On the occasion of the 71st Berlinale, Camilla Peeters and Jack Seibert share their thoughts on selections from this year’s Berlinale Shorts. This year the festival is being held June 9-20 (instead of the usual dreary February) as a ‘summer special’, holding in-person screenings via various open-air kinos throughout the city.
Review: “I am thinking of you [in Streams]” – ‘Bella’ (2020), dir. Thelyia Petraki
Love might be felt in streams – at times, continuous, and yet, in spaced flashes once memory is called to speak.
Essay: A Time For Many Words – Canon Formation, National Unity and ‘The Travelling Players’
Invariably, any appraisal of Theodoros Angelopoulos’ 1975 film The Travelling Players makes note of its length—230 minutes, to be precise—as well as it’s ostentatious style—it consists of just 80 shots, almost all of which are sequence shots and hardly any are tighter than a medium close-up.
Correspondence: ‘Wife of a Spy’ (2020), dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Patrick Prezisoi and Ryan Swen exchange thoughts on classicist vs. ground breaking tendencies (and much more) in the latest from Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Review: ‘Kapita’ (2021) dir. Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Kapita (2021), Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’s latest film and a selection at this year’s Berlinale (Forum Expanded), is a film about mining – through the mining of film.
Selections from Prismatic Ground: Small Films in a Large World
A global pandemic demands innovation, and over the past year-and-change, we have observed a massive shift in the very idea of what a film festival can be.
Lucrecia Martel: Four Feature Films
A teenage girl lies on a towel, stealing glances at a man swimming in an indoor pool. The man, who might be her mother’s age, whips around as if sensing someone’s gaze and the girl flinches out of sight, slipping as she does into prayer — intoned and feverish, like an incantation: mother most chaste mother most pure mother without fault…
Blu Review: Two Silent Films by John Ford (Eureka!)
by Ruairí McCann Produced and released by Eureka Entertainment’s Masters of Cinema line, this new Blu-ray boxset of two early silent John Ford westerns is most welcome. Not only […]
On the (Prismatic) Ground Floor
Founded by Inney Prakash in co-operation with Screen Slate and Maysles Cinema, Prismatic Ground is, in a fashion, the first festival of its kind.
Diaspora and Disappearance: ‘Letter From Your Far-Off Country’ and ‘Maat Means Land’
In our first piece of ‘Prismatic Ground’ coverage, Ruairí McCann compares ‘Maat Means Land’ and ‘Letter From Your Far-Off Country’