FEATURES:
2. David and Lisa (Frank Perry, 1962)
“Normal is not the norm, it’s just a uniform.”
(Delain, We Are the Others)
One of the sweetest love stories to ever grace the silver screen, David and Lisa marks the feature debut for a number of cast and crew members – the director and his screenwriter wife (first-time using her own name, and not a gender-bender moniker), actors Janet Margolin (radiant as the titular heroine), and Jaime Sánchez, the cinematographer Leonard Hirschfield, composer Mark Lawrence, and editor Irving Oshman. Their fresh energies combined make for an engaging film in which a sensitive topic such as mental disorders is treated with utmost care and respect. The setting is a boarding school for psychologically disturbed youngsters, and its newest protégé is an intelligent and sophisticated teenager, David (Keir Dullea, superb), whose haughty demeanor is a facade built due to a lackluster emotional upbringing, not to mention thanatophobia reflected in his severe fear of touch, and nightmares of decapitation. Gradually melting his icy aura is Lisa – a ‘pearl of a girl’ suffering dissociative identity disorder, speaking in rhymes, and – despite the limited screen time – acting as the story’s big, candid and gentle heart. Their romance blossoms in an unhurried pace, as Perry shows and elicits from the viewer great sympathy and understanding for his broken characters, without resorting to overly saccharine tactics, and finding a strong support in Hirschfield’s meticulous framing of the protagonists’ beautiful faces.
3. La chouette aveugle / The Blind Owl (Raúl Ruiz, 1987)
“Fatima, according to a curious superstition, believed she could capture images in her right hand and sound in her left hand. According to her, it was easy enough to trap them by leaving her hand open for a few moments in front of a projector... She was convinced that these images and sounds had a very high nutritional value.”
Borrowing elements from Sadegh Hedayat’s (nonlinear) novel of the same name, as well as from Tirso de Molina’s play Damned by Despair, The Blind Owl is the most delirious of Ruiz’s films I’ve seen so far. A meditation on cinema, death, identity, duality, and obsessive love, it is a mind-boggling, eye-pleasing, linguistically wily, and wryly witty tale of... well, it’s hard to determine exactly, but let’s say, madness as the intrinsic part of human condition. Metafilmic at its core, it plunges you into a volatile, fever dream-like world of Kafkaesque absurdities, Borgesian puzzles, and shifting perspectives, with its convoluted structure bolstered by shadow-infested cinematography from Patrice Cologne. The highly expressive lighting alone is the reason enough to see it.
4. Esquizo (Ricardo Bofill, 1970)
“I have the biggest patience and electricity in the world. God is the universe. I am the owner of the world. Therefore, I am God. Revolution is in progress and men will become demi-gods. Democracy doesn’t exist.”
A pseudo-documentary filtered through the prism of speculative fiction, and dubbed A Fictitious Report on the Architecture of the Brain, the only feature offering from acclaimed Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill portrays the mind of a schizophrenic woman as a piece of performance art. Intersected by the footage of real mentally disordered patients, naked boys playing in the sand, and animal carcasses in the slaughterhouse, it can be viewed as a simulacrum of life under a fascist regime, especially when the ‘omnipotent’ voice-over is taken into consideration. Miraculously surviving the Francoist censors (or was it too clever for them?), it has stood the test of time, and now – when the liberties are increasingly endangered all around the globe – its relevance couldn’t be more pronounced. A challenging experiment that may be dismissed as ‘pretentious’ by the mainstream audience, Esquizo also exposes “the lack of understanding, the lack of sympathy, the lack even of seeing or being incapable of visualizing how some people suffer, how incomprehensible their anguish is”. (Daniel Kasman, Rotterdam 2016. Acting Out)
5. Boof-e koor / The Blind Owl (Kioumars Derambakhsh, 1975)
“Only death never tells a lie.”
Faithfully adapting a part of Sadegh Hedayat’s masterful novella of the same name, Kioumars Derambakhsh (1945-2020) manages to capture the spirit, if not all the layers and ellipses of the source material in his first (and only?) fiction featurette. A cinematic equivalent of a nightmare, The Blind Owl clocks at around 55 minutes, playing out like a time-distorting rumination on death, with themes of desire, guilt and tradition (as a factor of torment) skillfully intertwined into the bleakly surrealistic tale. In the central role of an unreliable narrator, Parviz Fanizadeh delivers a superb performance, his expressions and the slightest of movements reflecting the disturbed inner state of his world-weary character. Desolate surroundings of withered grass, barren trees, cracked earth, and man-made structures of mud and stone – all arrestingly framed – also play an important role in the portrayal of the protagonist’s anguished psyche...
6. Dvoje / And Love Has Vanihed (Aleksandar Petrović, 1961)
Boy meets girl (in front of the cinema), they fall in love, but his affection for her gradually fades. A simple, yet timeless story that could’ve been set virtually anywhere in the world gets a modernist / Nouvelle Vague-ish treatment in the first solo feature from Aleksandar Petrović (of I Even Met Happy Gipsies fame). On par with the masters of European arthouse film of the period, this romantic drama is bolstered by strong performances from Beba Lončar (radiant in the role of a music student, Jovana) and Miha Baloh (charming as an architect, Mirko). The jazzy, quaintly inviting score by Ljiljana Popović, and Ivan Marinček’s taut framing of both the leading couple and Belgrade of the early 60’s, define a fascinating portrayal of Jovana and Mirko’s relationsip, capturing all of its nuances, from saccharine to bitter, and transcending most if not all narrative clichés.
