Ioncinema

Last September, we had the first details on what Summer 1993 and Golden Bear winning Alcarràs (read review) filmmaker Carla Simón was cooking up for a third feature. Yesterday, we learned via the Cineuropa folks that production on Romería began this month. Newcomer Llúcia Garcia and Mitch are toplining the project with supporting players in Tristán Ulloa (of Sex and Lucía fame), Janet Novás (The Rye Horn) Celine Tyll, Miryam Gallego, Sara Casasnovas and José Ángel Egido complete the cast. Described earlier as a neorealist flamenco musical, gem cinematographer Hélène Louvart is onboard here and naturally so is producer María Zamora.… Read the rest

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Last September, we were thrilled to share a small yet significant piece of news: Jasmila Žbanić was preparing a sequel to her acclaimed film in 2020’s Quo Vadis, Aida? (read our ★★★★ star review), which was selected at the Venice Film Festival. Now, Variety has picked up on this and is touting it as an exclusive scoop. Nowhere in their article were they able to confirm the actual title (we still assume that it is Quo Vadis, Aida?: The Missing Piece) however we now learn that the Bosnian filmmaker will explore the aftermath of the tragic consequences of the 1990s Bosnian War — essentially wives/mothers uniting together after the genocide of thousands of husbands and sons.… Read the rest

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After winning the Silver Lion for Best Director with Miss Violence (2013), Greek filmmaker Alexandros Avranas returns to the Lido in the Orizzonti section with his latest work. This time, the focus is on a Russian family exiled to Sweden, where one might assume the biggest challenges would be adapting to the language, food, culture, and peculiar pop music. However, their true ordeal is only beginning. Known for his sharp exploration of human psychology intertwined with social issues, Avranas once again puts the family unit to the test. In his fifth feature, Quiet Life, parents Sergei and Natalia face the devastating aftermath of their asylum application being denied, which shakes their family to its core—especially when their youngest daughter, Katia, collapses into a mysterious coma.… Read the rest

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Swedish filmmaker Mika Gustafson shifts from the docu world beginnings to her fiction feature debut in Paradise is Burning – a selection in the 2023 Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section. Winner of the Best Director award, Gustafson infuses her world of children (here three sisters) fending for themselves in their free-wielding carefree spirits with a template that dismantles cliched representations of what it might look like to defend a fort that is without a caring adult. As the character Hannah, portrayed by Ida Engvoll, makes her entrance, we embark on a journey of exploration into previously uncharted depths. Gustafson employs a visual poetry that mirrors a world characterized by compassion interwoven with turmoil. … Read the rest

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The 2024 film festival summer closed out with the prizing at the Locarno Film Festival and it’s the debut feature of a Lithuanian filmmaker who claimed to highest prize in the Golden Leopard aka the Pardo d’Oro. Our Nicholas Bell admired the “distinctive choices” made in Saulė Bliuvaitė‘s Akiplėša (Toxic) – “elevating this beyond both miserabilism or sentimental absolution, meandering like its subjects toward some ill-formed ideas about how to escape an environment they did not choose and will certainly not uplift them.” Read the full ★★★ review here. The film also landed the Swatch First Feature Award.… Read the rest

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Right Sketch, Wrong Skit: Sangsoo Scans Patterns in Bittersweet Interludes

Perspectives of regret and the uncertain odyssey of retrospection emphasize the undertones of perennial auteur Hong Sangsoo’s latest, By the Stream (his second premiere of the year following A Traveler’s Needs). While its title is reminiscent of any number of Sangsoo narratives, which tend to be tied to various forms of landscape, like beaches, hills, rivers, or mountains, his latest is a more melancholic, reflective departure, and (at least for Sangsoo) contains more pointed cultural critiques in the subtext than per usual. While there’s plenty of eating, drinking (and the guilty pleasure of smoking cigarettes), an assortment of patterns emerge in the eddies of its straightforward story.… Read the rest

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Imitation of Life: Giordana Composes an Old-Fashioned Miracle

Music seems to be the language of the heart in The Life Apart (La vita accanto), a bizarre tale of suffering and expiation relayed with sedate repose by director Marco Tullio Giordana. Having directed a number of films over the past forty-plus years, Giordana won Locarno’s Golden Leopard for his 1980 debut Damn You, I Will Love You (Maledetti vi amerò), and has been a staple in the Italian film industry ever since. Often dealing in period dramas and coming-of-age sagas (often with epic running times, such as one of his most celebrated titles, 2003’s The Best of Youth), his latest is in keeping with his thematic interests, spanning the childhood of a troubled young pianist in 1980s Vicenza.… Read the rest

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Through a Glass Darkly: Keltek Finds Divinity Through Insanity

Sanism might be the term best used to define the trials and travails faced by the protagonist of Turkish director Gürcan Keltek‘s sophomore film New Dawn Fades (Yeni șafak solarken). Like the Joy Division song it shares a title with, a mentally unstable young man drifts in and out of hallucination in a film which also feels “Directionless, so plain to see.” Since the narrative is from the perspective of its spiraling principal, it takes a while to mull over Keltek’s languorous pacing to decipher if it’s merely an affliction or if something more sinister and supernatural is indeed afoot.… Read the rest

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The Taste of a Poison Paradise: Bliuvaite Explores the Commodification of Women’s Bodies

Lithuanian filmmaker Saulė Bliuvaitė perhaps could not have contrived a more succinct title than Toxic (Akiplėša) for her debut feature, set in the bleak confines of an industrial town where dysfunction and desolation is the day-to-day norm. Not all is despairing, despite what it sounds like on paper, as two thirteen-year-old girls, each outcasts for their own unique reasons, forge a fast friendship, initially as a means for subconscious survival. While the template of the narrative is quite familiar, Bliuvaitė makes some distinctive choices elevating this beyond both miserabilism or sentimental absolution, meandering like its subjects toward some ill-formed ideas about how to escape an environment they did not choose and will certainly not uplift them.… Read the rest

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The Unhappy Hooker: Vernier Explores Ennui in Monaco

Interconnected drifters aligned with sex work once again provide the backbone for Virgil Vernier’s third feature 100,000,000,000,000 (aka Cent mille milliards), a reference to the futile amount of money required to buy freedom…or happiness. A handsome young escort in Monaco has a life-changing connection during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the desolate period for the transients and wanderers who find themselves isolated. An interesting idea inadequately executed transforms a seventy-minute running time into a tormenting exercise of patience, a meandering and desultory effort which feels as unmoored from reflecting human experiences as its characters do from their purported apathy.… Read the rest

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