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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This is an Iranian film that will perplex those who are familiar with Iranian cinema, and those who aren’t but have homogenizing fantasies. There’s a car owned by one of the protagonists, and two women friends conversing in it. There’s dialogue about politics, dictators, Argo, and, of course, a game with the different levels of re...
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The Ben Zaken family is composed of brothers Shlomi and Leon, their mother Dina, and Shlomi’s daughter Ruhi. Ruhi is eleven, and she’s nothing but trouble. Yes, she lacks a mother, or a mother figure, and her father has doubts about her choices. Ruhi –the extraordinary Rom Shoshan– and her family have plenty of grimness in t...
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Narayan Kamble is 65 years old; he’s a poet, musician, professor, and political activist. His everyday activities include a series of travelling performances through the neighborhoods of Mumbai. He gets arrested during one of his shows, under charges of inciting a worker to commit suicide. This is the starting point for young filmmaker Chaitanya Ta...
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The strange days are the ones a young Colombian couple experiences in a black and white Buenos Aires. This is where they live together, wander around, have sex, argue, fight, get drunk, have fun, go to parties, make each other jealous, have sex with other people, and provoke each other. Without ever losing the attraction they feel for each other, t...
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“The Chinese replica of the Austrian town of Hallstatt opens its doors,” read the headlines in mid 2012. Indeed, in record time and very near the explosive “special economic area” of Shenzhen in Southern China, a high-end real estate development didn’t include a mall, a park, or a recreational compound, but a 1:1 repro...
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A young couple is about to move from the apartment they rent to the one they plan to buy on the day that begins. Everything is already packed: the place is deserted. That place is no longer home, and the next one is still not available. They have to buy an apartment, move a large sum of cash –a practice that is typical of the economical absur...
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María José and Norberto live in the outskirts of Belo Horizonte. They have been married for 35 years, shared a life together, and have two children. One of them is André Novais Olivera, director of this film that discovers his parents in very simple and everyday-like domestic situations through which we’ll learn their hab...
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Two twin brothers, a mother who returns from plastic surgery with her face completely bandaged, and a glacial design house that sits sufficiently away from other forms of life. The setting and its protagonists already hint some terrifying possibilities that will erupt as the twins –who are so bored there, in the middle of the summer– be...
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“It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present,” says Little Edie Bouvier Beale in Grey Gardens (1975). Dog Lady is not Grey Gardens and perhaps doesn’t owe a thing to it: they have common features, but for that reason both films repel just like equal charges do. Now, a woman who lives surrounded by a...
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A fascinating chronicle of one failure, or maybe several. In the Eighties, the Cuban government –with the assistance and capitals of the extinct Soviet Union– started to build nuclear reactors in the Juraguá region, in the province of Cienfuegos. Then Chernobyl happened, and then the Berlin Wall fell, and then the USSR was gone....
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After watching The Romantic Exiles, you get a melancholy feeling similar to the one you get after vacation reunions with old friends. Here, we run against Vito and Francesco again, those dilettantes who moved through a winter and somber Madrid back in The Wishful Thinkers. Whether they play the same characters or not is irrelevant: we recognize the...
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One would wish today’s festival cinema was more like this, limitless and outrageous. One that would test our notions on good taste and correction. A color-filled, vane, and definitely sexy cinema. I Swear I’ll Leave This Town fits those adjectives, which are also good to describe the film’s protagonist Joi, a young woman from a di...
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Probably a film as fragile as Songs from the North will set a turning point in the way North Korea and the Juche Thinking are represented in cinema. The figure of Kim Jong-il –between the sinister and the extravagant– has made the North Korean regime a succulent dish for interpretations made from a distant Western cynicism. However, Sou...
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Asked about the political dimension of his second feature (because he’s a film director born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1975, and that is what he must be asked about), Nadav Lapid answers: “In the film, there’s a great amount of Israelis that rub salt in the film’s wound: does anyone still care about beauty, poetry and ideas? A...
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If you thought adventure films in the style of Kim (1950) or Lawrence of Arabia (1962) were Technicolor-exclusive, think again. Because Theeb tells a coming-of-age tale set in the Hejaz desert (Saudi Arabia) and during WWI. As the world is modified by means of explosions and massacres and the power structures still seek new forms, little Theeb (Ara...
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In order to attract attention on a film like Passers-by, it would be simple to resort to cold hard data and, for example, mention the fact that its shoot took place over the course of two decades in diverse formats, and had more than 6,500 cuts. However, these factors pale in comparison to the final experience the film offers a 100-minute-long expo...
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In 1968, Ulrike Meinhof wrote: “The fun is over: a protest is when I say I don’t like this and that. Resistance is when I see to it that things that I don’t like no longer occur.” Two years later, she would come to lead the Red Army Fraction along with Andreas Baader. How did it get from extreme A, in which a young Marxist w...
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