When we enter a museum and engage with its objects, we might not think about the people responsible for making those experiences available to us. Behind the public walls of the museum, conservators, preservationists and historians work tirelessly to restore and preserve the artefacts that we as visitors ponder over. These undertakings are celebrated, explored and reflected upon in Argentine-British artist Jessica Sarah Rinland’s latest film, Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another. It’s an investigation that amplifies the tactile qualities of the many processes involved in repairing objects, fabricating copies and ensuring their long-term saving as historical records, presenting actions […]
Speaking to Tsai Ming-liang is itself like a Tsai scene. On the day of my interview with the Taiwanese director, the whole of Potsdamer Platz—the main hub for the Berlinale—feels emptied out of its inhabitants. His new film Days has premiered in the competition late into the festival, after the industry presence has largely packed up and flown out. By this point, the grand space of the Berlinale Palast in midday is like a shopping mall in a zombie movie, abandoned to a splintered cadre of bodies shuffling under an eternity’s worth of exhaustion and weariness. The revolving lights in […]
Writer and director Diao Yinan’s follow-up to the award-winning Black Coal, Thin Ice is The Wild Goose Lake, a film noir set in a southern China of humid tenements and steamy resorts. (Although the film’s location is left unnamed, Yinan shot in Wuhan, ground zero for COVID-19, to make use of the lakes in the area.) Yinan based his script on memories, such as the train station that opens the movie, and photographs, like a black-and-white “swim companion” lounging on a boat — imaged he uses to explore genre characters and situations. Double-crossed on a job, crook Zhou Zenong (Hu […]
Harkening back to Golden Age romantic comedies while placing its young characters in of-the-moment relationship scenarios, Straight Up, the feature debut of director, writer and actor James Sweeney, opens in theaters today from Strand Releasing. Sweeney plays Todd, a gay man and software developer questioning his sexuality who falls romantically (and perhaps just platonically) with an aspiring actress played by Katie Findlay. Shot in eye-popping colors within a 4:3 frame, and with sharp dialogue delivered rat-a-tat-tat, Straight Up, which premiered at last year’s Frameline Film Festival, subverts the tensions traditionally found in romantic comedies in service to a more inclusive […]
When John Sayles wrote and directed Matewan in 1987, he was already a hero to those of us following American independent film, both for his witty, energetic genre screenplays (Piranha, The Howling, Battle Beyond the Stars) and for his self-financed directorial efforts (Return of the Secaucus Seven, Lianna, The Brother From Another Planet). His movies as writer-director, which also included a detour into studio filmmaking with the exquisite coming of age drama Baby It’s You, were major inspirations for an entire generation of aspiring filmmakers, because they gave us a high standard of excellence to reach for yet also seemed […]
The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez is a six-part Netflix docu-series from Brian Knappenberger (Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press) that delves into one of the most horrific crimes to hit Los Angeles headlines in recent years — the death of eight-year-old Gabriel Fernandez at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend after years of physical torture and emotional abuse. Taking as its starting point the courtroom drama of death penalty defendant Isauro Aguirre (after one too many outbursts from Gabriel’s mom Pearl Fernandez the accused murderers are ultimately tried separately), the series soon becomes something else entirely — a […]
Taking place on Friday, February 28th in Amsterdam (or via a live stream near you), “Blue Artichoke Films Presents: Adventures In Intimacy” will be, according to the event’s press release, “a celebration of sex-positive, p*rn-positive, queer-friendly culture as explored by p*rn performers, scientists, and sex educators in their own work.” Organized by the feminist force behind Blue Artichoke Films (which will simultaneously celebrate its platform launch) Jennifer Lyon Bell, the evening’s quartet of speakers, including the host herself, are an international array of notable thinkers on the subject of erotica in cinema. The Netherlands Ellen Laan, a sexologist and “pleasure […]
Included in the 2010 edition of 25 New Faces of Independent Film, director Rashaad Ernesto Green has been sitting with his intricate story of love had and love lost, Premature, for quite a while now. The original short film, made while Green was a film student at NYU Tisch, was described in his 25 New Face profile as being “classically built,” telling the story of a “teenager who, having found no support for her pregnancy from either her disaffected family and brutal community, resorts to drastic, near-tragic measures to free herself of responsibility.” Green’s leading lady in the short, his […]
Exquisitely grueling yet fiercely humane, Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole, an astounding Russian period drama, cements the artistically mature director as a prodigy of international cinema moving towards an auspicious career. At age 28, Balagov has had his first two features premiered at Cannes with both earning prizes in the Un Certain Regard section. Situated in 1945 Leningrad among the ashes of World War II, Beanpole, which was also shortlisted for the Best International Film Academy Award, explores the harsh aftermath of the conflict through the tortured friendship between Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) and Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), two women who served in the […]
Kazuo Hara has always aligned himself with the political left, but it was nevertheless surprising to hear about his latest film, Reiwa Uprising, which depicts the ascent of Japan’s newest left-wing political party, Reiwa Shinsengumi, from grassroots agitators to seated parliamentarians during the 2019 election. It is not unusual for Hara, best known for Extreme Private Eros (1974) and The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987), to take almost a decade or even longer between films, yet Reiwa Uprising follows Sennan Asbestos Disaster by just two years. That expedited time to completion was largely out of necessity: Reiwa Shinsengumi was […]