Premiering at Cannes, Caravan is a road movie unlike any other this year. It is gentle, intimate, and powerful in its insistence on giving space to characters who are so rarely seen, let alone authentically portrayed, on screen. Directed with compassion, the film follows Ester (David Vodstrčil), a middle-aged mother overwhelmed by years of caring…
Tag: Cannes Film Festival
78th Cannes Film Festival: “A Useful Ghost” Review
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s debut feature, A Useful Ghost, is a superb, part political reflection, part gentle love story, and part quirky ghost tale, all set in glowing fog and the remains of an industrial past. Playful and bold, the film moves through themes of death, memory, and class with ease, guided by a director who clearly…
78th Cannes Film Festival: “I Only Rest in the Storm” Review
Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm is a hypnotic and textured look at power, identity, and longing, set in a tense West African city. The film follows Sergio, an environmental engineer working on a controversial road between the desert and the forest, as it explores the tangled realities of neo-colonialism, expat privilege, and…
77th Cannes Film Festival: “When the Light Breaks” Review
Under the moody lilac skies of the Northern hemisphere, comes an 80-minute life sampler of the hopeful and free-spirited youths of Iceland, directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson. There’s only really two plot points of the whole film, which would explain its length; the rest is filled in with the characters’ – particularly Una’s – emotional conflicts…
77th Cannes Film Festival: “Universal Language” Review
The latest absurdist gem sitting behind the oh-so-frightening curtain of non-English cinema is Cannes Directors’ Fortnight: Audience Award winner Universal Language, directed by and starring Matthew Rankin. In Persian and French, the film lands us in the snow-laid streets of Winnipeg, starting off in the French immersion school attended by Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi), Negin (Rojina…
77th Cannes Film Festival: “Locust” Review
Every generation has its angry young men, rebelling against the cultural conformity of the era. From James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando in The Wild One pushing back against the stifling conservatism of the Eisenhower age, to the various turn-of-the-century studies of disaffected adults stilted by middle-class life, these are snapshots…
77th Cannes Film Festival: “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” Review
Kowloon Walled City, a military fort turned ungovernable residential area in Hong Kong that was demolished in 1993, feels like the product of a screenwriter’s imagination run wild. As depicted in Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, the city’s self-sustaining ecosystem is almost entirely shut off from the real world, its 35,000+ residents living and…
76th Cannes Film Festival: “Omen” Review
Taken at surface level, you’d be forgiven for initially thinking rapper Baloji’s directorial debut was going to transform into a straightforwardly satirical examination of cultural tensions. Arriving in the Democratic Republic of Congo from his adopted homeland of Belgium to introduce his wider family to fiancée Alice (Lucie Debay), Koffi (Marc Zinga) is initially greeted…
76th Cannes Film Festival: “Inshallah a Boy” Review
The power of cinema in Jordan holds significant cultural, artistic, and societal importance. Jordan has a rich cinematic history, and the country has produced a number of acclaimed filmmakers and notable films that have made an impact both domestically and internationally. Cinema in Jordan has been instrumental in reflecting and exploring various aspects of Jordanian…
76th Cannes Film Festival: “Tiger Stripes” Review
You don’t need a gross visual metaphor to articulate the horrifying transformation we all undergo during puberty – but it certainly can help. The history of genre cinema is rife with adolescent allegories, from the straightforward telekinesis metaphor of Stephen King’s Carrie, to the superpowered changes that Peter Parker goes through to become a “man”…
VIEW OF THE ARTS 