In this year’s Berlinale Shorts, cinema is distilled to its most essential features. Conventional narratives are very much eschewed in favour of complex ideas, bold left turns and bravura filmmaking gestures. This is my fifth time covering the programme for Directors Notes, and once again I am pleased by the aesthetic unity of the offerings as well as their unorthodox filmmaking techniques. You’d be hard-pressed to find another section at the festival with so much diversity. As usual, there may be some films that I found confounding, odd or interminable, but I can’t accuse them of peddling cliché or well-worn narratives. Most notably, while the feature competition at Berlinale contains no animated movies this year, the Shorts has plenty, putting them on an equal footing with their live-action and documentary counterparts. From the unclassifiable to classical filmmaking, strange 3D models to lo-fi romance, here are ten excellent...
- 2/23/2024
- by Redmond Bacon
- Directors Notes
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. María Alché's A Family Submerged is exclusively showing February 6 – March6, 2020 in Mubi's Debuts series.My first encounter with the work of the Argentine director and actress María Alché was in 2016, at the Valdivia Film Festival, while watching two of her short films—of which the witty, emotionally crackling Noelia (2012) was particularly memorable. In the short, the actress Laila Maltz plays an unstable young woman who craves attention, and so clings to random, successive mother figures. If this whimsical debut didn’t yet hint at the full range of Alché’s directing capabilities, it certainly forecasted her skill in portraying complex, one might say, inscrutable women, with compassion and flair. This complexity and, by now, more subdued humor combine handsomely in Alché’s accomplished first feature, A Family Submerged. The film revolves around Marcela, a middle-aged woman played by Mercedes Morán,...
- 2/6/2020
- MUBI
There are many shades of loneliness, but the tatty gray isolation of a seaside town in the off-season provides a peculiarly perfect background hue for two bereaved late-teenage siblings in Argentinian director Mateo Bendesky’s elusively offbeat “Family Members.” Only Bendesky’s second feature, its contemplative remove — despite the humor inherent in many of its observations — is both a boon and a pitfall, providing plenty of room for unusually accurate insights into the strange workings of grief for those on the cusp of adulthood. But it also keeps us at a distance, and sells short some of its punchier ideas in favor of a precise, but slightly enervating portrait of two people struggling to regain some sense of connection while being trapped in about six different layers of limbo.
Following the death of their mother, the circumstances of which we learn about only gradually and elliptically, Gilda (Laila Maltz) and...
Following the death of their mother, the circumstances of which we learn about only gradually and elliptically, Gilda (Laila Maltz) and...
- 1/1/2020
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
The AFI Fest has been rolling out its 2019 slate for months — since announcing Melina Matsoukas’ Queen & Slim as its opening-night film in August — and now we have the full lineup. Check it out below.
The festival, which runs November 14-21 in Los Angeles, will close with with Apple’s The Banker, starring Anthony Mackie, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicholas Hoult and Nia Long, and will feature the world premiere of Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell.
Here is the full lineup for the 2019 AFI Fest:
New Auteurs
Adam
Samia, heavily pregnant and alone, wanders through Casablanca, seeking shelter until Abla, a single mother, reluctantly takes her in. As the women discover each other’s inner struggles, their lives are transformed. A film festival darling, Maryam Touzani’s debut feature crafts a delicate tale of love through a confident female gaze. Dir Maryan Touzani. Scr Maryan Touzani. Cast Lubna Azabal, Nisrin Erradi, Douae Belkhaouda.
The festival, which runs November 14-21 in Los Angeles, will close with with Apple’s The Banker, starring Anthony Mackie, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicholas Hoult and Nia Long, and will feature the world premiere of Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell.
Here is the full lineup for the 2019 AFI Fest:
New Auteurs
Adam
Samia, heavily pregnant and alone, wanders through Casablanca, seeking shelter until Abla, a single mother, reluctantly takes her in. As the women discover each other’s inner struggles, their lives are transformed. A film festival darling, Maryam Touzani’s debut feature crafts a delicate tale of love through a confident female gaze. Dir Maryan Touzani. Scr Maryan Touzani. Cast Lubna Azabal, Nisrin Erradi, Douae Belkhaouda.
- 10/29/2019
- by Erik Pedersen
- Deadline Film + TV
Round up of the buzz Argentinian titles out to tempt buyers.
