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Veteran cinematographer Sandor Kardos’ astonishing adaptation of the classic Rainer Maria Rilke short story is a bold innovation in cinematic narrative technique. Commandeering the technology used in horse racing to document the photo finish, the film resembles a carousel of hall-of-mirrors images, distorted and bleeding into one another. An enigmatic stranger comes to work as [...]
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It’s been a difficult year and in this International Shorts Panorama filmmakers depict our global nervous state in unexpected ways. French film Higher is about people who substitute themselves with bolster in places they don’t want to be anymore and escape to somewhere better. In BEEP (United Arab Emirates), Mr K’s experience of life has [...]
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Presented in partnership with Together for Peace with a discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle for peace. Budrus is an award-winning documentary about a Palestinian community organizer, Ayed Morrar, who unites local Fatah and Hamas members along with Israeli supporters in an unarmed movement to save his village of Budrus from destruction by Israel’s Separation Barrier. [...]
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Continuing the creative boom of the recent Romanian ‘new wave’, Adrian Sitaru’s Best Intentions is a beautifully observed and understated drama of universally recognisable family neuroses. When thirty-something Alex’s mother is hospitalized with a stroke, the caring son’s life gets off track. At the hospital he finds himself in a burlesque kind of human zoo [...]
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Love is a deeply moving story of fractured family life under a repressive political regime, also a deft artistic reaction to political censorship. Janos has been imprisoned on a trumped-up charge and his wife Luca tends his bedridden mother, comforting her by pretending that Janos is away pursuing a career as a Hollywood director. The [...]
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Take Shelter is a riveting blend of domestic drama and supernatural thriller featuring an outstanding central performance by Michael Shannon, rapidly emerging as one of the best America actors of his generation. In his second collaboration with director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories), Shannon plays Curtis, a Midwestern husband and father who begins having terrifying dreams [...]
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Toomelah is a tough and uncompromising portrait of a remote Aboriginal community featuring non-professional actors and a mesmerising central performance by 10-year-old Daniel Conners. Daniel yearns to be a gangster like the male role models in his life. Skipping school, getting into fights and running drugs for Linden, the main dealer in town, Daniel is [...]
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Heat Wave is a simmering drama of intersecting lives all taking place one sweltering afternoon somewhere on the edge of Marseilles, France. Following overlapping and repeating timelines like a subtler version of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the narrative is cleverly constructed to enlighten the differing perspectives of its characters. Two teenaged cousins Stéphane and Luigi, [...]
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Convento is a poetic documentary, introducing an eccentric family of Dutch artists who live in a converted 400-year-old Portuguese Monastery, Sao Francisco. Christiaan Zwanikken is a kinetic artist who reanimates skeletal parts and deceased wildlife with servomotors and robotics. His parents, ex-ballet dancer Geraldine and her late husband Kees, a successful photographer, came to Portugal [...]
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A claustrophobic and disturbing documentary, brilliantly executed (excuse the morbid pun) and shot entirely in a motel room on the US/Mexican border. El Sicario Room 164 is a feature length conversation with a masked Juarez hit man: he has killed hundreds of people, is an expert in torture and kidnapping, and even received some training [...]
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