Screen Anarchy

Edgar Nito’s rural legend horror flick, A Fisherman’s Tale, opens at dusk with a shot of La Miringua. We’re looking at her from a distance, peering at her through branches of a tree. She is feasting on a goat it looks like, grabbing viscera by the handful. The blood stands out against her stark white skin and hair. This is her (un)natural form, naked and pale as a ghost. She turns to the camera and her pitch black eyes stare back at us, spreading fear into our souls.    The flick is an adaptation of a legend passed down orally from the indigenous Purépecha peoples in the lake regions of Central Mexico, specifically Patzcuaro in the Michoacán state. As we had stated in a festival…

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Easton’s mysterious psychological destruction drives him to the edge of sanity and possible self-harm by those who love him most… his wife and daughter. Will Easton succumb to their increasingly traumatizing pressure, or will he conquer the dark forces at play?   We have an exclusive clip from Chad Bishoff’s psychological thriller Daft State. The film is out now on digital and on-demand platforms as of November 12th, 2024, from Scatena & Rosner Films.    Daft State stars Christopher Backus, Skye P. Marshall, Ka’ramuu Kush, Paulo Costanzo, Jake T. Austin, and Iman Karram. Bishoff produced and wrote the thriller with Sam Harter. Erich Hover also produced with actress Mira Sorvino on board as an executive producer withInny Clemons, Brett Cullen, and Lisa Crnic.    Check…

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In a world of plutocracy, the working-class struggle is not a left or right issue.

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To the sounds of cicadas during a Tokyo summer, 11-year-old Karin and her father Tetsuya leave the city by train to visit a countryside temple where the caretaker is the grandfather she has never met. It is a grand old property at the edge of a forest, near a sleepy little fishing village. Local spirits abound. Wait. Does this all sound kind of familiar?   After 40 years of Studio Ghibli creating masterpiece upon masterpiece, the animation house was sold off to Nippon TV at the end of last year due to a lack of any successors to its founders: Miyazaki-san, who seems to have retired for real this time after many false attempts, and Takahata-san, who passed away in 2018. Given that there may not…

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Payal Kapadia’s soul-stirring docudrama, A Night of Knowing Nothing, delicately weaved together India’s national politics, student protest movement, cinema, and its nostalgia in 2021. Her follow-up narrative film, All We Imagine as Light, proves that she is one of the most exciting new talents emerging in the current international cinema scene. All We Imagine as Light starts with the documentary style footage of bustling Mumbai, as its citizens start the day in a ‘city symphony’ style intro, paired with voice-overs of actual workers who came to the big city, looking for work: street vendors getting ready for their businesses, people hanging on the back of trucks in a packed traffic, large crowds milling into commuter train stations, filling in on crowded train cars, talking, sharing…

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An unusual family lives an unusual life in Mark H. Rapaport’s Hippo, one of the stranger films that has played at the Fantasia Film Festival. Rapaport drops us into a suburban dystopic home where society’s rules don’t seem to apply, and no subject is too taboo to elicit nervous laughter. Hippo (Kimball Farley) and his Hungarian adopted sister Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger) share a troubling relationship with each other and their mother, Ethel (Eliza Roberts), as they approach adulthood wholly unprepared for the world outside their doors. A young man on the verge of adulthood, Hippo is an odd duck. He spends his days playing video games, bossing around his mother, and searching for automatic weapons on the internet. It’s the late ‘90s, two of these…

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Imagine it’s the 90s, in the early days of wide home computer use, with dial-up models, compact discs as the main mode of music listening, and you’ve fallen asleep in front of your television. You wake up in a dark hour and images of beaches and modern dance and a strange pair of investigators sitting on a beach trying to figure out why scientists are dying mysteriously. Perhaps you think you’re still asleep, watching this strange, visually intriguing and sometimes not quite coherent story, but you can’t help but be drawn in. You might be watching Dream Team, the latest lo-fi, lo-budget speculative experimental work by American filmmakers Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn. Using 16mm film, the film is a strangely comic (not dark exactly,…

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Directed by Naoyuki Itō and animated by Madhouse, Overlord: The Sacred Kingdom is a continuation of season four of Overlord, the anime. The actual plot of the film has almost nothing to do with the series. You can watch it thinking it’s a high fantasy film about invasion and war, and only be confused a couple of times. The plot: the Sacred Kingdom has been attacked by the Demon Emperor Jaldabaoth and his army of half humans (half pig, half wolf, and so forth). The kingdom’s best paladin, Remedios Custodio, leads a small team to the neighbouring Sorcerer Kingdom to ask for aid. His Sorcerous Majesty is a huge skeleton, an undead, and the focus of the film. He is not the main character, however….

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Director George Nolfi’s film stars Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin.

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In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: the music videos of Encyclopedia Pictura. Recently the trailer for A24’s The Legend of Ochi dropped online, and the filmmaker behind it might not ring a bell as it is his debut feature. Isaiah Saxon should be well known to fans of animated shorts and music videos though, as he is one part of the collective Encyclopedia Pictura. Allow me to introduce the collective to newcomers, as Encyclopedia Pictura well deserves to be a household name. If three things are emblematic for Encyclopedia Pictura it is their ambition, their mixed-media approach and their love for nature. Let’s tackle their ambition first: Encyclopedia Pictura is not…

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