La mala verdad (2011)

La mala verdad (2011)

Director: Miguel Angel Rocca
Country: Argentina
Runtime:94 min


Bárbara (Ailén Guerrero) is ten years old and lives with her mother, Laura (Analía Couceyro), and her grandpa, Ernesto (Alberto de Mendoza). She spends her days going to school choir practice for the end of the year recital and planning her escape with her friend Matías, eight years old, an irresistible liar and petty thief. Bárbaras behavior at school; her sad looks; the recurrent incident of her peeing on herself when witnessing a violent scene; and her drawings, where she pencils a girl who loses her face gradually; all that makes Sara (Malena Solda), the educational psychologist, and her teacher suspicious. The tension and distance among her family members are evident. Laura has a submissive attitude towards her father and Rodolfo (Carlos Belloso), her boyfriend, who is unemployed and full of debts that he tries to pay off with money from Ernestos bookshop. Bárbara and Matías spend their days planning a crazy escape. The idea is to make a raft on which they will sail out to see towards a nearby island. She also keeps in her old toys trunk the back cover of books, looking for her father who she never met. She only knows he was a writer. Her conversations with Sara begin to reveal her fears and the darkness behind this girls look.

De bon matin (2011)

De bon matin (2011)

Director: Jean-Marc Moutout
Country: France | Belgium
Runtime:90 min





Monday morning. Paul Wertret, 50, heads off to his job as a manager at the International Credit and Trade Bank. He arrives at 8 o'clock on the dot, as usual. He enters a meeting room, takes out a gun and kills two of his bosses. Then he locks himself in his office. As he waits for the inevitable police assault, this ordinary man looks back over his life and the events that led him to commit such an act.

Wilaya (2012)

Wilaya (2012)

Director: Pedro Pérez Rosado
Country: Spain
Runtime: 97 minutes

 Centered around a family of Spanish-speaking Sahrawi – a stateless, mixed ethnic population inhabiting the deserts of Southwest Algeria – this minimalist, well-shot effort from Pedro Perez Rosado (Salt Water) should continue its fest run after landing the Best Actress award at Abu Dhabi (where it was known as Tears of Sand). Theatrical pickups outside Spain are less certain.
As the opening title cards explain, Wilaya of Smara is a refugee settlement of displaced persons who, following the Spanish decolonization of Mauritania and Morocco, settled in large numbers (estimated at up to 400,000) in the Western Saharan desert. Caught in political limbo (an independence movement is still seeking statehood) and largely self-sufficient, they survive under harsh tribal conditions and remain more or less cut off from the outside world.
Wilaya follows the story of Fatimetu (Nadhira Mohamed), the daughter of Sahrawi parents sent to live with a foster family in Valencia while her handicapped sister, Hayat (Memona Mohamed), and traditionalist brother, Jatri (Mohamed Moulud), remained behind in the refugee camp. Following her mother’s death and a break-up with her Spanish boyfriend, she returns home for the first time in years, expecting to remain only temporarily until she’s slowly – very slowly – swept in by local ties.
Featuring terrific widescreen cinematography by Miguel Morales (Solitary Fragments) and a captivating score by Sahwari singer Aziza Brahim (who plays a neighboring widowed mother), the film boasts enough technical prowess to capture the muted, semi-nomadic lifestyle of its characters.

The Lightning Testimonies(2007)

The Lightning Testimonies(2007)

Director: Amar Kanwar
Country:India
Runtime:113 min

 Why is one image different from the other? Why does an image seem to contain many secrets? What can release them so as to suddenly connect with many unknown lives.

