Authors — Paul Dallas
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First Impressions: The 2014 Locarno Film Festival
A spinning vortex of yellow leopards could be a metaphor for the feverish mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration experienced at the Locarno Film Festival. The image was a large collage of the festival’s mascot produced by the proprietor of my B&B, which he showed to me one sleep-deprived morning, on my way to a 9 am press screening at the Kursaal Cinema. Speaking of altered states, there’s been a persistent sense of déjà vu at the festival — which is actually a good thing. Seven days into the ten-day celebration, it’s clear that the 67th edition continues its tradition as […]
by Paul Dallas on Aug 14, 2014 -
Looking Both Ways: Tales of Future Past at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2014
Talent, money, and press descended on the otherwise quiet northern English city of Sheffield last week for the 21st edition of Doc/Fest — officially named the Sheffield Documentary and Digital Media Festival. With its mix of screenings, live events, music, and genuinely fantastic parties, this five-day celebration earns its reputation as the Glastonbury of documentary festivals (albeit without the mud). The analogy is encouraged by the seemingly endless days (the sun doesn’t set until 11pm), as well as some remarkable outdoor venues. These include a giant cave affectionately known as the Devil’s Arse, where I caught an evening screening of […]
by Paul Dallas on Jun 18, 2014 -
Phantom Rides
Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s mesmerizing Manakamana is the kind of film that pushes us to confront the basic reasons we go to the cinema in the first place — and what compels us to stay and stare at a screen for two hours. Most of us go to be transported in one way or another; Spray and Velez’s film certainly delivers in this respect, both literally and figuratively. Set entirely within a cable car floating above the Nepali jungle, the camera trained on visitors journeying to a mountaintop temple, the film never stops moving. It’s an action movie about […]
by Paul Dallas on Apr 28, 2014 -
Lost in Translation: Public Hearing
If you want to make a movie, you need a good script. Or, at least that’s what they tell you. A script gets the talent, which gets the financing (the two are really synonymous). The other thing you’ll need, of course, is luck. First-time filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins can thank Google for both (not the money part though). While cruising the Internet in 2007, Wilkins came across a transcript of a public hearing on a town hall website. It described in detail a well-attended public hearing in Allegany, New York, population 8,000. At issue was a proposal to replace […]
by Paul Dallas on Mar 7, 2014 -
Street Views: a Conversation with James Nares and His Cinematic Ode to New York
The following article originally ran in Spring 2013, when Street was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It is republished here to coincide with it playing as part of New Frontier at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. In James Nares’s 1976 film Pendulum, a large metal sphere swings ominously from a bridge in a desolate TriBeCa street. We watch with unease as the ball, viewed from multiple positions, traces a giant arc, pulling on the cable, which emits a low rhythmic groan on the soundtrack. This tense, hypnotic Super-8 film, which transforms a forlorn […]
by Paul Dallas on Jan 18, 2014 -
Eyes Wide Shut
French director Alain Guiraudie’s first feature, the 2003 coming-of-age film No Rest for the Brave, opens in a nondescript bar in a sleepy town where Basile, the agitated protagonist, is recounting a strange dream to his friend Igor. The disturbed young man believes the dream carries a fatal warning: if he falls asleep again, he will die. What follows is a Buñuelian picaresque that is shot in the style of social realism but structured as a series of narrative ruptures creating the filmic equivalent of the surrealist game of exquisite corpse. Guiraudie has, over the past decade, continued to probe […]
by Paul Dallas on Jan 17, 2014 -
Into the Woods: Director Michelangelo Frammartino Talks About His Mesmerizing Installation Work Alberi
Director Michelangelo Frammartino unveiled his latest project at Den Frie Center for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen in November. Alberi, his stunning 26-minute video installation, which first screened at MoMA P.S.1 last spring, was receiving its European premiere at CPH:DOX, a festival that awarded its top prize to his second feature, Le Quattro Volte, in 2010. Like that film, Alberi is a hybrid work that combines documentary and staged performance, but operates in the space between video installation and cinema. It describes a mysterious ritual from the southern region of the filmmaker’s native Italy that is well known but little understood. […]
by Paul Dallas on Jan 10, 2014 -
Things Fall Apart: Alexander Carver and Daniel Schmidt’s The Unity of All Things at BAM’s Migrating Forms
The Unity of All Things, the first feature by artist Alexander Carver and filmmaker Daniel Schmidt, is an erotic queer sci-fi with an experimental narrative that combines particle physics, critique of global capitalism, various existential quandaries, and playfully perverse digressions into gender politics. It’s an unclassifiable micro-budget film shot on Super 16 and Super 8 in locations ranging from China, Switzerland, Chicago, and the Arizona desert, and has dialogue in at least three different languages. As its title might imply, the film’s ambition is undercut by a generous serving of self-aware humor. The film receives its New York premiere tonight […]
by Paul Dallas on Dec 13, 2013 -
Children of the Revolution: Director Narimane Mari on her Award-Winning Bloody Beans
The focus this year’s edition of the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (commonly known as CPH:DOX) was squarely on the political, with programs exploring the intersection of art and activism. Guest curators Ai Weiwei and The Yes Men programmed eclectic sidebars under the festival’s theme “Everything is Under Control.” A section devoted to Chinese documentaries emphasized the medium’s vital role in surveying the state, and the festival added a new award explicitly addressing the recent crop of documentaries that operate between investigative journalism and activism. Taking the festival’s top prize was Bloody Beans, the first feature by French-Algerian filmmaker Narimane Mari, […]
by Paul Dallas on Dec 6, 2013 -
Letter from Locarno, Festival Wrap Up
The 66th edition of the Locarno Film Festival came to a close Saturday with the handing out of the Palmarès during an evening ceremony in the Piazza Grande, and thankfully this year’s awards were congruent with critical consensus. Lav Diaz, the Filopino master whose films regularly clock in at five and six hours, presided over this year’s jury, which, perhaps coincidentally, bestowed top prizes to the two competition films with the longest running times. The big winners of the Concorso Internazionale (International Competiton) were Catalan auteur Albert Serra, whose challenging but ultimately rewarding historical drama Historia de la meva mort […]
by Paul Dallas on Aug 19, 2013
