By Yun-hua Chen. After the Chechen Wars, many changes happened. Refugees and guerrilla fighters from Chechnya had a major impact on the Islamic faith of the Kist people in Pankisi. Leila and her daughter, Mariam, represent these two generations before and after the Chechen Wars.” Adamiani, screened at the international […]
A Subtle Kind of Heroism: From Where They Stood
By Michael Sandlin. From Where They Stood shows that documentary filmmaking – used by the Allies during WWII to bring the true scope of Nazi concentration camp horror into the public eye in the first place – can still shed historically relevant light on the Holocaust eighty-some years later.” Although […]
Fist in the Fire: Wang Yu’s One-Armed Boxer (Arrow Video)
By Thomas Puhr. This ‘plot’ is mostly window dressing for a series of increasingly complicated (and ridiculous) fight sequences. These set pieces are impressively choreographed and shot…boasting the kind of excessive violence similar genre exercises promise yet don’t always deliver.” The good people at Arrow Video may have the market […]
Language and Love: An Interview with Filmmaker Tomasz Wasilewski on Fools (KVIFF 2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. This film is also about motherhood, mutual love, becoming a mother again when you are a very mature woman, loneliness, and all those difficult emotions which are so powerful in this film and our life. I did not want the confirmation of the taboo to be the […]
The Rules of the Game: Laura Wandel’s Playground
By Christopher Sharrett. Wandel has us pondering a crucial concern: is education predicated on patriarchal-capitalist ideology, as would seem most obvious, or do we confront, at this level of human development, some inherent savagery in the species (a problem with ‘human nature’)?” I was very happy to read on this […]
Of Time and the City – Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt’s Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel
By James Slaymaker. But the overarching ambition of Dreaming Walls is to preserve an image of the Chelsea Hotel while there is still some semblance of the creative spirit which one animated it remaining.” Early in Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt’s elegant, mournful documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea […]
Emerging Post-Covid in Wiesbaden and Udine: The Shape of Two European Film Festivals
By Dina Iordanova. My interest, however, is in the festival as a shell – its structure and functionality; the films are a component that is vitally important but also ephemeral. And, in the year 2022, there is a lot to say about how film festivals in Europe emerge post-Covid.” It […]
The Fever Dream of Werner Herzog’s The Twilight World
A Book Review Essay by John Duncan Talbird. Although Hiroda Onoda [as a central character in Werner Herzog’s debut novel] doesn’t carry any of the toxicity of many of Kinski’s roles – misogynist, racist, sense of entitlement, viciousness – he does have what nearly all of Herzog’s characters have, the […]
Myth and History Restored: Aleksandr Ptushko’s Ilya Muromets (The Sword & the Dragon)
By Ken Hall. A visually rich and fast-paced mythic and historical screen epic…the timing of the new restoration by Mosfilm and Craig Rogers is also oddly appropriate given the current warfare in Ukraine, as the courageous defense of Kiev has featured prominently in newscasts. This visually rich and fast-paced mythic […]
Avoiding Complacent, Selective Angles – Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television
A Book Review by M. Sellers Johnson. Júlia Havas scrutinizes selective applications of feminist analysis and responds with the charge of provoking media studies scholars to scrutinize those who engage in reductive feminist discourse.” Júlia Havas’s new monograph Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television (Wayne State University Press, 2022) […]