We met up with Mark Chapman, whose film Carmex is screening at this year’s Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival, as part of the Lab selection. Camrex is a cinematic and photographic project exploring the stories of residents at the notorious Camrex House hostel in Sunderland. You were working on a drama in the area, when the idea to film Camrex came about. What sparked your interest ? I was (…) Continue Reading »

Armand Lameloise, réalisateur de Je ne suis pas un cygne et Chabname Zariab, réalisatrice de Au bruit des clochettes, échangent autour des points communs et des différences entre leurs films. Lire la suite »

Another year, another Clermont Fest, wish assorted goodies, freebies, queues and lunch vouchers. Not that they’re needed to sway us. It’s a strong selection, many hits and few misses. We’ll have updates and coverage coming up, but first, we’re (…) Continue Reading »

Homme Less is a feature documentary directed by Thomas Wirthensohn, who follows the life of the charismatic and seemingly successful Mark Reay as he goes about his day-to-day activities in the Biggest of Apples. This is a man who has all the makings of your typical downtown success story, with his stylish wardrobe, clean shave and handsome haircut and face. The documentary is well (…) Continue Reading »

A documentary about an art collector who in the 1920s considered herself destitute with $450,000 in her bank account, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict might sound a bit vapid, but even a passing interest in artists of the 20th century is reason enough to become acquainted with someone who met the best, bought the best and slept with the best. Derided throughout her career for being a New York (…) Continue Reading »

The ironically-titled Entertainment plays hard on the expectation that a cinema audience requires something redeeming in its anti-heroes. The film is an extension of Greg Turkington’s stand-up-as-performance-art project ’Neil Hamburger’, a greasy peddler of puerile one-liners and vile, hateful patter (Turkington co-wrote the screenplay with Tim Heidecker and director Rick Alverson). In (…) Continue Reading »

Between 1999 and the year 2000, Agnès Varda took a digital camera around France filming gleaners – “glaner,” Varda’s voiceover says over shots of the encyclopaedia entry, “to gather after the harvest.” The original gleaners, made famous in rustic paintings of the 19th century, gathered left-over corn; in Varda’s film we meet the specialist gatherers of unwanted potatoes, grapes, furniture, (…) Continue Reading »

The BFI has just re-released ‘Love is the Devil’ on Blu-Ray. First released in 1998, this is a film portraying the destructive relationship between Francis Bacon and his muse and lover, George Dyer. The film culminates in Dyer’s suicide on the eve of one of Bacon’s triumphs, an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. Just as Dyer drops seemingly from nowhere into Francis Bacon’s (…) Continue Reading »

Carlyle plays the titular role of socially inept barber in his entertaining directorial debut, based on the first of a series of novels by Douglas Lindsay. The film kicks off with two seemingly unrelated stories unfolding in Glasgow; awkward and (…) Continue Reading »

This isn’t ’the story’ of how women got the vote. Nor is it a tale of how activists shocked the nation with their efforts to obtain suffrage for women. This is a snippet view of one (fictional) woman’s experience in a militant cell of white suffrage activists, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. But you’d be forgiven for leaving the cinema without realising that these women are (…) Continue Reading »