tale of cinema

“It seems that we may be doing the most unpopular thing,” says Nargiz Shukenova, co-founder of the Central Asian Documentary Festival (CADF), trying not to laugh. “Unpopular region, unpopular genre.” Situated in Almaty, Kazakhstan, the festival, which recently celebrated a remarkably successful first edition, is an unlikely offshoot of an already somewhat unlikely proposition; and by all accounts “an experiment” too. The CADF runs a month after Clique, the other film festival that Shukenova runs with her colleague Boris Baykov, which brings high profile arthouse films such as Birdman or The House That Jack Built to Almaty, alongside select documentary programming and special events. The new venture, focused entirely on Central Asian documentary, represents something different both for its organisers, and for the region’s filmgoing audiences.”

Full report on the Central Asian Documentary Festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan on Sight & Sound

“How nice it is to be shown what we rarely ever see. RaMell Ross’ exceptional first feature Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a brief, beautiful snapshot of a place and its people; and a rare depiction of ordinary black communal life. The documentary takes the lives of two young men (college basketballer Daniel and new father Quincy) as a starting point from which to draw a loose, lyrical cross section of a community in Hale County, Alabama. Shifting between friends, family and the environment the two men inhabit, it depicts the everyday activities of this small sub-sect of the area’s population with poetic panache.”

Review of Hale County This Morning, This Evening in Little White Lies 78

“Most film festivals are largely alike; Doclisboa—a well regarded non-fiction film festival in Lisbon, Portugal that just held its 16th edition—does things a little differently. Their focus this year, “Sailing the Euphrates,” for instance, followed a river rather than a specific style of film, country, or creator; whilst Luis Ospina—a revered filmmaker and cineaste in Colombia but hardly a household name in Europe—was chosen for the retrospective. In side-strands, attendees could see a new landscape film (Communion Los Angeles) paired with an old John Carpenter television special (The Gas Station); or films directed by French actor Jean-François Stévenin or by Spanish “anonymous-delirious collective” Terrorismo de Autor, to pick just a few varied examples. Eclecticism was the expectation then, and even the International Competition—a competitive, variable-length section consisting entirely of international and world premieres where traditionally more conventional, audience-friendly fare might be located—was, well, a little off-kilter.”

Full article on the international competition at Doclisboa 2018 on The Brooklyn Rail

"Art has taken a distinct ‘cartographic turn’ in the last century,” writes Catherine D’Ignazio in her essay ‘Art and Cartography’. “Artists have made maps, subverted maps, performed itineraries, imagined territories, contested borders, charted the invisible, and hacked physical, virtual and hybrid spaces.” This tradition of “artistic appropriation of cartographic strategies” may have informed the thinking behind the ‘Transmission, Imagined Territories’ focus at Lisbon’s DocLisboa, an intriguingly wide-reaching curated programme included in the festival’s most experimental section ‘New Visions’, comprising films with artistic map-making at their centre."

Full article on DocLisboa's 'Transmission, Imagined Territories' strand on Little White Lies, featuring films by Phillip Hoffman, Dominic Gagnon, Kidlat Tahimik, Rocío Barbenza, Abderrahmane Sissako and others.

It’s rare that anyone is aware that they are making a movement while in the middle of it; it’s only on reflecting upon something that its importance becomes clear. John Torres and Shireen Seno have been making and showing films with friends and colleagues in the Philippines since as far back as 2003, producing and presenting work under the name Los Otros from their home-studio-garage in Quezon City, Manila. And whether or not they knew it then, or even know it now, this has become important work – the sort of careful, continual and community-orientated practice that causes shifts in culture, that makes the marginal move towards the centre, and ensure it is appreciated and remembered as it should be.

Full article on Los Otros, Shireen Seno and John Torres on Sight & Sound

“I’m a bit suspicious of people who go on about words all the time,” says musician-poet-multihyphenate Supreme Vagabond Craftsman (SVC), delivering snippets of spoken word in a droll monotone over a soundtrack of improvised synth and distorted cassettes, free ranging squeaks and squarks mixing over a scratchy fuzz of scene-setting pre-recorded sound. One of many similar musings—one-line thoughts situated somewhere between profound aphorism and dim-witted interior monologue—it’s a particularly funny line in part because it arrives in the middle of a performance that contains, well, a lot of words. Spluttering out sentences in a near-continual stream of consciousness, SVC’s prose style could be best described as consisting of seemingly nonsensical non sequiturs that collectively describe a worldview. Consisting largely of apparently unconnected and often incomprehensible nonsense-rhyme that verges from the very strange (“radio brain smurfs”) to the entirely ordinary (“there was a Pizza Express here”), these words are bound together by an outlook, an overarching grumpiness that connects it all."

