17728 Results for “”
-
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 3: Drive My Car, Bergman Island
“I am not really necessarily interested in performance, per se, but in emotion,” Ryûsuke Hamaguchi told Vadim Rizov back in 2019 when asked how meaningful the work of Jacques Rivette was to him. The answer went on to more or less say “not very,” which is even more incredible now that his new three-hour Murakami adaptation, Drive My Car, has landed, so absorbed with the art and nuances of rehearsal and performance that the French New Waver will inevitably be the default assumed touchstone once again. Indeed, Drive My Car is, along with its 40-page source material (found in Murakami’s […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 13, 2021 -
“People Think the Audience is Stupid”: Sophia Al-Maria on Little Birds, Anaïs Nin and Screenplay Development
Sophia Al-Maria is an artist and (screen)writer, probably most well-known for co-coining the term “Gulf Futurism” and authoring the memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth (2012). Since then, Al-Maria has directed gallery films and worked on numerous unrealized film and TV projects. Al-Maria’s exhibition “Virgin With A Memory” (2014) was a response to Beretta, a self-authored script meant to be her directorial debut. Her short film Beast Type Song (2019) is both an extension of an unmade post-colonial SF project about “solar war” and a hang-out film with a slow, deliberate anger. Al-Maria created and wrote the majority of Little Birds, a six-episode […]
by Brendan Byrne on Jul 13, 2021 -
“What is Our Duty Today as Viewers?”: Abdallah Al-Khatib on Cannes (ACID program)-Selected Documentary Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege)
A movie could be made out of the making of Abdallah Al-Khatib’s heartbreakingly poetic Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege), screening in the ACID program at this year’s Cannes. The film’s title refers to Yarmouk, a district in Damascus that served as the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world from 1957 until its destruction in 2018. In 2013 the Al-Assad regime set up a siege, depriving Yarmouk’s residents of food, medicine and electricity while haphazardly dropping barrel bombs on what it deemed a rebel stronghold. An accidental filmmaker, Al-Khatib—born and bred in Yarmouk until ISIS expelled him in 2015—was a […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jul 12, 2021 -
Summer 2021
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 12, 2021 -
Editor’s Letter
Often when I sit down to write this letter each quarter, I’ll scan through our InDesign file and take note of themes or subject matters that flow from article to article across the issue. Sometimes, a business issue will be represented in multiple stories, or several directors will unexpectedly share the same creative inspiration or working method. This time, as I flipped through the pages of this summer 2021 edition, one thing jumped out: There’s no article tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. A year ago, the digital pages I flicked through remained that way. For the first and only time […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 12, 2021 -
Dial-up Connections: All About Lily Chou-Chou at 20
Twenty years after the release of All About Lily Chou-Chou, I can’t think of a film that better depicts what first drew people to the internet, and certainly none that matches its expressive use of content-type header errors. Director Shunji Iwai evokes the gaps and hesitancy in early internet communication through the depiction of character encoding across the screen. Posts on an online forum devoted to Lily Chou-Chou, a mysterious pop singer, first appear in a mojibake jumble of accented Latin characters. We can hear the clack of an old keyboard and another tap to refresh. The BBS code is […]
by Joanne McNeil on Jul 12, 2021 -
After the Goldrush: NFTS, the Blockchain and Independent Film
“One week, I didn’t know what an NFT was,” says producer and director Adam Benzine. “Seven days later, I had the first film out as an NFT, and seven days after that, CNN wanted me on as an expert on NFTs.” Benzine is referring to a time just a few months ago—March 2021—when his documentary, Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, a 2015 short about the maker of the classic Holocaust documentary Shoah, was announced as the “first Academy Award nominee to be released as an NFT.” Issued on the Rarible NFT trading site, Benzine’s NFTs (they were released in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 12, 2021 -
The Longhand Film
For the past six years, I sought out amateur travel films made by women in the first half of the 20th century, which I collected in an all-archival essay film, Terra Femme. In the process, I watched dozens of hours of footage of everything under the sun: biblical gardens, women doing laundry, ice fields, a tapir, mounds in a cemetery. Occasionally, there is a handwritten intertitle. “Crossing the Equator” reads one, and the filmmaker has added little serif marks to the letters in “Equator.” What follows is footage shot onboard a boat during a line-crossing ceremony, in which Poseidon and […]
by Courtney Stephens on Jul 12, 2021 -
Knowledge Can Be Scary
No North American city is more synonymous with Bronx-born George Romero than Pittsburgh. A trip to the nearby Monroeville Mall (the setting of Romero’s 1978 satirical screed on mass consumerism, Dawn of the Dead) brings you face-to-face with the horror director himself—a bronze bust of Romero’s head greets shoppers outside Dick’s Sporting Goods. When the filmmaker unexpectedly passed away in 2017, he was at work on his newest sequel, Road of the Dead, in Toronto. News of his death from lung cancer prompted online tributes from the film community, not that Romero would have encouraged any public-facing praise: “I had […]
by Erik Luers on Jul 12, 2021 -
Battle Cry: Beth B and Lydia Lunch on Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over
Beth B’s films take you deep into the darkness of the human psyche. With a body of work that includes shorts, features, video installations and episodic television, she creates from a place of pure opposition and resistance, standing up against oppressive systems of control and calling them out with the knowledge that discomfort and provocation are what creates dialogue and generates positive change. B’s films are not easy. B’s new documentary film, Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, may be her most compelling and powerful film yet, as it looks at musician, writer and provocateur Lydia Lunch’s 45-year career […]
by Michelle Handelman on Jul 12, 2021