4x4
Dir. Mariano Cohn
Thriller 4x4 was the talk of Ventana Sur in Buenos Aires last December and has already landed distribution deals in France (Ugc), South Korea (Cree Pictures) and Argentina, where Buena Vista International will release. Cohn, Gaston Duprat’s co-director on The Distinguished Citizen, makes his solo feature directorial debut on the story about a car thief trapped inside a luxury SUV. Peter Lanzani, Dady Brieva and Luis Brandoni star.
Contact: Juan Torres, Latido Films
After Hitler’s Steps
Dir. Tbd
Keen to move deeper into...
4x4
Dir. Mariano Cohn
Thriller 4x4 was the talk of Ventana Sur in Buenos Aires last December and has already landed distribution deals in France (Ugc), South Korea (Cree Pictures) and Argentina, where Buena Vista International will release. Cohn, Gaston Duprat’s co-director on The Distinguished Citizen, makes his solo feature directorial debut on the story about a car thief trapped inside a luxury SUV. Peter Lanzani, Dady Brieva and Luis Brandoni star.
Contact: Juan Torres, Latido Films
After Hitler’s Steps
Dir. Tbd
Keen to move deeper into...
- 2/9/2019
- by Jeremy Kay
- ScreenDaily
Jonah Hill’s directorial debut, “mid90s,” about a 13-year-old skateboarder’s coming of age, and a documentary on influential film critic Pauline Kael are among the works that will screen in the Panorama section of the upcoming Berlin Film Festival.
Films starring Tilda Swinton and Jamie Bell and titles from countries including Israel, Brazil and Japan were also announced in the first batch of 22 Panorama selections unveiled by the Berlinale on Tuesday. Nine of the films are debut works, and 14 will have their world premiere in the German capital. The section is curated by Paz Lázaro and co-curator and program manager Michael Stütz.
“mid90s” follows teenage Stevie as he joins up with four skateboarding punks who take him under their wing. Variety described Hill’s debut film as “a slice of street life made up of skittery moments that achieve a bone-deep reality. And because you believe what you’re seeing,...
Films starring Tilda Swinton and Jamie Bell and titles from countries including Israel, Brazil and Japan were also announced in the first batch of 22 Panorama selections unveiled by the Berlinale on Tuesday. Nine of the films are debut works, and 14 will have their world premiere in the German capital. The section is curated by Paz Lázaro and co-curator and program manager Michael Stütz.
“mid90s” follows teenage Stevie as he joins up with four skateboarding punks who take him under their wing. Variety described Hill’s debut film as “a slice of street life made up of skittery moments that achieve a bone-deep reality. And because you believe what you’re seeing,...
- 12/18/2018
- by Henry Chu
- Variety Film + TV
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Vladimir Durán's So Long Enthusiasm (2017), which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from July 5 - August 4, 2018 as a Special Discovery.It’s become almost commonplace to observe that Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis isn’t about an ugly-looking bug, but instead about the inner workings of a family in a time of crisis. When we can’t depend on the support of others, what personal inner resources might we reveal?A similar question drives the Colombian filmmaker Vladimir Durán’s feature debut, So Long Enthusiasm (2017), in which members of a tight-knit family—three sisters in their 20s and an eleven-year-old boy, Axel (Camilo Castiglione)—find themselves cooped up in their apartment in Buenos Aires, with guests and friends coming and going, as their mother, Margarita (Rosario Bléfari) convalesces, locked up in her bedroom.“Dysfunctional...
- 7/6/2018
- MUBI
Gastón Solnicki's Kékszakállú (2016) is having its exclusive online premiere on Mubi. It is showing from April 10 - May 10, 2018.Who imagined, planned, and built the spaces we inhabit? How many people participated in the process and how many hours did it take them to culminate each building? What purposes did they seek to give us? Which of those purposes were meant solely for the spaces themselves? How many of these people’s own needs and purposes were renounced for the comfort and leisure of others? I suspect that these are some of the interrogations that start exploding as bombs in the mind of Laila (Laila Maltz) towards the final moments of Kékszakállú, Argentinian filmmaker Gastón Solnicki’s third feature film. “I often recognize that we are not capable of looking at what we have in front of us unless it’s placed within a frame,” said Abbas Kiarostami. In Kékszakállú,...
- 4/11/2018
- MUBI
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