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    My goal is to observe life and not to mystify it. What I film is simply matter that exists in the world. A person or object may have a particular meaning within the context of the film but I don’t see them as having an inherent conceptual identity. If I say the word ‘tree’, you don’t necessarily need to see the tree because you have learned since you were a child how to conceptualize the tree. In most narrative films, things—whether it’s a bird, a human body, a cloud, a car or a sound—exist as devices that only serve to tell a story. This is true for the actors as well. These types of films do not allow the viewer to see the actors as people existing in the world. Instead, the viewer sees a mask moving around in a costume and wearing lots of make-up. My goal is to bring out the individuality of each person or object and to capture something of their essence. I’m not interested in filming the mask. This is why you see the particular bodies in the films. If they are not...

      “If they hurt others, it’s because they hurt, too.”--  Benedicta, mother of Amador, responding to Amador’s comment on the root formation of the Eucalyptus tree, a tree that can cause explosive burning during forest fires, a metaphor of trees used in the film to describe human behavior                                         **** “They told you about me?” Amador to Elena “Yes, but..well, you know how people are.” Elena’s response   I n a 2021 interview for American Cinematheque, Russian film director Andrei Konchalovsky stated “ Sometimes silence is better than action .” That is a comment applicable to Oliver Laxe’s film Fire Will Come . The lead character Amador rarely speaks but his body language and the soundtrack do the talking, not words. Laxe’s film urges the viewer to explore the soundtrack that is expressive and offers much food for thought for an...

    “I don’t make a lot of films...I can only shoot what is essential to me”   --Director  Philippe Lacôte   in an interview to CNN titled "Machetes and Microbes: Why  Philippe Lacôte's Prison Drama Cuts Close to the Bone" (September 8, 2020)      F rench-Ivorian filmmaker Philippe Lacôte has made two feature films Run (2014) and Night of the Kings (2020), both officially submitted to the Oscar’s foreign language category by Côte d’Ivoire (former name: Ivory Coast), in respective years. Both films provide a marriage of documentary and narrative fiction styles, and both have international actors of repute playing major roles. Run has Côte d’Ivoire-born Isaach de Bankole (Jim Jarmusch’s actor in The Limits of Control/Coffee and Cigarettes/Ghost Dog-The Way of the Samurai ; Claire Denis’ actor in White Material/ Chocolat ) and Night of the Kings has Denis Lavant (Leos Carax’s actor in Holy Motors/The Lovers on the Bridge ); Claire Denis’ act...

T wo films made in 2019 mark the resurgence of Brazilian cinema: Dornelles’ and Filho’s joint effort Bacurau (a Cannes film festival winner) and debutant Maya   Da-Rin’s The Fever (a Chicago international film festival winner).   The following citation for the Chicago win is a good encapsulation of the merits of the second film,  The Fever: " "The Silver Hugo for Best Director goes to Maya Da-Rin for her debut fiction feature The Fever. The film drifts between dream and reality, portraying with both tenderness and precision the world of an indigenous father and daughter in the north of Brazil. It takes us into the family and their hearts, but never forgets the importance of the political context ."   Citation for the award from the Chicago International film Festival Justino (Regis Myrupu), a denizen of the Amazon rainforest, chooses to work as a security guard in Manaus, where instead of trees, he is surrounded by steel containers shipping goods  D irector...

I ndia produces some of the world’s most attractive textiles that contribute to making lives in India and elsewhere colourful and comfortable-- whether it be the clothes one wears or the cloth-based furnishings in one’s dwellings. Few realize the oppressive conditions in which textile printing workers in India toil to make the lives of billions of diverse people across the world happy and content. Machines and human beings together contribute to those lovely printed textiles. The contribution of human beings in the process is rarely in the limelight. Toiling within dingy factories, these human beings gradually become dehumanized and mechanical in their actions in their sheer desperation to earn a regular income to keep themselves afloat above the abject line of hunger and poverty. They become machines not out of choice but more from a lack of choice. Film director Rahul Jain’s honest perspective is not focussed on the machines that manufacture and print the textiles but more on the fac...

Rams is an unusual tale, remarkably told. Rams are male sheep and the entire film is appropriately about two dour male, hairy, unshaven Icelandic brothers. The two male characters, Gummi and Kiddi, are quite old and not married. They are not gay; they are not womanizers either. They are both passionate sheep farmers, who live on different homesteads, separated by a road and fences. It is indeed a strange tale to surface from a matriarchal country, one of the only two such countries in Europe, the other being Albania. The tale, created by director Grímur Hákonarson, is centred on the two brothers who have not talked to each other for 40 years but communicate with each other by sending written messages carried by a dutiful sheep dog. As you watch the film unspool, you wonder about what could have led to the grim, silent antipathy of one brother towards another. When the movie ends, you are never the wiser. But what one realizes at that point is that this information really does not matt...