The Lightning Testimonies reflects upon a history of conflict in the Indian subcontinent through experiences of sexual violence. As the film explores this violence, there emerge multiple submerged narratives, sometimes in people, images and memories, and at other times in objects from nature and everyday life that stand as silent but surviving witnesses. In all narratives the body becomes central - as a site for honour, hatred and humiliation and also for dignity and protest. As the stories unfold, women from different times and regions come forward. The film speaks to them directly, trying to understand how such violence is resisted, remembered and recorded by individuals and communities. Narratives hidden within a blue window or the weave of a cloth appear, disappear and are then reborn in another vocabulary at another time. Using a range of visual vocabularies the film moves
beyond suffering into a space of quiet contemplation, where resilience creates a potential for transformation

Amar Kanwar is an independent film-maker whose lyrical and meditative work explores the political, social, economic and ecological conditions of the Indian subcontinent. Having directed and produced over 40 films, which are a mixture of documentary, poetic travelogue and visual essay, much of Kanwar’s work traces the legacy of decolonisation and the partition in 1947 of the Indian subcontinent into Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India. Recurrent themes are the splitting of families, sectarian violence and border conflicts, interwoven with investigations of gender and sexuality, philosophy and religion, as well as the opposition between globalisation and tribal consciousness in rural India.

Kanwar’s compelling films are created using image, ritual objects, literature, poetry and songs. Rather than focusing on traumatic or political situations, he attempts to move beyond trauma and its direct representation to a more contemplative space. He experimented with this strategy in his most celebrated film, A Season Outside, 1998, exploring the border tensions along the thin white line between India and Pakistan. Scripted and narrated by the artist, the work is a personal journey and poignant meditation on the philosophies of violence and non-violence.

Along with his numerous single screen films, Kanwar has also developed multi-screen video installations, in which projected films are choreographed to create sophisticated layering of image and meaning within a conscripted space. In The Lightning Testimonies, 2007, he reflects upon a history of conflict in the Indian subcontinent through experiences of sexual violence, especially in the wake of the political unrest that followed the Partition, where 75,000 women were abducted and abused. Eight synchronised projections present disparate narratives that converge. Women from different times and regions come forward as stories are revealed through people as well as through the images and objects that survive as silent witnesses.

The Lightning Testimonies explores how such violence is resisted, remembered and recorded and moves beyond the realm of suffering into a space of quiet contemplation, where resilience creates the potential for transformation. Beyond its immediate subject matter, the work also examines the contrasting methodologies and vocabularies used by different individuals and communities for archiving and recalling memory.

Kanwar’s latest work is a three-part installation, The Torn First Pages, 2008-, which examines the political and humanitarian situation in Burma and the struggle between dictatorial regime and the Democracy Movement. The title of the work is related to the story of a bookshop owner in Mandalay in the mid-1990s accused and subsequently convicted and imprisoned for tearing out the first page of every book he sold. The extracted pages were printed with a legally required slogan of the military regime and a denunciation of democratic forces. His action thus represented a private yet powerful resistance against the repressive authorities, pertinent to the artist’s experience of Burma. The Torn First Pages: Part I, a five-channel projection onto paper sheets, presents films shot clandestinely in Burma, India, Europe, the US and Thailand where Kanwar located exiled Burmese communities. Independent stories are connected by a metaphorical reference to the struggle for a democratic society, exile, memory and individual courage.

The Hit(1979)

The Hit(1979)

Directed by: Assi Dayan
Country:Israel
Runtime:90min







This rollicking, romantic musical comedy features the winning performance and wonderful songs of internationally acclaimed pop superstar Ofra Haza. A dance teacher turned matchmaker who searches the obituaries for promising prospects and a boy who pumps gas but wants to be a rock star are among the many memorable characters who populate this comic classic from the celebrated Hagashash trio. 

A celebration for the eyes(1975)

A celebration for the eyes(1975)

 Director: Assi Dayan
Country: Israel
Runtime:86min

 This film is THE most sought after Israeli film ever made due to long and complicated trial that is still going for 30 years and which prevents this tiny

masterpiece from being shown under any circumstances...
And all this started from the one screening in the (then) only public channel on television, way back. I've got this rarest gem from a dear man who taped it back then and amazingly, the quality's quite goof, all things considered.
I've translated the dialogues and now I present you Dayan's 2nd feature which to this day he considers as his greatest work.

