In the Buddhist tradition, breathing grounds us in the present moment. According to Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, “Breathing opens the door to stopping and looking deeply in order to enter the domain of concentration and insight.” For Roman Kogler (Thomas Schubert) in Karl Markovics remarkable debut film Breathing, it is simply the means to…
The on-going feud between Israelis and Palestinians over land in the West Bank is extremely politicized. Most days, only harsh words fired back and forth between Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements and some days rock projectiles and even bullets escalate the situation to tragedy. What Emad Burnat’s camera does is watch the back-and-forth chest pounding….
In a film within a film, director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) and producer Costa (Luis Tosar) are shooting in Cochabamba, Bolivia in the year 2000. The film they are working on proposes to depict Christopher Columbus’ exploitation of the indigenous native population in his voyage to the Americas and the effort of two priests to…
I recently got through watching a 15 part, 900 minute long 2011 documentary on cinema titled The Story Of Film: An Odyssey, directed and narrated by Irish film critic and historian Mark Cousins, on Netflix, based upon his book of the same name. As might be expected of such a large undertaking, the film has…
Coming after the failure of singer/songwriter Paul Simon’s solo album Hearts and Bones, and the messy breakup with Art Garfunkel, his 1986 album Graceland was the most successful of his career and, to many, the artistic highlight. Simon’s return to South Africa to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Graceland is documented in Joe Berlinger’s exuberant…
Longing loneliness and rich romanticism collide in Tabu, each more a feeling than an idea, each dominating a portion of Miguel Gomes’ emotionally oppositional drama. Split nearly down the middle, the movie opens with a prologue and then devotes half of the following picture to part one (titled “Paradise Lost”) and the other half to…
At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the Soviet Union basketball team beat the U.S. squad for the gold medal and more importantly, bragging rights. In what is assumed to be a U.S. dominated sport in which an American team had only failed to get the gold once before, they not only lost, but tragically, they lost…
