Change Your Image
chaplin1-660-883267
Reviews
The Last Black Sea Pirates (2013)
The Lavender Hill Mob meets Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies type existence on a Black Sea beach with a mob of would be pirates ever hopeful to find the hidden treasure left somewhere on in the bay by a real pirate of the Ottoman empire. The mob's sense of friendship and bonding is depicted affectionately and with humour. The members of the mob are bound together through their need to escape from the realities of the life off the beach and by the eternal hope and expectation that any day now they will find the gold that will transform their lives. So they dig and they plan how to spend the money. This wonderful story, beautifully told, seldom feels like a documentary. These are sympathetic characters faced with insoluble problems. Their escape from reality is only possible as long as they stay together.
Hitler à Hollywood (2010)
A playful mock-documentary about film making in Europe.
This is a very enjoyable, playful mock documentary. It is nicely played and of course Maria de Medeiros in the lead role is wonderful. The story goes that they are making a documentary about Micheline Presle a seductive leading lady of the 1940s who is now a not so Young Lady in Distress who wants, before she dies, to see a film she made that was never distributed or indeed even shown anywhere - a realistic plot twist given the fate of the director of her first film. It is her wish that takes the plot further into a new and eventually surrealistic turn.
As the film progresses Frédéric Sojcher returns to the film world's much discussed theme of being in The Shadow of Hollywood. Perhaps it was in the making of the real documentary Born to Film that Sojcher found the urge to make a conspiracy theory film.
HiH has some excellent locations, which are explained tongue-in-cheek as being there just for the fun of being there. The hand-held point-of-view documentary style that takes us into the head of the lovesick cameraman make the movie fun to see. This is a movie that doesn't take itself too seriously but succeeds in delivering a feeling of a real conspiracy. This is a film for film lovers, you can feel that it was made with a lot of joy and I had a lot of fun watching it.
Mitt mörka hjärta (2010)
A beautiful but harrowing journey into the darkness of war memories and beyond to the light of reconciliation.
This is no dry documentary and illustrates its artistic and cinematic credentials by the literary title and the reference to 'Apocalypse Now' with its Navy Patrol Boat on a journey upriver. Here the four veterans from different sides have to face the killing fields of their war in Angola. This is a staggeringly beautifully photographed cathartic journey through African landscapes and through an inner journey of painful war memories into their heart of darkness. As they move upstream memories return and horror stories of the reality of war are told around the camp fire revealing different attitudes to the need for "cleansing". The injustice and insanity of war are revealed but the psychological message is more complex to decipher. Does it reveal the true humanity of man or does it illustrate what the secretary of the US army Thomas E White said in 2002 when talking about the film 'Black Hawk Down' that 'it's about the man next to you, that's all there is'. I guess it depends on how you define the 'man next to you'.