Read full review of Supreme Vagabond Craftsman and Edwin Rostron's Phased Return on The Quietus

"In Zita Erffa’s film — if her brother is to be believed at least — The Best Thing You Can Do with Your Life (2018) is commit to devotion, to surrender all freedoms in pursuit of a higher truth. Her brother László, a young man with whom she was once so close, has been away from their family for eight years, cut off in a monastery, in contact just once a year and by letter only. As a committed member of the Legionaries of Christ — a church with cultish devotees and a dark past — he lives amongst hundreds of other disciplined young men in Connecticut, USA — miles away from those who love him in both body and spirit, and seemingly unreachable."

Full interview with Zita Erffa about her film The Best Thing You Can Do With Your Life on Kinoscope

“Freedom: one of those detestable words that has more value than sense; that sings more than it speaks,” writes the essayist and philosopher Paul Valéry in a passage from ‘Regards sur le monde actual’, quoted by the French-Colombian filmmaker and artist Laura Huertas Millán in the production notes for her film La Libertad (2017). The idea of freedom arises frequently in La Libertad, but the role that it serves is not as straightforward as it may first seem."

Film article on the films of Laura Huertas Millán on Sight & Sound

"Time is a peculiar thing. It’s just a way of chopping up a period so that we know where we are, and when we are,” muses Alan, one of the four individuals facing end-of-life situations in Steven Eastwood’s Island, a documentary that sensitively, empathetically, and concentratedly examines what it means to face the reality of mortality. It is easy to speak as philosophically as Alan does when time seems ample, but when death is near the same sort of line of thought starts to sound braver. “There is no time but the now,” he adds. “The eternal now is the only thing that exists.” Death acts on its own sense of time, yet few adjust to it so effectively."

Read full feature on Steven Eastwood's ISLAND on Little White Lies

"Born in Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines, Liryc Dela Cruz is a young, intelligent, and thoughtful filmmaker, one of many making independent films in (and about) the country. Though still in the early stages of his career, he has directed a number of short films in the last few years, including: “Philippine Press” (2010), “Skype” (2012), “Remembrances of the New Year” (2015) and “Memories of the Waves” (2015). His short film “The Ebb of Forgetting” (2015) was selected for the Locarno Film Festival’s Leopards of Tomorrow section, gaining him favorable attention as well as comparisons to his compatriot and colleague, Lav Diaz, with whom he worked as second assistant director on Norte, the End of History (2013) and as production manager on From What Is Before (2014), amongst others."

Full interview with Liryc Dela Cruz on Kinoscope

"Most filmmakers think about light when making films. All film is light, after all; every image in every film needs the light that illuminates it in order to exist – for capture, and for projection. Yet few think about it quite as much as artist-filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky. As he writes in his book-cum-manifesto Devotional Cinema, “beyond everything else, film is a screen, film is a rectangle of light, film is light sculpture in time”; to not consider it deeply would be to disregard film’s most essential property."

Full article on Nathaniel Dorsky's Arboretum Cycle on Sight & Sound

"What does it mean to pour all of yourself into something, only to lose it? Detective documentary Shirkers examines the mysterious legacy of a missing film of the same title. Having found the footage from the original film more than twenty five years after its making and shaped a story from the remnants—repairing the rupture and reuniting the participants—director Sandi Tan explains."

Full interview with Sandi Tan can be found in Little White Lies 76

Some filmmakers innovate; whilst others iterate. Some, such as Scott Barley—a young filmmaker who has spent several years making slow, concentrated landscape films on his mobile phone—manage to do both of these things; repeating and refining, reinventing when necessary. “In a way, I am making the same film over again,” says Barley, asked about the consistency of the aesthetic of the films he has been making and posting online since 2012. “You build a house, brick by brick, and then once the house is built, it is done. Then you bulldoze that house, and build it again from those pieces, but the bricks are cemented in a different order, the windows and doorways are in different places, and the rooms lead to different rooms.”

