CPH:DOX, the boundary-busting Copenhagen non-fiction film festival that takes place each March, announced today that its upcoming 2020 edition will be a digital one. With indoor events of over 100 people banned by the Danish government, the festival is quickly scrambling to present a portion of its program online. Here’s the press release: In the light of the global crisis related to COVID19, and following the latest announcement from the Danish Government on March 11, 8.30PM further restricting public gatherings, CPH:DOX has decided to roll out its 2020 edition in a digital version. Sadly, this means that the planned +700 […]
While release dates are often determined months in advance for a slew of reasons solely related to a film’s individual success, it’s striking to see how some can be placed in indirect conversation with one another. I recently revisited Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s debut feature Swallow just a few days after taking in Leigh Whannell’s feminist blockbuster adaptation of The Invisible Man. Both are about women in emotionally abusive relationships that have grown increasingly difficult to break free from. To complicate matters, each are pregnant with their lover’s child, and that the pregnancy is carried out to term is of utmost importance to […]
Bacurau is the name of an angry night bird that exists in many different parts of Brazil, but that is only called bacurau in the Brazilian Northeast. Bacurau, the latest film by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles—which gets a US release this weekend—uses the motif of the night bird to tell the story of a small village in the Brazilian Northeast that is facing imminent erasure, targeted by international hunting tourists that have teamed up with domestic predators. The film reprocesses motifs from Hollywood genre movies and Italian westerns in the landscape of the sertão, the drylands of formal […]
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 […]
Kelly Reichardt describes her films as being “open.” She does not necessarily mean they are open to your interpretation. She means they are open or not to your engagement. First Cow co-star Orion Lee compared it to public speaking: If you yell at your audience they have no choice but to listen; if you project your voice midway to them they do, which is possibly more effective. In First Cow, Reichardt relays, delicately, the antics of a clumsy cook, Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro), and his friend King Lu (Lee). Cookie finds Lu squat-naked in brush eluding vengeance from a gang […]
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 […]
“We have a solution to Hollywood’s ‘development hell’ which I am pleased to share with everyone.” This was how Dallas Sonnier, or at least his marketing department, announced the introduction of “the original audiostate,” the neologism Cinestate (Sonnier’s Dallas-based indie production company) coined to avoid the dread word “podcast.” Through marrying the “grandiosity of Hollywood films with the intimacy of audio,” the audiostate is meant to transform that most beloved of objects, the unproduced screenplay, into multi-platform pitchable content. Since Sonnier’s 2017 statement, only one audiostate has been produced: the same year’s The Narrow Caves, a story of eldritch horror, […]
Because of the nature of the business, a cinematographer often has a more eclectic body of work than an actor or a director, and it is not unusual to see their work span continents. Even by these standards, however, Diego García’s filmography is quite impressive: His last four credits are Carlos Reygadas’s Our Time, Gabriel Mascaro’s Divine Love, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s short film Nimic—four films produced in four different countries by directors with four different mother tongues. It isn’t surprising, then, to hear that García is particularly attentive to a director’s body of […]
General audiences most likely recognize special effects coordinator and technician Jeremy Hays from his memorable moment in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, where he informs Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Rick Dalton, that they can’t cool the heat on his flamethrower because, well, it’s a flamethrower. Hays is a veteran who has worked in practical and special effects for over 25 years, frequently employing his skills on big-budget comedies. Last year, he contributed to some of the biggest films of the year: Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Dolemite Is My Name and Booksmart. Most recently, Hays was the special effects […]