Monthly Archives: September, 2011

"It is the kind of film, in other words, which wears its weirdness not just proudly, but as its very reason for being—I’m strange, therefore I am. The point here is not the basic ingredients of plot or character, because the characters are all either stereotypes or ideograms of a sort and the plot gossamer-thin, but the variations on plotlessness and characterlessness."

"Sometimes pacing issues drown out the tension that we know is embedded in the product, but it's a work that should not follow our ideas of what movie dramas should be, and how they should make us feel. It's an imperfect labour of desperation, and its flaws only make its realities linger all-the-more abrasively."

Banned Iranian Filmmaker Rasoulof Resists the Law, and Narrative Conventions, in his Feminist Allegory

One more standout item from the Vanguard programme offerings is this low budget Chilean film that garnered favorable reviews (Variety, THR and IndieWIRE) but went home empty handed at this year's Locarno Film Festival. Sebastián Lelio's third feature film (following his Cannes selected Navidad in 2009) puts a damaged landscape from Chile's deadly 2010 quake to extremely good use.

Need cheering up? Then you'll want to avoid Michael Glawogger's unflinching camera eye. Best know for 2005's Workingman’s Death, the Austrian docu filmmaker documents unapologetic ugliness in the human experience -- but could there be more to the matter than this? The Venice Film Festival selected (Horizons section) is the third part in the glo­balization trilogy.