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“Why are you attacking your parents in court?” —Lebanese judge/magistrate to Zain, a 12-year-old Lebanese, already behind bars for a crime he has committed  “ For giving me life ”—Zain’s response T he year 2018 has seen the release of three interesting films from three distinct parts of the globe. Each of the three   are very interesting, have several common themes and have and will be competing against each other for major honours at different awards nights and film festivals. The three films are directors Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum (from Lebanon), Hirokazu   Kore’eda’s Shoplifters (from Japan) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma (from Mexico).   Zain (Zain al Rafaeea) pondering on ways to feed and take care of someone younger and more helpless All three films deal with multiple children and their families into which they are born-- for no fault of theirs.   All three films are original tales conceived and developed by the directors from their own experiences and imagin...

B akerman is an award-winning Danish film that has surprisingly not been picked up for screening by international festivals beyond western Europe and the American east coast. Few critics seem to have either seen the film or discussed it. Yet it is better than some of the films that do get screened at film festivals around the globe and get discussed.   It won the Best Foreign Film award at the Maryland International Film Festival and Best Actor award at New York’s Nordic International Film Festival, both in USA. Director David Noel Bourke’s original script of Bakerman is quite engaging because it captures several feelings any economically fragile Dane would face in recent times.   Bourke presents a variant of the very subjects that the Belgian director brothers Dardenne or even the French director Stéphane Brizé usually work on. Bourke’s script injects a sinister psychological perspective to what the Dardenne brothers or Brizé would perhaps have preferred to skip while mould...

T here is always an unusual distinct flavour when a director makes a film on a tale that he or she has written from scratch. Praveen Morchhale’s three films are such films and have shown an ability to highlight positive bonding of people in ordinary situations and as well as in extraordinary situations. I n his debut film, Barefoot to Goa (2013), Morchhale highlighted two unusual bonding situations. The first was the love of two kids for their lonely grandparents, a wistful look at the large Indian family being gradually replaced by a more impersonal nuclear family due to economic compulsions. The second was contrasting the humane attitude of poor rural folks towards kids and strangers compared with the uncaring attitudes of the urban rich. I n his second film, Walking with the Wind (2017), Morchhale chose to write a film on a school boy of modest means living in the high elevations of Ladakh, in Kashmir, trying to repair his chair in his school classroom that he inadvertently broke an...

D ebut films of several directors worldwide have often been unforgettable, even when compared to their later works:   Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, Steven Spielberg’s Duel, Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Silence of the Sea, Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Claude Chabrol’s Handsome Serge, Bertrand Tavernier’s The Watchmaker of St Paul ...the list goes on.   That stamp of unmistakable awesome standards of filmmaking is apparent in Ash Mayfair’s debut feature film The Third Wife. Within minutes of the film’s opening credits an observant viewer gets a clue of the quality of the film that follows—intelligent use of visual editing in presenting the title of the film and the aesthetic and delicate balance between silence and music on the soundtrack. The Third Wife is an original tale written by the film’s director. It is set in the 19 th century Vietnam involving a rich nobleman liv...

I t is not easy to sit through any feature film that is nearly 4 hours long; more so if the characters in the film are dour, unexceptional, and behave like the dregs of society . An Elephant Sitting Still would challenge the average viewer to keep on watching the principal characters whose actions are abhorrent, whose views are negative, and whose reactions are slow. What keeps the fatigued viewer to persist in watching the long film is the unusual subject revealed in the initial few minutes of the film: an elephant that is sitting still in a city in China as part of a circus but eats the food offered to it. You keep watching the film trying to figure out the connection between the host of anti-heroes in the film and the elephant—which becomes clear only in the final sequence of the film. (The film is on show at the Denver Film Festival) Two school kids, Bu and Ling, meet at a monkey-feeding cage, where the monkeys keep a low profile An Elephant Sitting Still belongs to a wave of Chin...

D irector Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the most distinguished filmmakers alive and The Wild Pear Tree is arguably one of his best works to date, currently on show at the Denver Film Festival after its premiere at Cannes in the competition section earlier this year. If the viewer is patient to absorb a 3-hour film with lots of loaded conversations and meaningful visuals, the hours spent would be well compensated.   More so, if the viewer is well read and perceptive. It is a film that encompasses social, political and theological thoughts without being too obvious. Remarks made in passing are not easy to ignore in any Ceylan film, less so in this one. Sinan, the graduate, reads at home rather than look for work On a very simplistic level, a young man Sinan returns home after graduating in a distant college to his home town after some years.   He realizes his school-teacher father Idris has slid into a compulsive gambler, accumulating debts. His mother Asuman keeps the home runnin...