By Ryan Akler-Bishop
In our conversation, we discuss the cruelty of Toronto architecture, how archival research informs Bohdanowicz’s filmmaking practice, her cinema as a personal art journal, tensions between structured and improvisational shoots, the influence of samurai movies, and her forthcoming projects.
by Claudia Siefen-Leitich
Within his extensive film work, director Im Kwon-taek (born 1934 in Gwangju, South Korea) is concerned with national consciousness and thus with the history of his country. From cultural identity and the class differences associated with it, through to the divided roles of men and women: Im quickly takes the side of the women in order to find his way back to the history of his country through individual fates. The stories he has told since then cannot be imagined, let alone understood, without the basis of Confucianism. Confucius’ teachings are based on the so-called basic virtues such as humanity, a sense of morality and a sense of social justice.
by Nicholas Vroman
Mexican director Gabriela Domínguez Ruvalcaba’s Formas de atravesar un territorio begins with a sly evocation of an ethnographic study of a traditional Tsotsil shepherding family – Don?a Sebastiana and her four daughters – living and working in the hills near San Cristobal de las Casas. Like her previous opus, La danza del hipocampo (2014), the film builds like a Miguel Littin-esqe exploration of place, history, memory, indigenous being in the modern landscape, ways of seeing and the filmmaker’s very place and relation to this world she is documenting.
By Libertad Gills
I sat down with filmmaker Courtney Stephens during a hot day at the Locarno Film Festival, where her recent film Invention, made in collaboration with Callie Hernandez, who plays the protagonist, has just premiered. Invention is an indie drama/comedy/science fiction about a young woman who loses her father. As she mourns, she speaks to the people who knew him and discovers an electromagnetic healing machine that he created and which she has inherited. She must decide how much she wants to allow herself to open up to his world of invention and belief.
By Nicholas Vroman
Negu Hurbilak (Spain, 2023) opens with an epigram from the song of the same name by Mikel Laboa and Xavier Lete. Laboa and Lete were leaders in the 1960s cultural and political movement to gain political autonomy, if not independence from Spain – and to reclaim Euskara (the Basque language) as the legitimate idiom and voice of the Basque people. Under the aegis of Ez Dok Hamairu, along with along with musicians Benito Lertxundi, Joxean Artze, Jose Angel Irigarai, Lourdes Iriondo and other artists and cultural workers, they made music and produced events that flew in the face of Franco’s cultural repression, which effectively outlawed the use of Euskara in official, public and even, written discourse.
By Rushnan Jaleel
In Phil Solomon’s The Snowman (1995), water-logged home movies culled from an unknown archive are rephotographed to enhance their craquelure. The film evokes Wallace Steven’s eponymous poem and serves as a kaddish (a prayer of mourning) for the artist’s father. This would mark the second time that Solomon would memorialise a loved one through his work, with the first being Remains to be Seen (1998), which featured images of his mother on her deathbed. However there are almost no references to Solomon’s father (1) in The Snowman; he is buried in the emulsion of the film strip, under layers of corrugated memories.
by Claudia Siefen-Leitich
If you want to get a picture of Germany, it is important to note that this country is made up of 16 constituent states. Well, if you start from the current political situation: The German Empire at that time is something you can read about and appropriate historically, but back to a Germany of 16 federal states. Not only today does this mean a concert of sounds and a mixture of 16 dialects, cultures and temperaments, which some people may not realise if they only look at Germany from the outside. Or on a map.
By Joe Miller
Where the Devil Roams. This was their third film to appear at the Telluride Horror Show, and their seventh feature overall as a family—they’ve been making movies since their youngest, Zelda, was six years old. And while their latest feature is easily the most avant-garde and ambitious of the bunch, their earlier films, and especially their other horror films—Hellbender (2021) and The Deeper You Dig (2019)—are plenty edgy in their storytelling and aggressively cinematic, with moments that are positively kaleidoscopic.
Gabrielle Garcia Steib interviewed to Tania Romero and Karly Gaitan Morales about the recuperation of societal memory and cinema history of Nicaragua. “Cinema and photography are key to understanding the past and the present of the country”.
by Nicholas Vroman
Fauna, second feature film by Pau Faus, opens with opening shots of an Arcadian landscape, a few classic nature doc scenes – a heron, some ducks – then on to a shot of tree branches, dappled by sunlight. Cut to Valerio, a shepherd and his dog Brisa taking a break in a sylvan glade. The sound of a bleating lamb breaks the moment.
Directors:
Mónica Delgado Ch.
José Sarmiento Hinojosa
ISSN 2311-7451
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