Here's a translation I've made of a nice article from a local blog, "it's not McGuffin":

A celebration for the eyes - a cinematic wonder no one can see

Due to a complicated legal dispute, there's no legal way to watch "a celebration for the eyes"- Assi Dayan's second film as director. The relatively Positive side to that is that the conflict broke out following the film's broadcast on Channel 1 in the early nineties - which means there were (very few) people who have recorded it and with their aid I managed to watch the movie which the title of this post indicates the high esteem I have for it.

I feel that if the film was available today, more people would share my feeling. Although when the film was released in 1975 (two years after created) it did not get much of a crowd, but in many ways the film was ahead of its time - its use of the Hebrew language, its humorous attack on the militarism of Israeli society, by its mix of European influences with a local ,Mediterranean flavor.
I think that nowadays it can become a cult favorite and win a new critical evaluation.

It's enough to hear the story written by Dayan with Naftali Alter to understand the spirit of the film: a man comes to town that lies on the northern border and intends to commit suicide. The townspeople rescue him, but later they discover he's a well known poet, the kind whose death place can become a site of pilgrimage. Since a wave of tourism would do wonders for the bleak economic situation of the town, the residents try to encourage him to commit suicide and even arrange a local celebration for the occasion of the suicide. A girl that falls in love with him try to resist. In addition, the town is preparing for a wedding full of colorful characters. A military exercise held near the town also has an impact on the plot.

An upgrade factor for the film are the dialogues. I believe that Dayan (who is 67 years old now) is the most unique dialogue writer ever in Israeli cinema, a writer with a personal style, with a slang and spoken language awareness, a writer whose sentences often work on more than one level. In his good moments, he reminds me of Hanoch Levin (The greatest Israeli playwright). He takes ready-made phrases and delves to their bottom, often in order to expose a painful (while funny) dimension in his characters - so that when a girl falls in love with the poet, she tells him about the way the soldiers treat her: "I was a mattress" -and all that during a sex scene, of course.

Dane creates in the movie a carnivalesque atmosphere, reminiscent of Fellini's films and more than that, the movies of Emir Kusturica which were made later. Many shots end with blurring of the frame - a breaking of cinematic language which communicates with the breaking of language produced through the dialogue.

Not for a single moment is the film heavy handed nor too complex. This is primarily a movie that never stops to make you laugh and at the end manages also to touch your heart deeply even though it has no positive characters and there's cynicism at almost any moment. It was not easy for the Israeli public to accept such a wild work in real time. Dayan turned to make movies which were easier to digest and managed to make some great popular movies which were smarter than most give them credit for, all that before he created in the nineties his "trilogy" which made him one of the most respected directors in this country.

All the characteristics of Dayan's cinema are already there in this early work - from the military humor of "Halfon Hill" up to the lyrical touch of "Life According to Agfa". Dayan's latest film is a comedy about a psychologist who rents his medical clinic for people who wish to commit suicide, so its a full circle...
gabinbal@KG

Caesar Must Die (2012)

Caesar Must Die (2012)

Directors: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani
Country: Italy
Runtime:76 min



 The performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar comes to an end and the performers are rewarded with rapturous applause. The lights go out; the actors leave the stage and return to their cells. They are all inmates of the Roman maximum security prison Rebibbia. One of them comments: ‘Ever since I discovered art this cell has truly become a prison’.

Filmmakers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani spent six months following rehearsals for this stage production; their film demonstrates how the universality of Shakespeare’s language helps the actors to understand their roles and immerse themselves in the bard’s interplay of friendship and betrayal, power, dishonesty and violence. This documentary does not dwell on the crimes these men have committed in their ‘real’ lives; rather, it draws parallels between this classical drama and the world of today, describes the commitment displayed by all those involved and shows how their personal hopes and fears also flow into the performance.

After the premiere the cell doors slam shut behind Caesar, Brutus and the others. These men all feel proud and strangely touched, as if the play has somehow revealed to them the depths of their own personal history.

