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...
Functions:
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...
Functions:
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...
Functions:
In 2013, The Mysterious Fanta Ananas, an unknown Somalian filmmaker, surprised the festival fauna with Chigger Ale, a bizarre short film about a Hitler clone from outer space. Everything seems to indicate that behind Fanta’s novelesque identity sits Miguel Llansó, a visionary filmmaker and adventurer who was born in Madrid but is an Et...
Functions:
An intense and moving elegy for the fugaos or Asturian Maquis who were murdered in the Spanish Civil Post-war at the hands of Franco’s repressive forces, Here and in Other Time not only intends to be a political film, but also to work with the forms of cinema in a radically political way. After a prologue that conjures the ghosts of some of t...
Functions:
Leóne looks like she came from the shared imagination of Fellini and Robert Crumb: she’s confident, huge, with blonde hair, and a vitality that makes you unable to resist being infatuated with her. That’s what her son does everyday when he watches her with Oedipus’ eyes as she waits tables in a little restaurant outside of...
Functions:
The Republic of Abjasia is a new country located in the South Western side of the Caucasus mountain chain. Many states consider that this nation doesn’t really exist. When Eric Baudelaire sent his first letter to Maxim Gvinja, even he wasn’t sure what could happen. But the answer came along after several weeks, and kicked off a kind wri...
Functions:
A grandmother’s love is more powerful than any other form of love. Hence, losing that affection can provoke some huge emptiness. Just as Banana Yoshimoto wrote about her grandmother’s absence in her book Kitchen, Christelle Lhereux pays homage to that relationship through a film. A film composed of two parts: the home videos Madeleine m...
Functions:
This is the family story of a man who lived for a long time in a Harlem apartment together with a Bengal tiger named Ming, who slept at his side and watched films with him on the weekends –a heterodox, inhumanly loving bond between the species that later extended to a crocodile named Al. It constitutes a poetic essay about certain connection...
Functions:
How should one portray the tragic death of a sergeant and 44 drafted soldiers in the Chilean Andes during a march that concluded their training in 2005? Roberto Collío finds the right and fair resources: he shoots in black and white with a refined plastic work that includes animation and live action footage from different locations around th...
Functions:
Some time after having transformed Gérard Depardieu’s (enormous) humanity into a cinematic value in the film Mammuth (long before Abel Ferrara did something similar in Welcome to New York), the duo formed by Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern takes another strange body (in every sense of the world) like Michel Houellebecq...
Functions:
An architectural, urban, sexual film. Or a gay film rebellious against a certain type of real-estate developments. But none of the definitions mentioned do justice to a story that is concise, brief, raw and explicit and, at the same time, elusive, loose and intriguing. A film in which references to Pasolini and Fassbinder can be found processed and...
Functions:
A journey by train: the moving window like the screen of a landscape that is exterior as well as interior. The words of a poet that blend until they dissolve, blurring the borders of the intimate and the universal, merging with and separating from a snowed landscape that is always the same and always different. The window as link and frontier, as u...
Functions:
There is a key element that can be seen when the title of the film is presented: the line below the title, with the year and copyright, makes it seem as if it were a film from the sixties or seventies, of those that show tortuous emotional confinement like, for example, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. If Alex Ross Perry’s fourth film is psy...
Functions:
Like Wes Anderson, Seth possesses a calligraphic sense of beauty, as well as one dampened like an abandoned piece of wood. But Seth and his comics, which, hailing from Canada, gave the term “nostalgia” a less Andersonian and more powerful meaning in its questions (and visual simplicity) acquire a new layer in this animated-documentary h...
Functions:
The beauty of trash is undeniable. There are the traces, the stories and the preferences of thousands of anonymous persons, and that is if you don’t even start considering the aesthetic part. The single stream the title refers to is the denomination given to a system of waste recycling in which paper, metal and plastic are separated not durin...
Functions:
“Join me. During these days you will see, with pleasure, what my arts are. I will give you what no man has seen.” The same precept Mephistopheles used to seduce the elderly Faust applies to Sarah Walker, a young actress who will do anything in order to abandon the micro-universe of hipsters and aspiring indie filmmakers she seems to be...
Functions:
A train goes across China. In each one of its many wagons, hundreds of persons with their own stories and points of view travel every day, covering huge distances. China’s railway system is imaginably complex if you take into account the country’s area, its population density and its technical development. The laying of the tracks, whic...
Functions:
Just as she did in her opera prima The Joy of Life, Jenni Olson again performs a masterful combination of an intimate personal story with the greatness of History in capital letters. The Royal Road the title refers to, in the US West Coast, is the actual route that used to connect religious missions between Mexico and San Francisco, and is now the...
Functions:
A(nother) film shot in one continuous take. But this one really seems to be only one shot, or at least that’s what we’re told and, above all, what we perceive while watching Victoria. Are digital cameras the reason more directors try to make more films like this one? It’s possible, and it’s already happening. But Victoria is...
Functions:
Shiori, who’s 17, dresses as a Gothic Lolita. She dreams of her career as an actress, as a model, and lives with her boyfriend, a cool avant garde artist who’s sure of himself. Shiori has a blogcast. She interacts live with her followers, takes care of them, and keeps an eye on her performance. She meets another girl, Ayumi, who’s...
Functions:
Little Emily Prime receives a visit from the future: it’s a third-generation clone of herself coming from the world as it will be 227 years from now, a world on the verge of destruction where the conscience of the deceased are digitally preserved, time travel is possible (although risky) and captures of anonymous memories are exhibited at art...
Functions:
