This short film (discovered through Racialicious) about racial conflict (perceived or real, intentional or physical) won’t be easy to watch, especially when minimal context is given in its 13-minute run-time. Many films that introduce familiarly emblematic characters with hardly any background stories operate merely on a symbolic level. What you see and what you take [...]
“I didn’t want to offend anyone, but I did perhaps want them to be provoked. If anybody is offended, it’s his [or her] own fault. You are free to leave the theater after 5 minutes. I have always said: anyone who watches the film from beginning to end apparently has needed it,” says Austrian [...]
The first time I saw The River, it being my first movie by Tsai Ming-Liang, I brushed it off as overdrawn and artsy. The Wayward Cloud from 2005, however, has so impressed me that I started digging into Tsai’s film archive: Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a fantastic idea somewhat lost in pretension; Rebels of The [...]
It is 1984. The totalitarian state of paranoia and terror George Orwell immortalized in his cautionary tale half a century ago is really happening right in front of our eyes. This is East Germany, where Stasi, the ruthless GDR secret police, “shield and sword” of the regime, spies on its citizens to find everything there’s [...]
