2011-2020

  • Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis – Il solengo (2015)

    2011-2020Alessio Rigo de RighiDocumentaryItalyMatteo Zoppis

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    Synopsis:
    Winner of DocLisboa’s 2015 Best International Film Award, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s documentary explores the life of Mario de Marcella, a man who lived alone in a cave for over 60 years, nicknamed “Il Solengo” (the lone boar that’s been cut off from his pack). No one knows for certain why he decided to become a hermit. Still, hunters from his home village (who would occasionally encounter him in the wilderness) offer conflicting reasons about his solitude through elaborate stories. The negative space created by his absence is filled with gorgeous imagery of the Italian countryside.Read More »

  • Campbell X – Stud Life (2012)

    2011-2020ArthouseCampbell XDramaQueer Cinema(s)United Kingdom

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    Stud Life takes the viewer into a slice of life of an urban gay scene where casual sex, and drug taking is not treated as deviant behaviour. Where gender is up for grabs but desire follows very strict rules. Where violence can be part of sex as well as random attacks on the street. JJ and Seb inhabit a world where white queers are familiar with Black street culture and reject the mainstream “G.A.Y” world. This is Stud Life.Read More »

  • Nicolas Provost – L’envahisseur AKA The Invader (2011)

    2011-2020BelgiumDramaNicolas Provost

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    Quote:
    Belgium short filmmaker and visual artist Nicolas Provost brings his compelling and assured 2011 debut The Invader (L’envahisseur) to the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Acting as a refreshingly unbiased examination of illegal immigration and asylum seekers, Provost’s film is a surreal and demanding drama build around a sublime central performance by Issaka Sawadogo.Read More »

  • Cecile B. Evans – Hyperlinks or it didn’t happen (2014)

    2011-2020Cecile B. EvansExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Hyperlinks or it Didn’t Happen questions the identity of the mediated subject. “PHIL,” a “bad copy” of recently deceased actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, narrates a procession of bodies generated or augmented by computers. The most alluring among them is the Invisible Woman, who—like the anti-hero of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man—is invisible not because of magic but because she is unseen. She is a metaphor for all the women in the film: Yowane Haku, the synthesized, holographic pop star developed in Japan; AGNES, the bot that Evans was recently commissioned to embed in the Serpentine Galleries’ website; the Computer Girls, programmers in the 1960s; and Evans herself—all of them under-recognized workers who maintain the system that oppresses them.Read More »

  • Douglas McGrath – Becoming Mike Nichols (2016)

    USA2011-2020DocumentaryDouglas McGrath

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    Anyone who ever spent any time alone with Mike Nichols will tell you he was one of the most charming men who ever lived. I had that experience once, long ago, over a four-hour lunch. Thanks to HBO’s Becoming Mike Nichols, a splendid new documentary debuting on Monday night, everyone can have their own tête-a-tête. Most of this fine film is drawn from an extended conversation between Nichols and his good friend, theater director Jack O’Brien. Their talk took place in an empty – and then filled – Golden Theater, the Broadway venue where Nichols’ fame began, with An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May in 1960. The film is the product of a chance encounter between O’Brien and the writer Alex Witchel at a Manhattan dinner party in 2014. O’Brien told Witchel the celebrated director was looking frail and was never going to write a memoir. Wouldn’t it be great to capture his best memories before he was gone? Witchel repeated the idea to her husband, writer Frank Rich, who also happens to be an HBO executive. His bosses embraced the idea. O’Brien agreed to interview, Douglas McGrath was hired to direct, and within weeks they were off to the Golden. Four months later, Nichols died of a heart attack aged83. It was Nichols’ idea to do at least part of the interview in front of a live audience, and that makes his performance much more vivid than in any of his other filmed interviews.Read More »

  • Ross Sutherland – Stand by for Tape Back-up (2015)

    2011-2020DocumentaryExperimentalRoss SutherlandUnited Kingdom

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    FROM THE GUARDIAN:

    It’s extraordinary how potent cheap videotape is. That’s one of the lessons borne out by Standby for Tape Back-Up, a witty, resourceful and emotionally intense show by the 35-year-old performance poet Ross Sutherland. The stage is bare but for a chair, a TV and a wheezing VCR machine. Looking like a lone Reservoir Dog in his black tie and white shirt, Sutherland paces the stage brandishing a remote control, zipping back and forth through the images projected on the wall behind him.Read More »

  • Kent Jones – Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015)

    2011-2020DocumentaryFranceKent Jones

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    From theguardian.com
    In 1962, director François Truffaut conducted a series of in-depth interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, published in a lavishly illustrated book, which became something of a film-makers’ bible. Truffaut’s aim was to reclaim Hitchcock as an artist – an “auteur” rather than just an entertainer. Kent Jones’s documentary, which draws on audio tapes of those conversations along with new interviews with Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson et al, is no less evangelising, arguing that Truffaut’s book should be viewed and valued on a par with his movies. The documentary certainly makes for fascinating viewing; although most cineastes will already know the source text inside out, it’s great to hear audio of these exchanges, and the new interviews that make up the bulk of the film are entertaining, erudite, and (most importantly) refreshingly enthusiastic.Read More »

  • Pablo Chavarría Gutiérrez – Alexfilm (2015)

    2011-2020ArthousePablo Chavarría GutiérrezPortugal

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    A lovingly framed day-in-the-life portrait of a man waiting for an important event that never comes. Marked by a light touch and emphasizing openness over conventional, linear narrative, biologist-turned-filmmaker Pablo Chavarria Gutiérrez documents the rhythms of a man awaiting an important event that never comes. As he cooks breakfast, naps, paints, tries on sunglasses, and wanders through different rooms in his home, Chavarria Guitérrez lovingly frames every action in beautiful natural light, allowing each moment to flow to the next while maintaining its own transcendent essence.Read More »

  • Jonas Carpignano – Mediterranea (2015)

    2011-2020DramaItalyJonas Carpignano

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    Quote:
    Jacques Audiard’s decent Dheepan may have won the top prize at Cannes, but another drama about the experience of illegal immigrants in Europe deserves its fair share of the limelight. Screened in the festival’s Critics’ Week, Jonas Carpignano’s debut feature Mediterranea follows a Burkina Faso man as he takes a treacherous land and sea journey, then gets a foothold in Calabria, Italy. With an intimate naturalism that at times evokes a tag-along documentary, Carpignano’s matter-of-fact approach, leavened with the humor of engaging side characters, produces the ring of truth without strain.Read More »

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