7. Irati (Paul Urkijo Alijo, 2022)
Based on Jon Muñoz Otaegi’s graphic novel The Circle of Irati (originally, El ciclo de Irati) which draws inspiration from Basque legends, the sophomore feature from Paul Urkijo Alijo (of Errementari fame) is a beautifully realized medieval fantasy revitalizing the magic of the sword & sorcery subgenre. Set against the backdrop of the clash between the paganism and Christianity, the film takes the viewer into the Pyrenees forests rendered enchanted by cinematographer Gorka Gómez Andreu, labyrinthine caves guarded by beings of mythological yore, and stone castles where the power dynamics are incessantly shifting. In a story deeply rooted in local folklore, Alijo speaks of universal and “timeless human issues”, as Júlia Olmo notes in her review for Cineuropa, touching upon “the weight of roots, the idea of loyalty and honor, the meaning of identity, the struggle for a place and the value of that struggle, the meaning of faith, the classic concept of ‘the beautiful death’ (filling one’s life with deeds to achieve eternal glory, to be remembered and loved in eternity), the fear of forgetting, the presence of death in life, the search for your origins and the price of that search”. These themes are explored through both the titular heroine, a feisty pagan girl (Edurne Azkarate, stellar in her first big screen appearance), as well as a young Christian nobleman, Eneko (Eneko Sagardoy, excellent), learning to accept the mysterious ways of nature personalized by the goddess Mari (Itziar Ituño, a strong vocal presence bolstered by an intricate costume of red, intertwined threads). Speaking of nature, one can easily notice the ecological aspect of the proceedings, particularly in the scenes of bleeding tree stumps, and stones, with the overarching perspective being more feminine than masculine...
8. Le Feu sacré (Vladimir Forgency, 1971)
Very 70’s, and very French, Le Feu sacré (lit. The Sacred Fire) is (sadly!) the only feature helmed by Vladimir Forgency. It is a solidly crafted drama revolving around a young ballerina-in-training, Sonia, who shares her first name with the star – Paris-born dancer of Russian decent, Sonia Petrovna, epitomizing grace. At the very threshold of adulthood, the heroine is torn between her somewhat wavering passion for classical ballet and infatuation with Pierre (Pierre Fuger) – a handsome hippie who manages a modern-dance troupe. In other words, she is compelled to choose between the rigorous dedication, and the uncertainty of freedom; following in the traditional footsteps of her godmother teacher Lily (Lilian Arlen), or just letting herself go with the counterculture flow. The largely non-professional actors who’re most probably professional dancers deliver authentic performances, with the major characters built upon many exercise and rehearsal scenes, as well as a small part of Iphigenia staged. Forgency directs them with immediacy and spontaneity, his right-hand man being cinematographer Willy Kurant who previously collaborated with who’s who of La Nouvelle Vague – Godard (Masculin féminin), Varda (Les créatures), and Robbe-Grillet (Trans-Europ-Express). Also praiseworthy are Yves Trochel’s production and costume designs, often reflecting dichotomies explored, and Sonia’s contradictory emotional states.
9. Docteur Chance / Doctor Chance (F.J. Ossang, 1997)
“She’s dreaming. Blood colors the leaves. A smell of gasoline. The metal drenched with rain. Just a wall to lean on. A piece of glass in the throat till the blood stops flowing. We empty ourselves of the world and it’s good.”
More a (pulp) fever dream than a film, Doctor Chance appears like a vague reflection / afterthought of a gangster noir gradually turning into a road movie on a lost highway of crypto-poetic raving. Its fragmented narrative or rather, a dissolving illusion of it, exists only as a thread which holds a patchwork of cinematic references, from silent era to the French New Wave to postmodern psychological thrillers. As always with F.J. Ossang, the strongest is a Godardian influence, subtly filtered through the prism of punk nihilism into a freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness abandon. His brooding characters are but ciphers rooted in the crime genre archetypes, and confined within the images they desperately try to escape from – “disappear in flight to show that the sky exists”. A mother figure (the late and great Almodovar’s regular Marisa Paredes) and a lover (the author’s muse Elvire) may hold the keys of the exit...
10. O corpo ardente / The Burning Body (Walter Hugo Khouri, 1966)
“I think I got old sooner than everyone else. And it was a life that passed in a blink. I couldn’t even see it.”
