Acquaintances Ray (Fergus Wilson) and Alice (Emma Diaz) bump into each other in Brisbane, discover they’re both about to drive back to Sydney and decide to stop along the way for a night of camping—one of the first of many unexpected detours in Friends and Strangers, a fresh, funny and unorthodox rarity of an arthouse comedy. The title of this 2021 Rotterdam premiere gives some indication of how writer-director-editor James Vaughan’s feature debut unfolds: it takes some time to discern that Ray is the film’s main subject, as he keeps encountering new people and the film seems like it could go […]
In the year 2035, dream-auditing is a prolific but thankless business, especially for James Preble (Kentucker Audley). Scrummaging through an individual’s archived dreams via an endless collection of VHS tapes, Preble finds himself constantly stuck between mundane reality and the elusive world of someone’s REM cycle. The primary goal of slumming through this government job? Dream taxation. One afternoon, as he visits the home of Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller and, in the dream world, Grace Glowicki), a welcoming but mysterious dream tax evader, the lines between consciousness and unconsciousness grow blurred. A love story, a comedy, a 1980s children’s fantasy […]
In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed Gajendra Chauhan, a B-list actor and member of the right-wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), as chairman of the Film and Television Institute of India. Recognizing this as yet another BJP maneuver to saffronize (rewrite with right-wing policies and Hindu-nationalist agendas) curriculums, students protested and struck. Police arrested and tortured such dissenters across national institutes; administrations hiked up entry exam fees and cut nonconforming students’ stipends. Persisting today, the BJP’s violent acts of suppression especially affect students of the Dalit caste. But film students across campuses (including the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute) continue […]
Multimedia artist Jenny Perlin, whose work includes 16mm hand-drawn animated films, videos, installations, and drawings (some of which are in MoMA’s collection), opens this year’s hybrid Doc Fortnight with Bunker, a literal underground film. Beginning back in pre-pandemic 2018 Perlin took a cross-country road trip, hoping to explore the lives of men (almost all straight, white and middle-aged) who call decommissioned nuclear silos and military bunkers home. Along the way, she also meets the (demographically similar) businessmen building, selling and sometimes even living the fear-driven American dream. Filmmaker caught up with Perlin a few days before the doc’s February 23rd […]
When The Automat director Lisa Hurwitz left her family’s home in Southern California to go to The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, she found that the place where she was most comfortable was the school’s cafeteria, the Greenery. “I made new friends there every day and there was a different food every day,” she says. Hurwitz’s academic focus wasn’t film: “I took one documentary filmmaking course, just before I graduated.” But she also had a job projecting 35mm movies at Olympia’s Capitol Theater, aka the Picture Palace, which was operated by the Olympia Film Society and was the venue for […]
South Sudanese director Akuol de Mabior’s No Simple Way Home is a gorgeous example of what African filmmakers can accomplish if Westerners would just get out of their way. A world premiere in the Panorama section of this year’s Berlinale, the doc is produced by Kenyan filmmaker Sam Soko (Softie) and the South African duo Tiny Mungwe and Don Edkins of STEPS (Social Transformation and Empowerment Projects) as part of the organization’s Generation Africa initiative, “a pan-African anthology of 25 documentary films from 16 countries in Africa, on the topic of migration.” And it tells a tale not of folks […]
Simultaneously a gentle portrait of two aging artists and an appreciative look at a bickering but loving couple, Daniel Hymanson’s debut feature, So Late So Soon, benefits from a level of access most documentarians would crave. Having known Chicago-based artists and educators Jackie and Don Seiden since he was a young boy, Hymanson sets himself and his camera inside the Seidens’s multi-storied, eye-catching home. Known locally as the Candyland House, the Barbie House and the Rainbow Cone Home, this Rogers Park residence has been occupied by the Seidens for close to 50 years, its interiors and exteriors closely resembling the […]
The opening minutes of Afterwater, Dane Komljen’s second feature, might fool viewers into thinking they know what they’re in for. At a university, a young man sketches varieties of fishes preserved in jars of glass. A young woman attends class in a lab with microscopes on every table. They don’t speak, their expressions remain impassive. We observe them in static and meticulous compositions, as if they themselves were specimens. When a character reads from a book about limnology, i.e. the study of lakes, and the word “microcosm” cues a shot of Berlin’s central train station bustling with commuters, the cut […]
Erich Kästner’s Fabian: The Story of a Moralist (republished in 2012 by New York Review of Books as Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist), though less known in the West than the contemporaneous Berlin Alexanderplatz or the works of Mann and Rilke, was highly regarded in Germany in the aftermath of World War II for its depiction of life in Berlin just prior to Hitler’s rise to power. That life—as Kästner sees it—is degraded by sexual promiscuity and economic depression, and although Kästner uncritically reflects his protagonist’s tendency to dismiss the escapades of men as humorous and […]
World-premiering in the Forum section (February 13) at this year’s Berlinale, Philip Scheffner’s Europe is a work at once as simple and complex as its title might imply. “Europe” is the name of a bus stop in Europe (specifically in the small French town of Chatellerault) where the main character Zohra, an Algerian citizen, catches a ride from her housing block flat to her job sorting secondhand clothes at an NGO-run warehouse and also to various doctor and physical therapy appointments – her reason for coming to France in the first place. Fortunately, the numerous surgeries and treatments for her debilitating scoliosis […]