Ken Loach returns to Cannes after being a tad hasty announcing his retirement from feature films after the premiere of his last film to play at Cannes: Jimmy’s Hall. I, Daniel Blake is a story that demands to brought to the attention of the wider world, a tale of injustice, snide cynical bureaucratic manslaughter …
Audiences coming to Alain Guiraudie’s Cannes Competition entry Rester Vertical after his break out hit Stranger By the Lake (which played in the Un Certain Regard sidebar in 2013 and won best film of the section) are likely to be puzzled, perplexed and possibly peeved; long time supporters will likely …
Following the careers of two dancers in the National Cuban Ballet among the presence of the now-blind Alicia Alonso, a legendary Cuban prima ballerina assoluta, Horizons matches its subjects in sheer grace and determination. As a documentary, it exceeds the task of documenting the women it follows, feeling …
After the Coen Brother’s opened the Berlinale in February with Hail, Caesar! A film that gilded the Lilly over 1950 Hollywood and the meandering topics that surrounded that milieu; now it’s Woody Allen’s turn with Café Society, his mediocre tale of love set among the burgeoning Hollywood studio system of the 1930s.
Peterson’s coming-of-age documentary chronicles six years in the life of Zachariah Doomadgee, an aboriginal growing up in Sydney, far away from his peoples land claim and culture. His father teaches him about his people, in an effort to maintain the culture, but Zach feels always split between the…
Goetschel’s fascinating documentary takes viewers behind closed doors and into the past of a secret Soviet city, known as City 40, which was built for the purposes of off-the-grid nuclear testing and armament. Central to City 40 is a Nuclear Plant named Mayak, built in the mid-1940s soon after the…
E J-yong’s latest film addresses quite possibly every other marginalised community/identity and taboo yet pressing social issues that exist in contemporary South Korea. He accesses these identities and issues through a frank portrait of a woman in her mid-sixties, So-yeong, who is a prostitute; the only …
In the 1980s, Director Livia Ungur was a young child during communist rule in Romania where most of the citizens were exposed to very little western fare. One of the shows that did make it there was the long running American television soap opera called Dallas. Starring Patrick Duffy, Linda Grey, Larry Hagman and others, the show captivated its audiences with its allure of glamour, intrigue, and corruption…
Hong Kong International Film Festival’s omnibus ‘Beautiful’ series consists of four short films directed by four different filmmakers. This year’s series was helmed by (following the order of their films’ appearances) Nakata Hideo, Alec Su, Stanley Kwan, and Jia Zhangke. As with any omnibus film, the entire work runs the risk of being inconsistent …
This cluster of films significantly tugs at the fence that separates documentary and fiction as a way to re/present stories, experiences, and perspectives. Such stories, experiences, and perspectives range from the very personal, even familial, to the very public and sociopolitical. This group of films also varies in the degree to which each one blends …