Features

Dreaming of a homeland she is denied, a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, sets a challenge to find an ancient tree that stands as witness to her family’s existence, guided only by inherited memories, a blind man and a two-headed dragon. Sarah Beddington’s first feature film is the result of over a decade of filming and years of editing, in collaboration with her producer Susan Simnett. The story of Fadia and her search is interspersed with footage of bird migration and interviews with Israeli (…)

Our writer Tia attended a screening of Mr Turner as part of the "In conversation with Mike Leigh" series of screenings at the Garden Cinema in London. As I sat in plush comfort at The Garden Cinema, London, surrounded by creative intellectuals sipping wine and discussing with ardour the frequency with which they attended similar events; I couldn’t help but wonder if Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner would comprise a similarly varied cast and artistic scenery. From the off, the guttural growls and (…)

Set in an exquisite hand-crafted world made up of painted backgrounds, miniatures, intricate compositions and theatrical props, A New Old Play may at first strike one as sui generis. While the history of cinema is rich in hand crafted worlds and ingenious practical effects (e.g. the works of Méliès, Tourneur and Zeman), such techniques have historically been dismissed as uncinematic and are usually permitted only in science fiction, horror or children’s cinema. The hostility directed toward (…)

Coco Green and Ola Magdziarek review a couple of cinematic highlights from 2017: Maria Sadowska’s The Art Of Loving, which tells the story of Polish sexologist Michalina Wislocka who fought for her book to be published in the late 1970s, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, in which Daniel Kaluuya’s African American Chris Washington visits his white girlfriend’s parents. A series of bizarre, unsettling events ensues. ‘The Art of Loving’ (Sztuka Kochania), Poland 2016, Dir. Maria Sadowskav Ola (…)

Following a spate of successful shorts - the excellent Magic Alps caught our attention at Clermont-Ferrand - Italian filmmaking duo Andrea Brusa and Marco Scotuzzi, and regular collaborator producer Andrea Italia, are back, this time with their first feature film, which is currently touring festivals. We talk to Andrea Brusa about Le Voci Sole (Lonely Voices): One family’s life goes haywire at the start of the pandemic as the matriarch-now without her steady housekeeper income-encounters (…)

The internet giant Wikipedia just turned 20. We take a look at its background and the future of the online encyclopaedia. Louis Christie reviews Maria Teresa Curzio 2021’s documentary. Now in its third decade, Wikipedia faces some complex questions. What role can robots play in writing and regulating articles? Can automated translation help save indigenous languages? What are the implications for an online encyclopaedia when nine in ten contributors are men? In a world where data is the (…)

In 2011 the USG mine in Empire Nevada closed, effectively creating a ghost town. Caught in the wake of this collapse, Fern (Frances McDormand) has lost her job, her home and is reeling from her husband’s recent passing. Fern becomes part of the disparate and transient “nomad” community. The nomads are usually older, often solitary, Americans living on the road in cars, vans, and mobile homes, following seasonal work and forming short term convoys. “What the nomads are doing is not that (…)

In Chloé Zhao’s 2020 docu-fiction, Frances McDormand plays a woman in her sixties whose financial circumstances force her out of her home and into a life on the road, roaming the country in a camper van in search of temporary work. Nomadland (2020) is a romanticisation of misery. And for that reason, it is going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. In an era where hopelessness is the norm and anxiety about our bleak future is prevalent among most of us, cultural productions such as (…)

International Film Festival Rotterdam had some dazzling pieces in its programme this year, but Sexual Drive seriously stands out in its ambition and creative execution. Japanese director Yoshida Kota’s odd but undeniably endearing film is triumphant in illustrating the intimate link between food and sex, at the sweaty intersection of lust and repressed desires. Sexual Drive is a striking piece in that the plot is three separate vignettes, all involving a seemingly sudden and dramatic (…)

In a lab-like location, Maia Levy, a young Jewish American woman, watches videos portraying life in the occupied West Bank, while verbalizing her thoughts and feelings in real time. Director Alexandrowicz once again explores and denounces the injustices faced by Palestinians living under occupation this time in a clever experimental process whereby he aims to capture the viewer’s emotional and verbal responses to a series of videos - many of them shot by Jerusalem-based human rights NGO (…)