Features
I really wanted us to experience the way that history and our representation of truth is mediated through images, through popular culture, through the news, through horror films, and through archives of therapy sessions.
Much of the current deepfake hysteria stems not from questions of consent, but from fears about election manipulation. It has never been as easy to undercut the “truth” of filmed reality, but verifying truth in image-making was never so straightforward.
The title of Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash may be slick and playfully edgy, but in ironic passages, Edwin ruptures that tone.
Feathers is a caustic rejoinder to a country still dragging its feet on gender parity, particularly when it comes to the issue of labor.
The film dissects the status of Bangladesh as a postcolonial nation that, like many other postcolonial nations, tries to establish itself as a free nation while holding onto symbols that tie it back to the period it wants to (impossibly) outgrow.
The Balcony Movie is about the contingency of human perspective and what that means for our lives and relationships, but it is also about what thoughtful works of art can create.
The premise/gimmick features Guido Hendrikx behind the camera as he approaches the doorsteps of strangers and stands there waiting for any kind of encounter.
These evidential images provide a midpoint between knowledge and history, and between a subjective and objective truth. This is the framework for Loznitsa’s archival cinema: a kind of foundation on which we can build a better understanding of the world.
Over the course of four hours, Loznitsa constructs a granular record of Lithuania’s moves towards independence.
The film, starring Adele Exarchopoulos as a hard-living, pain-numbing flight attendant on a fictional low-cost carrier, is a welcome indictment of the leisure culture and spiritual malaise of the Common Market.
I wanted to show these atrocities to remind Europe, and the whole world, that these barbarities are not happening far away, in some distant past, but right here, right now. If we don’t resist the Russian invasion, Ukraine will disappear as an independent state.
First Time displays a conceptual rigor, its clear segmentation and wordless progression creating a characteristic, riddle-like fusion of sensation and mental reflection.
The most intriguing films I saw were premised upon an often performative return to the near or distant past to resolve pesky questions of home or relationships, which is to say, inevitably, questions of identity and inheritance.
A pleasing sense of ambient drift marked a number of the landscape-focused True/False features I saw, a welcome respite from the “story” and character-obsessed rigidity that hobbles the American commercial documentary industry.