Pedro Fernández

Anybody wanting any lessons on how to be socially conscious without being too obviously tendentious in portraying a regional struggle in film ought to take notes, because in his full-length debut, The Colors of the Mountain, Colombian filmmaker Carlos César Arbeláez manages just that—an accomplishment made only the more astonishing by the fact that in the film Arbeláez also engages another, equally perilous narrative archetype: the loss of innocence in the face of trauma.

"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."

Yet no matter what the standard one adopts—whether Tarkovskian film epic, or Buñuel-esque socio-politico-religious farce, or Kubrickian (non)sexual odyssey, or authentically hysterical onanistic romp (admittedly some of these are new banners, hung especially for it)—Love Exposure seems hell-bent on being difficult.

Sono Paints a Portrait of a Love so Outrageous that it can only ever be Realized in Complete Madness.

"The Sound of Insects is a very taxing aesthetic experience, and one which does not appear tax with an eye to rewarding the viewer in the end, but which seems content merely to tax and toss out a few nice images at intervals. As an adaptation of a novel which was itself an adaptation of a diary, it almost provides a template of what not to do, namely, to let the narration overwhelm the visual aspect of the work, which is finally the raison d’être of cinema."