Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov’s Palace for the People (2019)
Though released in 2018, it’s as if Bulgarian documentary duo Georgi Bogdanov and Boris Missirkov’s latest film was made to mark the thirty years that have elapsed since the downfall of Communism. In...
View ArticleMaria Saakyan’s I’m Going to Change My Name (Alaverdi, 2013)
Maria Saakyan’s I’m Going to Change My Name is one of those carefully structured films that use the opening sequence to reveal both the main themes of the story and the cinematic tools that will be...
View ArticleMaria Saakyan’s Entropy (Entropiya, 2012)
Entropy is a 2012 experimental feature film by late Armenian director Maria Saakyan which watches over four filmmakers and a simpleton as they hold out in a deserted house anticipating a loosely...
View ArticleJuris Kursietis’ Oleg (Oļeg, 2019)
That the cultural industry has not managed to change the dominant discourse on closed borders and xenophobia with artistic productions on migration and refugees is a now so blatantly obvious that it...
View ArticleNatasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov’s The Man Who Surprised Everyone...
Forest guide Egor (Yevgeny Tsyganov) and his wife Natalya (Kudryashova) live quietly in a small Siberian village. Natalya is pregnant with their second child when Egor breaks the news of his impending...
View ArticleSilva Khnkanosian’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of (2019)
In a remarkable opening shot lasting four minutes, we see a distant figure on a grassy hillside standing so still it seems as though the image has frozen. Eventually, the figure comes to life,...
View ArticleMorten Tšinakov and Lucija Mrzljak’s A Demonstration of Brilliance in Four...
A Demonstration of Brilliance in Four Acts is a 2D animation film Morten Tchinakov and Lucija Mrzljak made in 2018 after graduating from the Estonian Academy of Arts. The film was co-produced by...
View ArticleGyulai Panni’s Broken Things (2018) & Daria Kashcheeva’s Daughter (Dcera, 2019)
This autumn, from October 30th until November 2nd, the 8th Primanima animation festival took place in Budaörs, a small city close to Budapest. It is a festival often described as familiar and cozy,...
View ArticleNadja Andrasev’s Symbiosis (2019)
Symbiosis” literally means to live with someone. For the director of an eponymous short featured at this year’s Primanima festival, it illustrates either the condition of a couple tolerating their...
View ArticleMarko Škop’s Let There Be Light (Nech je svetlo, 2019)
Life is bleak if you’re male and based in rural Slovakia. Thus is the premise of Marko Škop’s Let There Be Light, which is only half as problematic as what the director ends up doing with it. For what...
View ArticlePeter Kerekes’ BATAstories (Baťa, první globalista, 2018)
What is the main idea behind the founding of Baťa, a century-old shoe company that once used to operate as a global empire from its headquarters in Zlin, Czechoslovakia? If we are to believe Peter...
View ArticleLevan Akin’s And Then We Danced (2019)
The affinities between dancing and loving are sufficiently obvious to have earned a firm place in our public imagination. As primal forms of bodily expression, both activities carry an immediacy that...
View ArticleMicol Roubini’s The Way to the Mountains (La strada per le montagne, 2019)
In Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle (1926), the protagonist K. arrives in a remote village, desperately trying to gain access to a mysterious castle. An impervious bureaucracy refuses him...
View ArticleBoris Akopov’s The Bull (Byk, 2019)
In Alexey Balabanov’s 1997 cult film The Brother, 1990s Russia found the cinematic portrait that every era of turbulent turn-over and hardship produces: a gritty, atmosphere-driven flick recounting...
View ArticleAndrey Gryazev’s Kotlovan (2020)
Grievances are best addressed to those who can alleviate them. If any person we trust can answer our need to be heard and understood, only those who promise us an escape route can turn anger into...
View ArticleAbel Ferrara’s Siberia (2020)
There comes a time in each auteur’s life when it seems compulsory to him or her to break the circle of filmmaking with a work that both transcends and elevates all of his or her hitherto made films....
View ArticleDaniil Zinchenko’s Tinnitus (2019)
We are shooting a film about graveyards and musicians” – a line uttered by one of the musicians participating in Daniil Zinchenko’s documentary – would be an accurate synopsis for the entirety of...
View ArticleNatalija Yefimkina’s Garage People (Garagenvolk, 2020)
The skyline of the typical post-Soviet city has now become a reasonably familiar image, with its vast complexes of identikit apartment blocks, often in a state of disrepair but not without a certain...
View ArticleIryna Tsilyk’s The Earth Is Blue as an Orange (2020)
As the shelling in the Donbass dwindles, the scars still remain fresh for both the urban landscapes and the people who live in them. In the heart of the “red zone”, Ganna and her children are...
View ArticleRadu Jude’s Uppercase Print (Tipografic majuscul, 2020)
With his two most recent films, Uppercase Print and The Exit of the Trains (released simultaneously), Radu Jude continues to charge ahead in pursuit of the two missions that have come to define his...
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