The new short by Sandro Aguilar completes a fascinating diptych with the previous Jewels (seen last year at Bafici) and, like that one, it asks us to use reason and imagination in order to run away from the comfort zone the contemporary audience has settled in. Over images -amazing, as always- of caged monkeys, bugs preserved in formaldehyde and a...
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Faraday, the main character, has a new opportunity to start believing again in his passion: telepathy, the paranormal –the sub-normal? He and his girlfriend, who sells cupcakes and uploads videos to her blog aiming to be a star on the Internet, move to a new apartment that features ghostly presences. Faraday, the film, believes in comedy, in...
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This is not just another documentary on the increasingly fundamental Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It’s a documentary that includes never-seen-before interviews with Fassbinder –meeting-interviews shot by Danish director Christian Braad Thomsen. It’s a portrait, the story of a friendship and an admiration, and a multiple approach to t...
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Christian Feasts / Secular Feasts is the name that groups the documentaries rescued from a series shot in Murcia, also during those Mission years
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A portrait of the filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. The film proposes a journey through his cinema marked by the recent history of Chile. From The Battle of Chile, a masterpiece of direct cinema recounting the last months of Salvador Allende and the Chilean Popular Unity to Nacre Button, still a project but filmed as it is coming into being, Patric...
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Young and troubled Le Quoc Phong lives in a village in Vietnam with one single thought: travelling to Hanoi to have a sex-change operation. In an über-redundant selfie-mode, he proves his anguish by elaborating in tears –and yet also a curious dry crying– on the horrors he is facing. The recipient of this confession as well as the...
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Film critic Andy Kellman celebrated the release of Finisterre (2002), the sixth album by London supra-pop trio Saint Etienne, as a return to the surprise they had produced a decade earlier, when they busted into the scene with the dazzling Foxbase Alpha (1992). “Just like back then –Kellman wrote– the record’s flow is deligh...
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ōoka Shōhei, one of post-war Japanese literature’s greatest, had been called up to serve in ‘44, on the Philippines. What he describes in his 1951 masterpiece, Nobi, he knew –some of the unspeakable deeds too many soldiers committed during the final weeks of Imperial Japan (most merely to stay alive, some simply because they could...
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The Argentine coast has some characteristics that are hard to translate: tourist attractions, the everyday pace, the personality of its inhabitants and urban identity. Lucía Ferreyra’s first film, a feature based on a short, traces line after line the skeleton of one of those coastal towns: Mar del Sur. The introspective, sensitive poi...
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But more or less everything of it is forgotten, reduced to two or three footnotes. I wanted to take the audience to an adventurous trip to this lost time, a trip which should entertain, move, surprise and remind us all to an open wound in our past. Siegfried Kracauer, a forgotten genious, described this epoch in From Caligari to Hitler. This best-k...
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There are lots of films that look like From Scotland with Love, but we should also say this one doesn’t look like any other. Less cerebral than Gustav Deutsch’s Welt Spiegel Kino and more surprising than Electric Edwardians –that collection of footage and primitive views of British pioneers Mitchell and Kenyon– Virginia Heat...
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Tactilevision gives life to the sculpted saints by Juan de Juni and Berruguete, which burn to the rhythm bailaor Vicente Escudero echoes on the retables of the Valladolid Museum of Religious Sculpture. It’s a figuration of the “horror moor,” a delirium that leads to an awaited mystical ecstasy through the grace of mechanics.
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After the tourists finish taking pictures of the sea lions from the port, the symbol of the most visited coastal city in Argentina, the man in charge of making the animals go back in the water appears with a clean white apron and a whip of sorts in his hand. They say it’s a matter of hygiene, for them not to be there when the ships unload the...
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Martín and Matías are two best friends who are about to begin their lives out of school. Martín decides to start looking for a job, while Matías is comfortable in his role as a son.
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In this film of eccentric beauty and wild feeling, printed words sometimes fill the screen, almost obliterating the puny creatures struggling beneath the type. Based on Joseph Conrad’s very dry, very vicious long short story, ‘The Return,’ the film concerns a man who, having married a woman for whom he apparently feels nothing, be...
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Welcome to the funniest, freest, sharpest, and –why not– more serious film made about its theme Argentine cinema has delivered in a long (maybe too long) time. It’s a radical Artificial Generation and is also enchanting, and the fact that someone has managed to put those two things into the same image flow is a huge merit. Maybe i...
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Some day we will be nothing, but in the meantime, where do we really exist? Glen Campbell looks at himself in a familiar Super 8 footage. He doesn’t know who the guy on the screen is. It’s him. Neither does he know he’s a country music legend to whom Sir Paul McCartney himself says: “I just wanted to say I love you” (a...
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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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“Selling anticuchos wasn’t his dream, so after trying different jobs and getting fired a few times, Guido started as an assistant cutter in a textile shop.” The paragraph is located somewhere down the middle of a splendid profile of Guido Fuentes (Tarija, Bolivia, 1974) that was published on the website of the Bolivian Consulate i...
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Chico se despierta en cama de chica, feliz después de una noche de fiesta que terminó bien. Ella, que se despierta enseguida, no parece compartir ni su felicidad ni la idea de que la noche haya terminado bien. Es más: no se acuerda de nada. La incomodidad escala hasta que ella lo echa y él se va a medio vestir. ¿F...
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TV meteorologist Phil Connors travels to Punxsutawney for a festivity, Groundhog Day (2/2), a traditional celebration in the US and Canada in which this animal acts as meteorologist, because according to folklore, it is able to determine if the winter to come will be soft or harsh. That day comes to an end, and Phil Connors goes to sleep; the next...
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The economic crisis in Spain and its impact on young people is the center of this film about a couple that tries to survive in Madrid with almost no money. Natalia lives with her divorced mother and her younger siblings, and there doesn’t seem to be much more to life than seeing her boyfriend, Carlos, who works for a construction company wher...
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“This is pretty civilized,” says Simon while someone serves food on his plate, as if he was expecting his hosts to be anything other than a Charles Manson-like clan of savages. Simon’s untrusting reaction during his short visit is probably the same one spectators would have if they would have look closely at these four youngsters....
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