some filmmakers still seem to confuse self-critical emotional nakedness with physical nakedness, and it is especially unexpected to see this in an artist of Françoise Romand’s caliber and artistic maturity (her documentary Mix-Up is a sublime and intelligent psychoanalytical discourse on identity in light of two middle-aged British women who were […]