By Jeremy Carr. Young Haya is having a rough time. At the beginning of the documentary Miss Kiet’s Children, this precocious primary school student is terribly upset. She fell on her way to school and her pants are dirty. She is sad and shameful. Her teacher, Kiet Engels, offers to give […]
Swimming in Poetry: The Shape of Water
December 14, 2017
By Elias Savada. When Guillermo del Toro makes a film, people take notice. For me, these are delicious, often unsettling – and sensitive – events. Critics adore his unique skill and have grown accustomed to his stylish shadings; audiences may be put off by his films’ strangeness, a tendency to excite […]
Various Industries Post-Independence: New African Cinema by Valérie K. Orlando
December 13, 2017
A Book Review by Cecilia A. Zoppelletto. Charting the recent film industry of an entire continent is an unimaginable task and, even if that could be done, the result would be an encyclopaedic creation of hundreds of pages satisfying merely the need for lists and facts. But is it actually […]
A New Platform for Chinese Independent Cinema: An Interview with Jia Zhangke and Marco Muller
December 12, 2017
By Martin Kudláč. A new Chinese film festival emerged this year, Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival, inaugurated in the Ancient City of Pingyao listed on the World Cultural Heritage map. Founded by internationally-recognized Chinese independent writer-director-producer and seasoned festival director Marco Muller, the festival embraced dialogue between Eastern […]
Luck in Debuting from Georgia: An Interview with Ana Urushadze on Scary Mother
By Martin Kudláč. The emerging Georgian filmmaker Ana Urushadze unveiled her first feature-length directing effort Scary Mother, a Georgian-Estonian co-production made at the prestigious Swiss showcase in Locarno. While introducing her bleak psychological drama about emancipation onto the festival circuit, she nabbed the Swatch First Feature Award at the Concorso Cineasti […]
A Stilted, Flat Wonder Wheel
December 8, 2017
By Elias Savada. Woody Allen has gone dumpster diving. His new film, Wonder Wheel, is anything but wondrous. In fact, it stinks. The aging auteur may open his movie with a cloud-specked blue sky framing the aquamarine beach umbrellas and masses of New Yawkers absorbing the sun across every inch of […]
Money, Censorship, and Films of the Chinese Independent Cinema: An Interview with Han Dong
By Martin Kudláč. The inaugural edition of the Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival introduced several emerging filmmakers from the Chinese independent cinema. China produces over 800 films annually and lacks a vital platform to curate new independent production for potential domestic and international releases. Pingyao was founded […]
Melville at 100: Le samouraï from Criterion
By Tony Williams. Initially released in 2005, this new edition of Jean-Pierre Melville’s outstanding film has only one new feature to complement those that appeared earlier. They include the 2005 interviews with Rui Nogueira, editor of the classic interview book Melville on Melville (1971), and Ginette Vincendeau, author of the […]
Early Programming in the Midwest: Saving Brinton
By Jeremy Owen. Documentaries about cinema are today so numerous that they are close to a genre in their own right and, with a very definite cinema-centric subject matter Saving Brinton puts itself firmly into that canon. Co-directed by Iowa based film-makers Tommy Haines and Andrew Sherburne along with fellow […]
Double Vision: The Breadwinner
November 30, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. The power and purpose of storytelling is essential to The Breadwinner, the newly released animated adaptation of Deborah Ellis’ 2000 young-adult novel of the same name, directed by Nora Twomey and scripted by Anita Doron. For Kabul father Nurullah (voiced by Ali Badshah), stories are a way to […]