“And you will look with open eyes, And see the world clear, And when your crying is dried up, Then you will feel your heart, And know a new and deeper love” — Alexi Murdoch There are no men in Céline Sciamma’s (“Girlhood”) Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en…
The bold debut, We (Wij), from Dutch director Rene Eller uses various unreliable narrators and a fractured chronology to create an intricate and arresting new spin on coming-of-age tropes. The ostensible setup is a typical teen movie: A group of friends find a shack in the woods and use it as a base for their…
Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize and awards for cinematography and originality at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska’s unforgettable documentary Honeyland looks into the ancient tradition of beekeeping, a tradition that has been attuned to the rhythms of nature for centuries. Set among the isolated villages and rocky…
“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole” — Derek Walcott To French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, the ocean is a “holy temple,” a shimmering presence that reflects the economic and social aspirations of people seeking a better life….
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress” — Frederick Douglass The war began peacefully. In 2012, university students and others launched peaceful protests against the regime of Bashar-al-Assad whose government had been in power since 1971 and had failed to institute promised reforms. When government soldiers fired on…
“For a long time after the war I was afraid of the sky, even of raising my head towards the sky. I was afraid of seeing plowed-up earth. But the rooks already walked calmly over it. The birds quickly forgot the war” — Svetlana Alexievich, “The Unwomanly Face of War” During World War II, the…
According to award-winning Israeli director Nadav Lapid (“The Kindergarten Teacher”), “art has the right to be chaotic and wild, to go to extreme and dangerous places.” If you are looking for chaotic and wild, you need look no further than his Synonyms (Milim Nirdafot), a mystifying and often maddening film that will either leave you…