Full profile on Scott Barley online at Sight & Sound

"Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965, Kon Ishikawa explained that with Tokyo Olympiad, his spectacular portrait of the 1964 Summer Olympics, his aim was “to grasp the solemnity of the moment when man defies his limits, and to express the solitude of the athlete who, in order to win, struggles against himself. Several films at this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest matched Ishikawa’s description of the concerns of his own work. Personal and profound, these films show sportsmen and women facing significant battles; the athletes struggles made to feel universal."

Full article on Corneliu Porumboiu’s Infinite Football, Marta Prus' Over The Limit and Finlay Pretsell's Time Trial on Little White Lies.

"Almost from the very beginning of cinema's history, filmmakers have been trying to push the boundaries of the medium. While recent thinking often resists the presumption that images should be a certain height and width, housed with the square or rectangular containers they’ve become contained to, much early experimentation fought in the other direction: against the flatness of the frame, and towards depth - towards 3D. Why should the world’s three dimensions, through capture, be reduced to just two?"

Full article on the history of 3D cinema on Little White Lies

"Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) starts with a grain-laden spectral blue skyline. Surreal but serene, the scene sets the tone for the film it fades into, a chronological collage covering three decades of UK dance culture that connects northern soul to acid house and hardcore. A peculiar, exuberant film, it is at once nostalgic and euphoric; a reverie for the ephemerality of countercultural abandon and its increasingly vulnerable position within contemporary society."

As part of Little White Lies' 75th issue celebration, some notes on Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore can be found in LWL 75.

Salomé Lamas’ Extinction opens with a face looking directly at the screen. Shot in grainy black and white, the close-up composition immediately recalls her 2012 film No Man’s Land, in which a man faces the camera and describes the atrocities of his life. Though it also features interviews (alongside essayistic monologues, recorded conversations, archive audio, and other verbal digressions), Extinction immediately veers away from this simple setup, sprawling omnidirectionally to become larger and more complex. More than just one man’s testimony, it is an exploration – an excavation even – of nationhood and identity.

Full essay on Salome Lamas' Extinction for the Frames of Representation catalogue, available online here

"Frames of Representation’s founding mission was to bring “new forms of documentary cinema” to London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, but this mandate felt a little looser for the festival’s third edition. The lineup included several fiction films and was generally marked by a readjustment of its doctrine to encompass not just classical documentary but rather the whole “cinema of the real,” broadly understood to mean works that both draw from and interrogate reality beyond the traditional formal parameters of nonfiction filmmaking. The overall theme was “Landscape”—broader than “Working” and “The New Periphery” which came before—but the best of the selection was in fact quite human, featuring work that mirrors the idea of the anthropocene: films about landscape that also reflect that humanity has become the dominant geological influence on the environment."

Full review of Frames of Representation 2018 in the June 2018 issues of the Brooklyn Rail

"Having peppered their program with fiction films since their first edition in 2003 – a time when doing such a thing was far less commonplace than it is now – Copenhagen’s non-fiction film festival CPH:DOX has long held a reputation for eschewing categorisation. This is most apparent in the NEW:VISION competition, a section designed to dismantle divisions between classifications of “artist” and “documentarían” and instead encourage convergences of these approaches. With works by makers as varied as Ben Rivers, Deborah Stratman, Zhou Chen, Rosa Barba, Yto Barrada, Basim Magdy and Tsai Ming-liang present in recent years, the section has had serious pedigree for a while, acting as a well regarded platform for outlier (and often peculiar) artists’ film operating in a non-fiction mode, or documentary work that could sit as comfortably in a gallery. This year’s competition – far from the festival’s strongest – perhaps displays the increasing popularity of this sort of boundary-blurring work, but also the pressures that this puts on programmers competing to source and select it."

Full review of the entire NEW:VISIONS strand up on Senses of Cinema 87

“It takes a very long time to become young,” said Pablo Picasso, quoted in Jean Cocteau’s book ‘The Hand of a Stranger’, but the reverse can be true too, as displayed in 3 first time features about young people playing at nonfiction festival CPH:DOX. For these folks the burden of adulthood arrives all too quickly, as they are forced to reckon with problematic families, identity issues, tough responsibilities and the other grim realities that adult life brings."