I Saw Jesus Die (1975)

I Saw Jesus Die (1975)

Director:Ib Fyrsting & Carl Nielsen
Country: Denmark
Runtime: 88 min

How do you create a movie based on the Christian bible in the second half of the 20th century without staging a kitschy spectacle? How do you avoid the usual parade of dead symbols and void gestures that do no longer cause the viewer to reflect upon anything else than which artistic effects are used to show the symbols and gestures? And how do you cram the Christian bible into a 1h 30min movie without resorting to filming hand-picked episodes that fit your own petty human(ist) ideas about an ideal Jesus?
I Saw Jesus Die' tries to overcome the above-mentioned obstacles by blemishing the biblical narrative. 'I Saw Jesus Die' deliberately toys with our expectation of what a biblical story should be. For example, seemingly unimportant stories are included in the movie while the single-most important part of the bible, the Resurrection of Jesus, is left out. Other biblical stories are deformed and turned into biblical non-stories. Monstrous stories, that have nothing to do with Christian tradition, have also been inserted into the movie. The movie does therefore not try to enlarge our understanding of Christianity by simply presenting masquerades of well-known stories. No, in order to watch this movie we have to reject pretty much all prior knowledge of Christianity. Thus the movie helps us negate all prior knowledge such that we can transcend the knowledge of the mind by not knowing anything.
At times parts of biblical verses are left out by the voice recounting the travails of Jesus. This totally destroys whatever sort of discursive meaning that were part of the original bible verse. By deforming biblical language itself and rendering it discursively meaningless the movie obviously tries to make the viewer transcend the limitations of purely cataphatic readings of the Bible and help the viewer reach a higher inexpressible understanding of what is beyond all knowledge and being. That is, the movie makes us realise that all our language (even the bible) is confined to the ideas we are capable of forming.
The movie transcends the usual gospel accounts of how Jesus gathered the apostles in a brilliant way. The divine monad starts out by converting two fishermen (presumably Simon and Andrew, if we "think" the movie follows an account from the bible). The divine monad and the imperfect dyad (who will later go on to found the eastern and western church) then double their numbers by converting a triad of bystanders. Since three is the first real number it is clear that the divine one has now truly attained a human nature by becoming part of the real. The divine one thus doubles twice, first in order to first create the church, and then secondly to move the church into the real world. This move into the real is underlined by a miracle. Jesus is able to speak and convert the triad of bystanders without the use of words. Jesus simply opens his mouth and looks like he is talking without ever uttering a single sound. This monstrous act clearly shows us the workings of the holy spirit working through the Christian churches. What at first glance seems to be a scene of how Jesus gathers his disciples is cleverly turned into an illustration of the Holy Trinity. Thus the movie presents us with a meaningful un-biblical story instead the biblical story we were expecting. This makes us realise that both stories are actually man-made and told by man, and that we can never truly understand God.
n 'I Saw Jesus Die' Jesus is not depicted in the streamlined and standardised way which characterises most contemporary illustrations of the life of Jesus - that is, Jesus modelled as some sort of late 20th century western academic (egalitarian, non-judgemental, a humanist, etc). Instead Jesus is depicted much more as he comes across in Christian scripture. He is very Jewish, incoherent, misogynistic, he teaches using bizarre parables, he runs a dubious healing business, he interprets the Torah and insists on imposing his Torah interpretations on other people, and he gathers a following of low-lives and other outcasts of questionable loyalty.
The Passion of Christ episode have been created with truly wonderful ingenuity. When Jesus is hanging on the cross he only blames an unidentified group ("they") for his crucifixion as he cries out in agony. The movie thus cleverly avoids the political 'who killed Jesus'-powder-keg and thus depoliticises the episode. An episode in the life of Jesus which very few other people have been able to present in a spiritually meaningful way in the 20th century. In totally depoliticising the Passion of Christ, 'I Saw Jesus Die' makes a radical break with the by now long-standing tradition of solely seeing Christianity as a pretext to discuss various current political polemics. By refusing to blame the Jews, Romans, humanity,... for the death of Jesus 'I Saw Jesus Die' demands the viewer to forget such political squabble and instead immense himself/herself into to the purely spiritual dimension of the episode. A masterstroke of ingenuity which makes 'I Saw Jesus Die' stand apart from most other adaptations of biblical stories.
One of the most striking ways 'I Saw Jesus Die' breaks with the tradition of Jesus-films is in its use of sound. 'I Saw Jesus Die' totally rejects the use of "natural" sound. In 'I Saw Jesus Die' speech is not automatically connected to the act of talking. Plenty of characters talk without making a sound. This obviously leads us to think, that whenever we actually hear something being said, what we hear is not the "natural" cause of the speech but rather the Cause of all speech. But at the same time this grotesque and divine speech only presents us with a bunch of old biblical quotes and various profane vulgarities in totally dead dictions. This contradiction between "divine" and the hackneyed speech accentuates a feeling that it is utterly useless to believe that one can express the divine using any sort of language. So 'I Saw Jesus Die' tells us not to contemplate what is ultimately unknowable, but rather how to reach it.
Not only does 'I Saw Jesus Die' mock the use of reason to understand God, the movie also mocks the use of pompous art as a means to reach God. Instead of using the soundtrack to emphasise the greatness of God as some sort of human world ruler, the movie cleverly toys with our expectations and present us with strange monophonic versions of some most well-known works of the titans of Western classical music (most prominently Mussorgsky). In a similar vein the movie has all characters describe their most pleasurable experiences as "skønt!" [wonderful!]. This constant use of "wonderful" does not lead us to believe, that the various experiences are really "wonderful" and things we should aspire to. Instead we are force-fed a long cascade of "wonderful" banalities ad nauseam.
In 'I Saw Jesus Die' Satan tempts Jesus with her cunt. Jesus rejects Satan's offer as we would expect and denies his sexuality. But during most of the rest of the movie Jesus seems to be obsessed with human sexuality. The wellspring of Jesus' human life was the cunt of Maria, so Jesus have obviously also had some contact with the human sex. This movie is thus not just a simple rejection of the material world in favour of a life devoted to the mind. Jesus is a sexual being and Jesus is not a sexual being. God is divine and God is not divine. God is the Truth and God is not the Truth.

