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NEWS
Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024).
- Mike Leigh’s forthcoming Hard Truths will reunite him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, star of Secrets and Lies (1996). It will be the British director’s first film set in the present day since Another Year (2010).
- Jia Zhangke has divulged some details of We Shall Be All, now in the early stages of post-production. In production off and on since 2001, the film will be his first feature since Ash Is Purest White (2018). “I travelled with actors and a cameraman to shoot, without a script, without any obvious story,” the director told Variety. “This is a work of fiction, but I have applied many documentary methods.”
- Robert Bresson’s rarely seen Four Nights of a Dreamer is being restored by MK2 Films, set for a spring release. The director’s tenth film, an adaptation of a Dostoevsky story transposed to post–May ’68 Paris, is the only one yet to be restored.
- In more restoration news, the seven-hour “Apollo version” of Abel Gance’s silent epic Napoléon (1927) has been restored with "a mixture of detective work, digital wizardry, and extraordinary dedication" under the direction of Georges Mourier, backed by Cinémathèque Française. Sixteen years in the making, the new version will finally grace the screens this summer.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Sparrow (Youssef Chahine, 1972).
- “We gaze upon Binoche and Magimel in much the same way that we would examine a bottle of Clos de Vougeot or an Anjou pear, paying close attention to how they have aged and ripened.” For 4Columns, Melissa Anderson reviews Trân Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things (2023), a food-focused film that glorifies French gastronomy as “perhaps the signal achievement of the country.”
- “‘On my thirtieth birthday,’ he recalled in one interview, ‘I suddenly said to myself, Damn, I’m getting old! I realized that I had to change my life.’” Off the back of recent retrospectives of the filmmaker’s work, Dennis Zhou examines Edward Yang for the New York Review of Books, seeing how the trajectory of Yang’s life is visible in his films.
- “I don’t know if you become a photographer when you take pictures consciously or when you start printing them.” In Interview, friends Michael Almereyda and Wim Wenders talk about photography and Wenders’s two 2023 films, Anselm and Perfect Days.
- “Who will show the collective and individual heroism of these women, who broke the stranglehold of social and familial disapproval to serve their people?” In a 1977 text translated by Jonathan Mackris for Sabzian, Heiny Srour (The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived [1974]) looks at “Arab fiction films dealing with the Palestinian cause” that depict the role of women in the struggle, such as The Dupes (Tewfik Saleh, 1972) and The Sparrow (Youssef Chahine, 1972).
- Greg de Cuir Jr. is guest editor of the 2024 Woche der Critik magazine, which focuses on sustainability and systemic change within film culture. In the six articles he has commissioned, “authors pose questions about the Anthropocene, the multiverse and cinema’s use of resources.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Still Walking (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008).
- New York, ongoing through February 24: Across ten features, Japan Society’s series “Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux” examines “the shifting dynamics and struggles of the Japanese household in contemporary cinema.” Highlights include a screening of Hirokazu Koreeda’s Still Walking (2008), the US premiere of Keiko Tsuruoka’s Tsugaru Lacquer Girl (2023), and a 35mm presentation of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Twilight (1957).
- Los Angeles, April 4 through 7: The Los Angeles Festival of Movies, a new festival co-presented by Mezzanine and MUBI, will open with Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024) and will include the LA premiere of Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3 (2023).
- Nyon, April 12 through 21: Visions du Réel has announced that the special guest for their 55th edition is John Wilson, best known for his HBO series, How To with John Wilson. The festival will screen a selection of episodes of the show plus some of his previous short films, described by artistic director Emilie Bujès as “joyful, personal, droll, collaborative and highly contemporary.”
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
The Store (Frederick Wiseman, 1984).
- Frederick Wiseman himself is back on Shawn Glinis and Arlin Golden’s Wiseman Podcast. This time they discuss what Glinis and Golden call “the second era” of the documentarian’s filmography, covering The Store (1984) through Belfast, Maine (1999).
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
L'homme atlantique (Marguerite Duras, 1981).
- "My cinema is not made for people who love cinema. I didn’t think about those people for a second." Beatrice Loayza reviews My Cinema (Another Gaze Editions, 2024), a newly translated book of Marguerite Duras’s interviews, correspondence, and production notes.
- Has Yorgos Lanthimos finally defected from Team Pervert? Philippa Snow finds Poor Things strangely resistant to the darker side of the erotic.