Full article on Bing Liu's Minding The Gap, Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside's America, and Nicolas Peduzzi's Southern Belle on Little White Lies

"How can you effectively survey more than 20 years of filmmaking? How to tie together films that vary in form and approach, films made by a person at different periods of their life, across different countries, with different friends and family members? How to curate a retrospective that doesn’t suggest finality, but leaves room for continuation? One that accepts that, besides the work that gets displayed, there is incomplete work, work that will forever remain unstarted, and work that is still to come? These questions are wrestled with – overtly and inadvertently – in Circle, a show containing new and older work by American-born, Scotland-based artist Margaret Salmon currently on display at Glasgow’s Tramway gallery. The exhibition – consisting of a rotating retrospective programmes alongside a new multi-monitor installation piece and a sound work – arrives alongside a screening (with accompanying musical performance from Sacred Paws) of one of her newest films, Mm (2017), as part of Glasgow Film Festival’s underrated experimental strand Crossing the Line."

Full article on the work of Margaret Salmon on Sight & Sound

"Black vertical bars divide a nebulous green glow, thick lines fly by in unison. It’s a filmstrip, a barcode, a jail cell, a zoetrope viewed from the inside. In reality, it’s a rush of fence posts seen from a vehicle moving through a verdant landscape—a flicker-film built from documentary footage, abstraction from verisimilitude. This opening of J.P. Sniadecki and Joshua Bonnetta’s El Mar La Mar is as inexorable, unknowable, and entrancing as that which follows. An exquisite experiment in applying avant-garde aesthetics to a political subject, the film demonstrates how suggestion is more effective than assertion, dissonances as revealing as confluences."

Full article on J.P.Sniadecki & Joshua Bonnetta's El Mar La Mar in Bomb Magazine 143

"Traditional filmmaking has a fundamental limitation. It must start with reality. The images that can be created begin with what can be observed and recorded; filmmakers must use the extant in order to create something new. In animation - irregardless of the tools and techniques being used - no such restriction applies. Animation begins from nothing and can become anything; the only limitations present are those that artists impose upon themselves. As displayed across the films in this Edge of Frame weekender, this offers a distinct, dramatic opportunity to the artists who are bold and resourceful enough to utilise it, the chance to disregard the limitations of this world and fully engage with the imaginative possibilities of another. With pen, brush, finger, tablet, camera, torch, tongue, any tool available, in fact, the artist working with ‘animation’ - a term as evocative (animate, [verb]: to bring to life) as it is inadequate - can visualise the impossible, creating their own spaces or distorting existing ones until they are no longer recognisable."

Full essay in the catalogue for the Edge of Frame Weekend 2018, and reproduced online here.

"The scale and ambition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which packs 593 short and feature films into 12 days of independent cinema, as well as talks, performances, and gallery installations in venues across the city, makes it almost uniquely difficult to approach, even for the experienced visitor. The sprawling program—divided into four sections entitled “Bright Future,” “Voices,” “Deep Focus,” and “Perspectives,” then subdivided again thematically—suggests a festival more assembled than curated. But in its 45th edition, two more considered strands provided some comfort and cohesion."

Full article on IFFR's Zhou Tao focus,The Otolith Group’s The Third Part of the Third Measure, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s Unearthing. in Conversation, Onyeka Igwe's Her Name In My Mouth, Ayo Akingbade’s Street 66, Sandra Heremans’s The Yellow Mazda and His Holiness.

"Sleep has been an integral part of the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul since he began making them, but recently it has felt increasing central to the experience of viewing them as well. He introduced screenings of his last feature Cemetery of Splendour by stating that he didn’t mind people sleeping during them; and said the same (more understandably) ahead of the 16-hour, 36 film all-night Tate Modern retrospective of his work that took place a year later. This fascination with screen-slumber meets its logical endpoint at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, where the director has created SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, a site-specific temporary space – half-hotel, half-installation – where guests dream beneath an enormous projection screen."

Full article on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL on Sight & Sound.

"Barack Obama’s final year in office already feels like a long time ago, so much so that Greg Barker’s documentary on the subject seems to recall a simpler time. Despite containing material shot as recently as January 2017, it is immediately apparent that The Final Year depicts a considerably different administration – and indeed a different America – to the current reality."

Full review of Greg Barker's The Final Yeat on Little White Lies.