Even more Antonioniesque than its predecessor, ‘Noite Vazia’, ‘The Burning Body’ is a muffled scream for (absolute) freedom, also acting as a portrait of deeply suppressed desire, set against an alienating backdrop of upper-class society of intellectuals. Occupying the central role with brooding intensity, magnetic presence and an air of mystery surrounding her is Barbara Laage whose character, Marcia, is a woman on a desperate quest for a key to the shackles that bind her to her only, camera-wielding son, dead-end marriage, and boring lover. Her longing for a life unconstrained by duties manifests as a beautiful, untamable black stallion that she becomes fascinated with during a short trip to a remote desert cottage, the flashbacks of both the respite and extramarital affairs intertwined with the scenes of an ongoing party. The film’s fragmented structure – a mirror to Marcia’s emotional detachment – is well-paired with Khouri’s unwavering formal austerity which further emphasizes the atmosphere of existential ennui, making for a challenging viewing experience.
The latest feature from self-taught filmmaker Pablo Chavarría Gutiérrez (Still the Earth Moves) is a strange, or rather, decidedly weird animal, one that doesn’t take itself too seriously in its tackling of the themes such as art, love, death, friendship, existential crisis, and the way our dreams (and nahuals) navigate us through life. Described as a ‘mystical comedy’, the film portrays everyday routine of a struggling writer (played with a tongue-in-cheek nonchalance by the director himself), infusing it with absurd (and bits of self-deprecating) humor, stoner wisdom, and folk magic that – combined serendipitously – often turn the banal into the surreal. It is a rough-around-the-edges concoction that doesn’t always work, but its immediacy, easygoing attitude, independent spirit, and naivete of non-professional cast aren’t without their charms, all beautifully captured in soft grays of Carlos Hernández’s B&W cinematography, and interspersed with cinematic references.
12. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (Kenji Kamiyama, 2024)
“Fat and prosperous are when men are at their most dangerous. It fills them with false courage, and false courage breeds discontent.”
A beautifully animated fantasy in which a clever and headstrong girl who has never wanted to rule defeats a cowardly psychopath who thought he was the almighty king, sending his army of masked goons on unarmed people... Oh my, the film’s antagonist has all the traits of a certain, not-to-be-named tyrant of a Balkan country, though he’s far more handsome than the latter.
13. Oni Goroshi / Demon City (Seiji Tanaka, 2025)
More or less a formulaic revenge flick brimming with intense and stylish action, Demon City is somewhat intriguing for the parallels one could draw between its ‘demons’ and their real-life counterparts, if the latter had an ounce of ‘wicked coolness’. Alas, what we get, particularly in Serbia these days (or rather, decades), are pathetic, dehumanized excuses for ‘officials’ who embody the absolute worst of imaginable vices. These lying sacks of the smelliest, most toxic bullcrap – no, I’m not apologizing for the lack of euphemism – are so detestable that all the ‘poetic’, blood-spraying justice Tanaka serves here comes across as a mild punishment compared to what those monsters actually deserve. Matsuya Onoe as a grinning, thick-lipped, corrupted-to-the-bone mayor Sunohara evokes a certain ‘head of the state’ in both appearance and his character’s sect of loyalists, with his elitist project of Mahoroba resort (a phallic building, of course!) bringing to mind the gentrified raping of Belgrade. Confronting and disposing of Sunohara’s henchmen is one-man army Shūhei Sakata (the impressive, largely physical performance from Tōma Ikuta) – an ex-hitman who can survive a superhuman amount of metal pole blows, sword cuts and falls from height in a manga-inspired rampage. If only he had the purity of students and citizens who have been protesting for the past four months...
SHORTS:
1. A Placeless Place (Sibi Sekar, 2024)
A placeless place, a timeless time, an egoless ego... After jumping into the void, is it ‘voidlessness’ that follows? And can it be portrayed? Through a character of ‘outsider’ (Kamali), Sibi Sekar continues his quest across the innermost depths – an unknown realm where universal truth manifests itself in poignant absences. Obscure visions – of a forestless forest, a fieldless field, and a roomless room – pose as the verses of a calm-inducing poem, one in rhymeless rhymes, filling the air with melancholy that stems from existential longing. The film ceases to be a conscious hallucination, as its author strives to transfigure it into a dreamless dream of a dreamer hopelessly enamored of the mystery’s soul.
2. Silence Has No Wings (Zaur Mukhtarov, 2024)
Not to be confused with Kazuo Kuroki’s 1966 elliptical feature of the same name, Zaur Mukhtarov’s short is a captivating cinematic delight. Completely void of dialogue, as well as of music (apart from a party scene), it draws the viewer into a meditative state, as it reflects on loss, loneliness and death through the character of an unnamed young woman (Nurana Karimova, an embodiment of fragility). She lives with a caged dove – a figment of her imagination? – that quite possibly symbolizes her self-imposed imprisonment in memories, or rather, acts as a vessel for the soul of a beloved one who passed away. Transformed into a phantom romance, the protagonist’s refusal to let go permeates the profound stillness of her daily routine, almost ritualistic in its depiction, and the very air of her apartment – the fortress of melancholy. Her ‘ennui’ becomes delicate poetry in meticulously framed shots of cinematographer Matlab Mukhtarov, with the director maintaining a deliberate pace of his editing, harmoniously matched to the wingless, yet sublime silence.
Arguably, one of the finest, most loving homages paid to Hong Kong martial arts cinema, its astonishing fighting choreography shot with clarity, and intertwined with some delightfully cheesy humor.
