Features

Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini opens in the dark: the Italian director is interviewed in French, in sunglasses, in a smoky room, in 1975, about Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is the last film he will make. Pier Paolo Pasolini appears suave and patient with the questions (‘Sex is political?’ ‘Naturalmente’). His face is deeply serious, furrowed, and unsmiling, with just a ripple of knowingness running across his chiselled jaw. Willem Dafoe, brilliantly cast in the title role, is a perfect (…)

Earlier this month, filmmaker and academic Winnie M. Li and psychologist Dr. Nina Burrows presented Clear Lines: ‘the first ever festival dedicated to talking about sexual assault and consent through the arts and discussion’. This programme included a double bill of films (Brave Miss World and The Unspeakable Crime: Rape) in which rape survivors tell their stories. If we understand these two films as valuable testimonies and educational resources it is useful to consider their two very (…)

Mark Brown is a screenwriter and founding member of Braine Hownd Films. The P.O.C. teaser of his film Corinthian is currently on the festival circuit, screening at the Reading Fringe Film Festival this week. Mark is also a playwright and has had his plays performed at theatres such as The Old Red Lion, The Kings Head and the Soho Theatre in London. How as the film company set up? Braine Hownd Films was set up in 2006 by Phil Haine and myself when we made our first film The Empty Chair. (…)

This is one for the francophones amongst you.... Calling La Ligne de Couleur a documentary about the French “minority” experience would be reductive. It is this and much more. It is also a quietly moving and intimate collection of personal stories, “filmed letters” as director Laurence Petit-Jouvet calls them, that their authors read out loud. They are 11 French citizens, French born and bred, men and women, of various ethnic origins, displaying a palette of skin tones. Petit-Jouvet films (…)

Young children are often very receptive to new ideas. In 1987 when my favourite toy was adapted into a Hollywood movie ’Masters of The Universe’ I lapped it up, even though the film played fast and loose with the He-Man story so familiar to me from the cartoons, tapes and books I made my mum buy me along with all those brightly coloured, muscly figurines. The hyper-consumerist 1980s was a strange place anyway, so I was oblivious to the fact that in watching Masters of the Universe I was (…)

The film opens on an interview with Elliott, his voice characteristically unassuming, sincere and generous in spirit. "I’m the wrong kind of person," he says, "to be really big and famous." However, throughout we learn he did enjoy a certain amount of fame; even describing his incongruous appearance at the 1998 Academy Awards as fun for the day, a kick. And yet, friends talk of how Elliott fled local acclaim in Portland for relative obscurity in New York. According to one former (…)

‘The Exhibitionists’ is a collection of films about collections. The series brings together four cinematic portraits of European museums; the Kunsthistorisches museum in Vienna, the National Gallery in London, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and The Hermitage in St Petersberg. Each film explores a treasure trove of paintings, trinkets and costumes from various princely collections. These gilded objects are fetishised, protected and adored; their value to the nation-state is taken to be implicit. (…)

Chris Rock gives an updated twist to the boy-meets-girl story here, playing Andre Allen, a not-so-funny-anymore-since-getting-sober comedian, as he promotes his first serious film ’Uprize’ on its opening night to a disinterested public. Gaining attention for a movie about the largest slave uprising in the New World is almost impossible and it’s clear from Andre’s promotional rounds that no one cares about serious black films, unless they’re blaming each other for their own oppression (or (…)

A campaign to save a legendary nightclub is the theme of two separate documentaries depicting the fight to save community and history from their demolition by property developers. The Starlite in Brooklyn, New York is the subject of Kate Kunath and Sasha Wortzel’s We Came To Sweat while the ongoing fight to Save the Tavern (specifically the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in South London) is the impetus behind Tim Brunsden’s film of that name. Up to a point the films have a similar structure, first (…)

The team’s films to watch - Still Alice, Hyena, Dream Catcher