Currently in post-production, Oliver Laxe’s second feature, Las Mimosas, is an ambitious follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut feature, You All Are Captains. Shot in Morocco, where the French-born Spaniard has lived for the best part of a decade, the film has been four years in the making. Produced by Zeitun Films and co-financed by Rouge International (France) and LaProd (Morocco), Laxe’s sophomore feature also received support from several funding schemes at film festivals, including Torino FilmLab and CPH:Forum. With Zeitun Films aiming to unveil the film at another major festival in 2016 (Captains debuted at Cannes in 2010), footage […]

The Sky Trembles and The Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers (you can memorize the title after reciting it enough times — don’t fret) opens with a small fleet of ’80s Mercedes-Benz coupes, trailed by dune buggies, speeding across a desert. A chase scene entered in media res? The armed-escort arrival of dubious capitalists on the trail of some as-yet-underexploited resource? (Is there any more potent symbol of ostensibly removed colonialism’s lingering presence than the unkillable, diesel-fueled Mercedes that still stalk the globe?) As the sun sets and the caravan moves closer, the camera inches from a far-off, locked-down wide lens perspective to closer […]

Considering last year’s Locarno Film Festival presented what turned out to be some of the best films of 2014 – Lav Diaz’s From What Is Before, Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, Martín Rejtman’s Two Shots Fired and Matías Piñeiro’s The Princess of France – artistic director Carlo Chatrian had a lot to live up to in his third year of tenure. Unbelievably, when the program of the festival’s 68th edition was announced, the main competition featured an even more impressive selection of auteurs. Though the extremely high expectations weren’t quite met, it was nevertheless an excellent year, and for every disappointment […]