Rushes: Berlinale and Rotterdam 2024 Lineups, Otar Iosseliani, "Vanishing Point" Forever

This week’s essential news, articles, sounds, videos, and more from the film world.
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NEWS

Break no.1 & Break no.2. (Lei Lei, 2024).

REMEMBERING

Favorites of the Moon (Otar Iosseliani, 1984).

  • Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani has died aged 89. When Favorites of the Moon was released in France in 1985, “little was known in western Europe” about its director, claims Ronald Bergan in the Guardian obituary. Though Favorites of the Moon offered many “their first entry into the singular world of Iosseliani [...] he had already made three features and several shorts in the Soviet Union” before “becoming an exile in France in 1982.” Iosseliani “observed his characters through behaviour rather than dialogue,” Bergan notes. “His use of sound and silence, and his complex movements of people, animals and objects made him the true heir to Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati and Luis Buñuel.” Iosseliani, a “bibulous man given to extravagant discourses on history and literature,” is being remembered fondly online—with more than one critic recalling that Iosseliani demanded that they recite Shakespeare to him as part of the interview. If you are in search of somewhere to start, six of Iosseliani's short films can be watched on the Cinemathèque Française's Henri platform.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Store (Frederick Wiseman, 1983).

RECOMMENDED READING

The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, 2023).

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey, 1999).

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

The Wandering Soap Opera (Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento, 2017).

  • “Sounds and images from a week’s worth of journeys into the Chilean filmmaker’s oeuvre had coalesced into a shapeshifting amalgam that made my own recollections hazy, and the films themselves porous.” Leonardo Goi reports from a Viennale Raúl Ruiz retrospective, discovering “worlds that bristle with a sense of narrative exuberance you seldom register in anything being made today.”

EXTRAS

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RushesNewsletterNewsTrailersVideosOtar IosselianiFrederick WisemanJerome HilerHayao MiyazakiJean CocteauWim WendersAlexander PayneIsabelle HuppertRaúl RuizRodrigo MorenoRichard C. Sarafian
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