Parada (2011)

Parada (2011)

Directed by: Srdjan Dragojevic
Country: Serbia
Runtime: 115 min


Turning transgression into a comedic principle, this turbulent farce that toys with clichés and stereotypes turned out to be an unexpected hit in Serbia and other ex-Yugoslavian countries. In PARADA a life-saving operation on a gangster’s pitbull terrier brings together two very different worlds: old school machismo meets gay obsession for interior design, homophobia meets overblown gender display as a number of former foes – Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo-Albanians and Croatian war veterans – find themselves obliged to form a tenuous bond with a bunch of gay activists. This motley crew are sent on an impossible and probably suicidal mission to protect a fresh attempt to hold a Gay Pride parade from renewed and certain onslaught from nationalists and neo-Nazi organisations and make the event a success. Srdjan Dragojević’s film takes a look at survival strategies for gays in Serbia and at a society that even now, years after the Balkan war, is still fragmented and riven by two entrenched fronts. And, as one would expect from any comedy worthy of the name, no matter how tumultuous the plot, real-life tragedy is always hovering in the background, just a step away.

Scheherazade Tell Me a Story (2009)

Scheherazade Tell Me a Story (2009)

Director:Yousry Nasrallah
Country: Egypt
Runtime:134 min


Karim and Hebba are a young married and loving couple. Both have great careers. Karim is just about to be appointed as editor-in-chief of the greatest governmental newspaper. Hebba is the hostess of much appreciated TV programs about female victims, e.g. daughters who are buried alive because of improper behaviour, people drowning when attempting illegal immigration to Europe. Karim is told that he will only be appointed if his wife avoids political topics. He does persuade her to make programs on ordinary people instead. But her "non-political" programs will become even more repugnant to the authorities. IMDb (Written by Max Scharnberg)