For over 30 years the globetrotting Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann has been wowing audiences the world over. Born in Peru to Polish Jewish parents, Honigmann’s been honored with retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and also at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where her latest work of cinematic nonfiction Buddy closed this year’s Doc Fortnight. A heart-soaring tearjerker, the doc is an exquisite portrait of the lives of six guide dogs and their owners. But because it’s a Heddy Honigmann film it inevitably transforms into a philosophical meditation — in this case, an exploration of the love affair […]

An initiative of the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is an event that connects Qatari and international directors who are receiving different stages of DFI-funded support with industry delegates from across the spectrum of the film world and master filmmakers who meet with emerging talents and engage in public conversations. The 5th edition took place between March 15th and 20th, 2019. Fresh off the heels of the Oscar campaign for Cold War, Pawel Pawlikowski has been enjoying a sustained stay in the international spotlight since his 2015 film Ida became an award-winning critics’ favourite. While tonally distinct from one another, both […]

One of the great independent film discoveries of SXSW 2019 is a picture that is also one of the boldest artistic statements of year, Grace Glowicki’s Tito. The Canadian actor and director is known to Filmmaker readers as the female lead of 2016 25 New Face Ben Petrie’s Her Friend Adam, which I dubbed in these pages “a squirmy treatise on sexual insecurity and relationship oneupmanship.” Glowicki’s character’s response to her partner’s icky jealousy, I wrote, is one of “unrivaled power and blistering sexual humiliation, capped off by a loudly feigned orgasm that will erase in viewers any memory of […]

Near the end of Yann Gonzalez’s queer neo-giallo intoxicant Knife + Heart, gay porn producer and director Anne (Vanessa Paradis) finds herself in a delapidated porno theatre in 1970s Paris, watching her own work from the past projected onto the screen. The elusive murderer terrorizing the set of her newest film is also transfixed by the porn being projected. Anne’s history as creator of fantasies and the traumatic history of the masked killer who’s been knocking off her cast and crew converge, film and reality melt into one another. They’re both frozen in their tracks in the cat and mouse […]

Todd Douglas Miller’s Apollo 11, which premiered at this year’s Sundance, originated from the simple idea of using archival footage to revisit, in time for its 50th anniversary, the first moon landing. For those who’ve grown up watching the same images trotted out over and over—Neil Armstrong bouncing on the moon, a burning ring of fire propelling itself backwards toward Earth as Apollo leaves the planet—the premise seems tedious and redundant, an ossified staple of Baby Boomer montages regularly intercut alongside clips of Woodstock and the Vietnam War, now freshly recharged by nationalistic rumblings about a space force. And as […]

No one expected Claire Denis to soften with age. At 72, the French auteur has been a daring and unpredictable force in cinema for three decades now. After delivering last year’s talky romantic comedy Let the Sunshine In, which offered the unexpected sight of Gérard Depardieu as a lovesick psychic, Denis has returned with a certified leap into the unknown.  High Life is the filmmaker’s first English-language film, her first science fiction foray, and her first featuring eye-popping CGI. Boasting an international cast that includes Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth and André Benjamin, and set to be released by […]

After his road movie Kaili Blues became an international success, writer and director Bi Gan turned to the film noir genre for his follow up, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The layered, dreamlike plot follows Luo Hongwu (played by Huang Jue) as he returns to his hometown, looking into the past for clues about what happened to Wildcat (Lee Hong), a lost love he last saw more than a decade ago.  Set in the bars, alleys and seedy hotels of Gan’s home province, the film is divided into two parts. Elliptical scenes and a fractured timeline give the first half […]

The latest film from writer and director Jia Zhangke adds new insights to his previous titles like Still Life and A Touch of Sin. Again starring his wife Zhao Tao, Ash Is Purest White follows two outsiders for some twenty years as their fortunes flow and ebb in China’s new economy. Set partly in a gritty coal-mining town and partly on the Yangtze River at the moment when the then-under-contruction Three Gorges Dam was about to forever change the landscape, the film resembles the structure of Mountains May Depart in its use of three time periods and chapters. But, as Jia explains, what starts […]

A welcome sight on the SXSW feature list is a new film from Hilary Brougher, who has been making inventive, emotionally acute independent film across three decades now, always working in some degree of low to ultra-low budget. Her debut, Sticky Fingers of Time, was lo-fi sci-fi with a time-travel hook that might remind you of Looper but with a feminist slant. Stephanie Daley, starring Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn, followed in 2006, a mystery both legal and existential about an unwanted pregnancy. And now there’s South Mountain, which finds Brougher working with her smallest budget yet but with a […]