A Jewish version of Bridget Jones is the starting point for this first film that was born out of a viral YouTube video. “Why am I still single?” “What’s wrong with me?” and “Have I done something wrong?” form the algid repertoire Schargorodsky’s self-inquiry unfolds in this documentary in which other...
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In 1921, D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen journeyed to Sardinia, where they spent the winter travelling. He wrote a book about his experiences, Sea and Sardinia, and now Mark Cousins retraces his footsteps, armed with a camcorder and an inexhaustible reserve of curiosity. The film is conceived partly as a letter to Lawrence –...
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Exhortations to put the common good above personal ambition are a recurrent theme of North Korean society guided by the Juche principle of self-reliance. In A Bellflower, a man crosses the mountains to return to his old home after many years away, full of regret for his youthful decision to follow a wandering indulgent life whilst his lover stayed...
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This is innovative entertainment cinema made by the UFA for an European audience in three sound versions: A mass success with big international stars of that time, written by Billy Wilder in one of his first scripts. And an example of the musicals of early German sound cinema; of films which were very soon forbidden by the Nazis for their “Je...
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This is a tricky film. Premiered in Sundance and exec produced by actor Elijah Wood, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a US film that presents itself as “the first Iranian vampire western.” It’s a cinema-mix, a cross between Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, and a vampire girl dressed as the lead character in Jafar Panahi’s The C...
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“Over the centuries, Western culture has relentlessly attempted to classify noise, music and everyday sounds... Ordinary noises and the mundane sounds that are not perceived as either annoying or musical are of no interest.” How to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? Fowler’s film cycle attempts to address...
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There actually is a pigeon here, in the beginning: a stuffed one, therewith past wondering; some zombie-like-looking human gawks at it in seemingly dull incomprehension. The film’s anti-heroes, a pair of salesmen specialized in fun novelties like vampire teeth (with extra-long fangs!) are met by similar gazes wherever they go... The title of...
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Además del guionista y director Richard Brooks, otros dos colaboradores de A sangre fría recibieron nominaciones al Oscar. Uno de ellos fue el compositor Quincy Jones, cuya astuta e inquietante partitura jazzera recuerda a la que Duke Ellington hizo para Anatomía de un asesinato. Pero lo más grandioso de A sangre fr&iacu...
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The schoolgirl of the title, Su-ryeon, could be regarded as the present day embodiment of The Flower Girl. She lives a life with modest comforts amongst loving family and receives a good education. But she resents her frequently absent father, who works as a research scientist, and also resents her mother’s uncritical devotion to him. Having...
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Above and Below is the definitive improvement (probably the only one possible) of the little orange guy in Google Street View. Not just because these survivors’ stories detect what you can’t see at street level (let’s be clear: what Nicolas Steiner’s extraordinary film shows are not cases of “invisibilization,” b...
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Galician Caress was never finished by Val del Omar (who confessed he “couldn’t finish it because the Galicia film is purely tragic, a negative affirmation incapable of communicating”), and it opens this Elementary Tryptich of Spain, which gathers in reverse order the three pillars of his work and condenses the Spanish essence thro...
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This film is the most unknown treasure of Weimar filmmaking: Marie Harder was the only female director of the years before 1933 (and Nazi heroine Leni Riefenstahl.) She was a Social-democrat party-member, working in film education. This is her only film as a director: she died in Mexican exile doing research for a new project. We do not know much m...
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Nearly 47 years ago, Garrel made a six-minute short film during the peak of the May 1968 events in France, composed of his own 35mm takes and 16mm footage taken by the film students who participated in the revolts. One single screening of Actua 1 took place in late May before Garrel declared the film was officially lost. Last year, the negatives mi...
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The triptych is closed with Water-Mirror of Granada, which according to Amos Vogel is “an explosive, cruel, and deeply passionate piece; a silent cry that constitutes a mystical evocation of Spain’s nightmare. With echoes of Buñuel’s Land Without Bread, it manages to transmit anxiety and nameless terror. One of the masterpi...
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Daniel Rosenfeld returns to the tools he already used in The Chimera of Heroes (2003). Better yet, he returns to a particular notion about the use of such tools: without the narrowness that results from urgency but with a fair distance and the necessary time to detect that spot where the incredible takes place. And from then on, instead of approach...
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After six years and six months, waking up won’t be the same. Years of sharing are condensed in a walk from dawn till midnight through the streets of San Telmo, making it even harder to say goodbye.
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Harvey Logan and his two children live in the windy desolation of Tierra del Fuego, by the ocean. It’s not exactly an idyllic trio: Logan is violent; Eva is a restless and sensual teenager who dreams about going to Paris; his pathologically introverted brother Juan is in love with her. A British businessman and an Argentine engineer who want...
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The social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s were spearheaded by the charismatic, guru-like figure of Glasgow born psychiatrist R. D. Laing. In his now classic text “The Politics of Experience” (1967) Laing argued that normality entailed adjusting ourselves to the mystification of an alienating and depersonalizing world. Thus, those...
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Given the who’s-who of collaborators and acolytes of the late Robert Altman assembled for this feature-length tribute, it would have been all too easy for Ron Mann to let the film turn into a loose, digressive –indeed, Altmanesque– jamboree of war stories and portable wisdom. But Altman charts a different course, drawing on a weal...
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Amalia was the first Argentine novel. Written in 1851 by José Mármol during his exile in Montevideo, it was published in chapters on the newspaper La Semana, and stood as a big statement against Rosas, who was then governor of Buenos Aires. In 1914, successful playwright Enrique García Velloso decided to adapt the play into cin...
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American Interior is a lot of things at the same time: a documentary, a record, a PowerPoint conference, an app, and a book. The trans-media dimension of this piece, which also rummages through the remains of a minority language and culture (the Welsh one, in this case), is what made it so worthy of grants and institutional pats in the back. It may...
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If Animals, maybe the finest Spanish opera prima in recent years (screened in Bafici ‘13), featured a passionate and contained study of teenage urges from an intimate dynamics that didn’t lack visual and sonic palpitation, Everelasting Love takes that vision of juvenile textures and its clash with a dark world where adulthood is formed...
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Like in Aleksei German Jr.’s Under Electric Clouds –screened in the last edition of the Berlin Film Festival and also programmed in this Bafici–, Angels of Revolution deals with Russian history –or in this case Soviet, to be more precise. If German believes any Russian period we observe will offer a post-apocalyptic landscap...
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A portrait of the Epiphyllum Oxypetalum flower. The bud grows through the course of 25 days, it blooms one night and the next morning it dies. A record, as well as a subjective perception, of the flow of time.
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