On the set of her 2017 film Our Time Will Come, Ann Hui is slapping wet mud all across the backs of actors. Her other hand is clutching a walking cane. She stands in the pouring rain, puffing cigarettes, and yelling orders. Reaching 70 years of age – and spending the past 40 plus years working in film […]
Taiwanese romantic comedies can touch one’s heart regardless of their Rotten Tomatoes rating or the narrative itself. And despite the genre, the country’s cinema has always highlighted its culture and people against the wonderful landscapes and pictorial compositions of local architecture. Although rom-coms are filled with cliches, some storylines make the audience analyse their own […]
Asghar Farhadi, an Iranian director, producer and screenwriter, has a superb ability when it comes to writing his stories. He also has a very precise cinematic style which makes him different from Western filmmakers. While Farhadi’s first love was theatre, he chose filmmaking as his profession. Farhadi has always poignantly examined the themes of love, […]
There couldn’t have been a film less suited to this writer’s tastes than The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical 2019 drama about an aspiring filmmaker’s ill-fated romance with a drug addict. It was widely heralded as one of the best films of its year, although it proved hard to engage with due to its exploration of […]
Premiering at the London Film Festival this year, Martyn Robertson’s Ride the Wave follows the life of a 14-year-old surfer, Ben Larg. Hailing from the Island of Tiree in Scotland, at such a young age Ben has already grown a strong love for water sports and a passion to make it in life as a […]
I’ve never ran as fast as Usain Bolt until I was told that I would be conducting a 1:1 interview with Jan P. Matuszyński, a Polish filmmaker and producer, responsible for films such as The Last Family (2016) and Deep Love (2013) at the BFI London Film Festival. After months of not being able to […]
So much of the discussion around Titane has centered on a handful of extreme moments, that it’s easy to have a false impression about Julia Ducournau’s much heralded sophomore feature from the outside. The film is being talked about in many quarters as a mere extension of the Cronenbergian body horror of her debut, pushing […]
When WWII ended, Poland was thrown into another brutal fight, this time not against Nazis, but against communism, which took over the country from 1947 until 1989. While the 1950s, 60s, and 70s were unsettling, it was the 1980s that many consider to be the most significant time in the lives of Poles. Martial Law […]
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