Behind me you see the empty bookshelves that my obsession with film has caused. Film teaches me most of the important concepts of life, such as cynicism, beauty, ugliness, subversion of societal norms, and what it is to be a tortured member of humanity. My passion for the medium is an important part of who I am as I stumble through existence in a desperate and frantic search for objective truths.
Pirosmani jolts into motion with a haunting score and an ambiguous painting that offers a silently menacing backdrop for the opening credits. A wonderland of deep focus compositions emerges as we track through living paintings that are saturated with color, texture, and culture. We are presented with surreal imagery and disorienting cuts that tell the story of Georgian primitivist painter Niko Pirosmani …
The texture of wood in desperate need of paint brings us into the impoverished world of Susa, the woodwork scarred with painful memories and neglect offers a wordlessly poignant backdrop as a child breaks a soda bottle to create a handmade kaleidoscope. When the world is bleak one must bring their own beauty into the world. The world of Susa is depressing and without hope as everyone who occupies it is in service to the business of dulling senses as an entire …
Famous Nathan takes us through the history of the world famous Coney Island institution, Nathan’s Famous Frankfurter & Soft Drink Stand, and tells the classic story of the American Dream as Nathan Handwerker transcends his humble beginnings to create a uniquely American institution. Llloyd Handwerker, grandson of Nathan Handwerker, uses archival…
Film is always representative of someone’s version of truth. If taken as a form of cultural anthropology you can strip film of all of the burdens of objective merits that impose expectations that prevent us from losing ourselves in the experience. Film allows us to see the world filtered through someone else’s interpretation of the way things work, and when the creator is fueled by earnestness and passion we will see something unique that…
Based on actual police reports surrounding the events of a series of murders in France in 1978, Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart follows a duplicitous murderer through his dual life as a serial killer and policeman (technically a gendarme). The killer prepares to fulfill his dark fantasies as he travels through…
A man enters the frame, swallowed by the world that quietly oppresses him with impossible decisions as he tries to hold back tears and make sense of what it is to be an adult filled with regret and uncertainty. He yearns for a more fulfilling life, but we are often incapable of escaping the bonds that we willfully…
In Autobiographical Scene Number 6882, Ruben Östlund shows us fragments of a moment when a man tries to impress his friends with an act of stupidity fueled by alcohol and the insecure bravery of youth. We watch a group of friends as one of them prepares to jump off of a bridge to prove his worth amongst the pack, acting on primal impulses as he balances the line between wanting to prove his masculinity and wanting to be talked out of doing something …
Ruben Östlund has the ability to create a realistic scenario and let it play out organically to explore the behaviors that emerge when people are presented with an uncomfortable or unusual event. Rather than using the tricks of filmmaking and storytelling to fabricate hyperrealistic drama, he strips an event down to its basest elements to craft something that more closely approximates a real human experience. In Incident by a Bank he uses a bank robbery to explore the …
A bored TV viewer flips through channels looking for something to incite the senses, but the safe nationalist pap being crooned by some Swedish Pat Boone isn’t going to do it. The unseen television viewer acts as our navigator through the world of Ruben Östlund’s The Guitar Mongoloid and he surfs the sin waves of the analog ether in search of something honest. Our first stop is the rooftop of some apartment complex where the satellite dishes are being attacked and …
Regarded as one of the pillars of Iranian cinema, Kamran Shirdel’s The Night it Rained is a film that illustrates the tenuous nature of truth as we explore an event as it is presented to us by government officials, members of the press, villagers, and railroad workers that offer diametrically opposed accounts of what really happened on one fateful rainy night …