Interview with Emir Baigazin, director of The River
Emir Baigazin's fable The River just screened at the Warsaw Film Festival, after winning the Warsaw Industry Days' Pitching Award the year before. Baigazin wrote, produced, shot, directed and edited…
Interview with Igor Minaiev - The Cacophony of Donbas
We are at the 34th edition of Warsaw Film Festival with Igor Minaiev, the director of The Cacophony of Donbas. Călin Boto: Your film is a brief deconstruction of the…
In Conversation with with Julia Sinkevych, General Producer of the Odessa International Film Festival
The Odessa International Film Festival is often cited as an event with the ambition to be the “Ukrainian Cannes”. Do you have that ambition or did you give up on…
Fighting a country’s fate in Thou Shalt Not Kill
Gabi Virginia Șarga and Cătălin Rotaru’s first feature Thou Shalt Not Kill had its world premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival. It’s a drama about a pediatric surgeon who finds…
Let’s Talk about Online Gambling!
Putting Lipstick on a Pig is a Finnish-Estonian documentary, directed by Johan Karrento. It tells the story of Päivi, a middle-aged woman working as an accountant, who steals 800,000 euro…
On ‘Land’ and Some Other Cinematic Issues
Babak Jalali’s latest feature Land portrays the life of a Native American family living in a reservation in the United States. Every day a new challenge emerges and they must…
LAND
Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay coined the term Fourth Cinema to describe Indigenous cinema, referring to films being shown more or less exclusively on the festival circuit. Besides Sundance's Native Program,…
The Dive – War is a culture
Israeli Yona Rozenkier’s semi-autobiographical first feature is a take on culture of violence, militarism, and masculinity - not necessarily limited to the director’s home country. Having debuted in Locarno, The…
BEFORE THE FERRY ARRIVES - A keepsake of Cuba before the big change
May 2015: a multigenerational Cuban family is in the living room right in front of the TV, quarreling in an indistinct yet heated argument. An elderly woman interrupts at the…
The Cacophony of Donbas
Found-footage films have a very specific place in the history of cinema. Using pre-existent material in order to articulate a discourse about the present by referring to the past is…
MANTA RAY - Social and magical border lines
Following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded the Orizzonti prize, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s directorial feature debut was presented in Toronto, San Sebastian and Busan where it…
School Service - Neverland does not exist in Manila
To the outsider's view, Manila appears as a city full of disturbing contrasts. It is the midpoint of a densely populated agglomeration, homing state banking and commerce headquarters, tourist lures,…
Emir Baigazin’s The River: On 7th day God created Internet
Emir Baigazin returns with his third feature, The River, which concludes his coming-of-age trilogy, consisting of Harmony Lessons (2013) and The Wounded Angel (2016). Consequently to his previous work, he…
The martial art of surviving in the underground
Joost Vandebrug’s debut feature Bruce Lee and the Outlaw has its roots in his career as a photographer as well as in the very first representation of Romania as a…
