Above: a relaxed but aggrevated vision of young adults in 2009... Relaxation infuses the filmmaking of both John Cook's Slow Summer and Andrew Bujalski's Beeswax; only, the first was made by the Canadian
4.0: PREAMBLE So, after four days and nine attempts, I finally discovered a new film that I can more than luke-warm enthusiastic about. Near misses have included The Exploding Girl from Wednesday, Burrowing
Images © Fabrizio Maltese / fabriziomaltese.com
Sharon Lockhart pushes her camera on a dolly down a factory hallway during eleven minutes of the workers' lunch break, and creates a kind of cinematic magic we all wish we could conjure in real life
Above: A highlight of the 2009 Berlinale, So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain. Treeless Mountain (dir. So Yong Kim) - This premiered at Toronto last September, but so far I’ve yet to see a better
With not much making a great impression thus far at the Berlinale, Margot Benacerraf's lovely documentary Araya comes as a breath of fresh air from 1959. Reminiscent of Agnès Varda's debut
Above: Tommy Lee Jones tracing paths through the swamps of history in Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist. Like a bullet deflected, Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist lands close to target
Rainy midnight at the lost and found - a.k.a. a 6th floor room of the Etap hotel, just along the amazing ruin that was the Anhalter Bahnhof, about 5-8 minutes' walk from the Berlinale
Waking up halfway through Ermanno Olmi's Terra Madre, one will find a most mysterious kind of documentary emerging. The anonymous first half—unimaginative footage of the Terra Madre conference
Over my cornflakes, I peruse the Berliner Zeitung - specifically its story marking the passing of the individual who came into the world as Eric Lee Purkhiser (or, according to BZ, "Pruiksher") on 21st
Above: Clive Owen in Tom Tykwer's The International. One down, who knows how many to go before I depart a week on Sunday. Actually, this isn't going to be a "cram-em-in", six-film-a-day festival for
Above: Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of The Anti-Defamation League, in Hashmatsa. Friends may know that documentary makes me uneasy—well, any form that frequently pretends to be unmediated