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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The films by “the kids from independent cinema” don’t usually have sequels, but UPA 2! has enough eccentricity and self-confidence to embark on such task. The kids from the first UPA! had received the Argentine Competition’s main award at Bafici 2007 –in 2015, they maintain their boldness and their ability to observe w...
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Circus meets jealousy in one of the biggest German box-office hits of 1925. Three lifes standing at the abyss of their feelings in this melodrama full of love, passion, hate and death wish. Here Weimar cinema is wannabe-American: The leading man Emil Jannings was the first ever to win an Academy Award for Best Actor, and the last German. Leading gi...
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Out of the endless legends the Sixties have provided to pop and rock mythology, few are as fascinating as the one of Vashti Bunyan, the fairy singer and composer who, right before reaching stardom, set out on a wagon trip from London to Scotland, where she put out all the lights around her in order to live a simple life in anonymity for several dec...
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In a mountainous region in Albania where women have no rights at all, it’s optional to hide femininity, make the promise of remaining a virgin for life –hence the film’s title- and adopt the aspect of a male. This way, those virgins can take on “male practices” as classified by this traditional society, such as working...
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It’s not easy being a gypsy. “It’s easier to say it than to be it,” says one of the main characters in Shame and Respect. It’s not easy being a gypsy and, for a payo (that is to say, for a non-gypsy), it’s also not easy to understand what that implies –prejudice, it’s known, never allows one to see cl...
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Monicelli’s most recent documentary is within the framework of what we might call a series of “filmic love letters” to the places he knows best and appreciates most. Vicino al Colosseo… c’è Monti is a 22-minute short in which Monicelli draws an affectionate portrait of the Roman neighborhood in which he has liv...
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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...
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When she’s awaiting the train, when she’s in her kitchen fixing up some food, Victoria Morán doesn’t seem to be any different from the rest. But when she sings the first notes of an Omara Portuondo song, we can realize that she’s something special. Victoria is a singer with an exceptional voice. She has released album...
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After shooting È arrivato il cavaliere! (1950), Monicelli and Steno directed this choral film set in the world of third –or fourth– rate provincial vaudeville shows, a genre which, for all its artistic limitations, had been immensely popular in the 1920s and 1930s, but which had entered a decline throughout Europe after the Secon...
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The prolific Jacquot reunites with one of his longtime actresses, the great Isabelle Huppert, for a fascinating yet elusive films, one those films that are small in appearance but ultimately very complex and ambitions, that aims to talk about the feelings, the moods, the intimacy, the introspection of a woman who decides to end with his previous li...
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Back from a trip, Tomás and Josefina seem to be in different dimensions. In their apartment, there’s nothing but absence and disagreement. The deconstructed universe of a couple that still don’t fully accept the distance that separates them.
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In one of the intertitles of Walsh entre todos, artist Jorge González Perrín tells that, for many years, he felt the need of honoring his friends who were murdered and disappeared during the Argentine military dictatorship, and that it was when those responsible went to trial that he came up with a way of carrying it out. So in 2010 a...
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What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day? is the playful title of the second part of the Saint Etienne’s London Trilogy. It was filmed when London 2012 had been announced and it explores the wild and abandoned landscape of pre-Olympic Games Hackney Wick and the Lower Lea Valley. We watch Mervyn Day (Noah Kelly) go off on his paper round as the voi...
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María (an unstoppable Isabelle Huppert) is not planning on leaving her coffee plantation in Cameroon nor her ideal of resistance, which is not only political. When the French army, from a helicopter in retreat, tells her that it’s her last chance for going back to France and leaving the hostile place where she lives with her family, sh...
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An Israeli series of “love letters to cinema” drives this short that is precise and concise as possible. After being asked about a shot that changed his life, a filmmaker goes twenty years back in order to remember an episode of his time in the army: seeing Teorema. The fascination for the military, the tribal notion of virility, the ne...
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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...
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This episodic collective film speculates, sometimes as desperate comedy, on the manifestations of divinity under the points of view of a gang of renowned directors. That the gods are crazy and have a thousand faces seems to be the general conclusion, and they also have a sense of humor, a capricious temper, fits of rage or apathetic gestures like t...
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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...
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