Ioncinema

It’s a hybrid docu made on the small scale and dealing with a past that is pieced together through memory and a maquette, the painstakingly beautiful gem of a film presented at this year’s Un Certain Regard section in Cannes (where it won the section’s Best Director award and L’Œil d’Or – for the Best Documentary film on the Croisette) would become Morocco’s submission for the Best International feature category at the 2024 Oscars. Asmae El Moudir‘s The Mother of All Lies is a highly personal and political film — it’s powerful cinema by way of El Moudir’s innovative exploration of the narratives and the transformative potential of art in confronting concealed individual and collective memories.… Read the rest

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The Interest of Distance: Yeo Discovers the Masochistic Pleasures of a Surveillance State

“Strange feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of someone’s eye.” Samuel Beckett’s passage from Happy Days crystallizes the convoluted intrigue behind Singaporean director Siew Hay Yeo’s sophomore feature Stranger Eyes. Following his 2018 Golden Leopard winning debut A Land Imagined, Yeo once again explores similar themes on the overwhelming presence of absence, and again, a complex investigation of something labyrinthine ensues. A missing child is the jumping off point for the exploration of our innate responses to being observed, or, rather, feeling seen while under a state of constant surveillance, both by our loved ones and those behind eyes in the sky we will never see.… Read the rest

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Letters to Daddy: Grassadonia & Piazza Continue Their Cosa Nostra Sagas

Italian directors Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza reimagine the circumstances surrounding yet another mafioso tale with their third feature, Sicilian Letters. Freely inspired by events in Sicily from the 2000s, their introductory title cards reveal this tale is one where “reality is a point of departure, not a destination.” The Italian title, Iddu, is the nickname of a straggling mafia boss still being sought by law enforcement who have devised a circuitous plan to draw him out of his hideout. Starring two of Italian cinema’s most notable contemporary actors, Toni Servillo and Elio Germano, it is the directors’ most mainstream offering to date.… Read the rest

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A Vindicated Woman: Kulumbegashvili Constructs Potent, Profound Study in Body Horror

I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves,” wrote Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in The Vindication of the Rights of Women all the way back in 1792, one of the earliest publications of feminist philosophy. Although many details about her personal life obfuscated her literary contributions until recently, including coverage regarding multiple suicide attempts, she died of septicemia days after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley (who would later write Frankenstein). It’s been over two centuries since this publication and still we have yet to see transformational equanimity which would satisfy her wish.… Read the rest

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You might be surprised to learn that the slang term quisling which means a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying their country is taken from Vidkun Quisling — a Norwegian fascist and Nazi collaborator who served as the Minister President of Norway from 1942 to 1945 in a Nazi puppet state. It was Winston Churchill who immortalized the term. Unafraid to confront the painful chapters of his nation’s history, veteran Norwegian filmmaker Erik Poppe (of A Thousand Times Good Night, The King’s Choice and Utøya: July 22 fame) shines a light on the why — how did the man make such moral decisions and how was he held accountable for his actions.… Read the rest

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Erotic Stagnancy: Steigerwalt’s Depthless Approach of a Italian Porn Heyday

There’s a formidably compelling subject matter at the heart of Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s sophomore film Diva Futura, which recuperates the shifting social mores of Italian culture through the wild success of the titular pornography studio established by Riccardo Schicchi. Curating a handful of celebrity personas through his work, two of whom would go on to pursue political careers, this nostalgia tinged approach takes a look at a progressive swing in the country’s conservative rhetoric of the 1990s before the internet changed the game of the industry indefinitely. But this presentation is not the film which succeeds in capturing the movement or its participants.… Read the rest

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Joke’s On Us: Phillips Composes an Empty, Boring Spectacle

Kudos to Todd Phillips for forcing US audiences to be confronted with the intriguing subtitle for his highly anticipated sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, a psychiatric term from 19th century French psychiatrist Charles Lasegue, which means ‘madness of two.’ But the shared delirium implied of the toxic romance at the heart of the narrative really applies to anyone who’s impressed by this interminably vacuous sequel to Phillip’s 2019 Joker, which surprisingly won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and took home a Best Actor Academy Award for Joaquin Phoenix.… Read the rest

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Father Knows Best: The Coulin Sisters Examine the Detrimental Ripples of Fascism

With their third feature, The Quiet Son, French directing duo Delphine and Muriel Coulin (who are also sisters) explore the effects of extremism on a radicalized teenager from a working class suburban French family. In many ways, the trajectory of their filmography is similar to that of the Dardenne Bros., utilizing social realism to explore situations seemingly ripped from the headlines, such as their debut 17 Girls (2011), which also features a group teenagers getting together to make their own rash, cult-like decisions which have far-reaching effects they cannot comprehend.… Read the rest

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Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion: Du Welz Revisits Bungled Belgian Murder Case

“It is grand to contemplate the ruins of cities; but it is grander still to contemplate the ruins of human beings!,’ wrote Comte de Lautreamont, aka Isidore Lucien Ducasse, the French poet famed for his Surrealist poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror. It’s perhaps one of the less sensational or bizarre phrases from Lautreamont, the menacing essence of his iconic protagonist hanging like a slinky subtextual shadow over Maldoror, the latest narrative film from Belgium’s foremost arthouse genre auteur, Fabrice du Welz. But it’s the sentiment at the heart of his latest film, which most certainly deals with human ruination.… Read the rest

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(Disem)Body Talk: Guadagnino Pays Homage to the Paradoxical Beat Pariah

If Ayn Rand had dared to write a character who was a genius gay white male unable to reconcile his hedonistic tendencies and is thus thrown out of the heavenly refuge of Galt’s Gulch back to the hellishness of Earth, he might have resembled someone like Williams S. Burroughs. A non-conformist who set himself apart from the already non-conformist Beat generation he rose out of in the 1950s, Burroughs more readily identified as a heroin addict than a gay man, despite blatant suggestions to the contrary in his writings. Perhaps most famous for his 1959 novel Naked Lunch, and the subsequent obscenity trials it overcame in the ensuing decade (notably adapted into a pretty damn good film by David Cronenberg in 1992), he has long been a bruised icon for the social refugee.… Read the rest

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