In the Land of the Enlightened where truth is found via meta narratives — a film review
September 2, 2016
In the documentary In The Land of the Enlightened two worlds collide visually, technically and spiritually. This is a hybrid documentary, meaning some shots were staged while others focus on the environment of Afghanistan and its people through an observational style. The cast, if you may call it that, are all real people. Some of the action scenes are rehearsed and others are presented as they happen. The blur between fiction and non-fiction is intentional, as Belgium Director and Photographer Pieter-Jan De Pue takes on a non-traditional view of how to craft a true story, with imagines elements that respond to a lived experience of Afghanistan, rather than real-life depictions. Shot over seven years, the documentary focuses on the lives of a group of children who are also fighters. Their lives are all about survival and war in the mountains of Afghanistan.
The new documentary Plaza de la Soledad is an artistic rumination on aging that presents interwoven stories of different low-income Mexican women who are in their golden years. Although the stories told by each of these women vary, what they all have in common is they are facing their later years as prostitutes. The documentary offers an unflinching and intimate examination of everyday life for these women who seldom have a voice and are often judged harshly.
In Don’t Think Twice, comedian Mike Birbiglia once again taps into his sense for tragi-comedy to exorcise his demons by putting his personal struggles on the big screen. His previous movie, Sleep Walk With Me (Relationships and dreams collide in ‘Sleepwalk With Me’ — a film review) was a very personal re-telling of the end of a relationship gone awry. Now he turns to his career. Birbiglia wrote, directed, and co-stars in this new film that explores how individuals find a sense of belonging and how traditional markers of success, such as money and popularity, actually become obstacles that deter people from finding their own way.
One of the most powerful films you will see this year is Land and Shade (Tierra y Sombra). The 2015 winner of the prestigious Cannes Caméra d’or, the movie is simple but has that subtle quality of getting under your skin. The story revolves around very few characters, a family in the Valle de Cauca region in Colombia. It is a low-income family: the matriarch Alicia (Hilda Ruiz) and her daughter-in-law (Marleyda Soto) work in a sugar plantation in a brutal environment for very low wages. The matriarch’s son Gerardo (Edison Raigosa) has fallen ill of some sort of respiratory illness. Bed-ridden, he can no longer work on the plantation. Gerardo’s wife steps up to his job while taking care of him and their 6-year-old son. The action is set in motion when his estranged father Alfonso (Haimer Leal) returns to enter the constrained family dynamic.
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World considers the state of humanity in the digital age — a film review
August 19, 2016
There are few things today as ubiquitous as the internet. Our daily lives are sorted and stored online in a variety of ways, and we have become dependent on electronic information. Whether this interaction between humans and the connected world we have created is good or bad is an open question that invites many interpretations. In Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, the German philosopher/director Werner Herzog probes the depths of this relationship through a series of chapters that explore this cyber connectedness. One the one hand, he notes, the great potential and advances in scientific discovery that are beneficial to humankind. On the other, Herzog walks us through the part of the human realm that is lost or changed through this relationship.
In The Bride a theatrical drama is brought to the big screen with mixed results — a film review
August 5, 2016
The Bride (La Novia) is based on the famous play “Bodas de sangre” by Federico García Lorca, retold through the eyes of Spanish writer-director Paula Ortiz, who is able to bring out the female perspective in this tragic love triangle, albeit with mixed results cinematically. In The Bride, a threesome of two boys and a girl meet as youngsters in a remote, desert town. The three strike a friendship that marks their lives, as one of them later is to be married to this young girl while she pines for the other.
While the odd couple trope has been done before, in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, actor/writer/director Taika Waititi is able to breathe new life into the genre with his adaptation of Barry Crump’s 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress. The New Zealand filmmaker, who is also a painter and comedian, brings to life an endearing relationship between Ricky Baker, a 13-year-old Maori boy, and Hec Faulkner, a cantankerous old Caucasian man, who lives in the New Zealand mountains.
Independent Ethos 