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D irector Debra Granik is an independent filmmaker in USA who works outside the Hollywood studio system.   Leave No Trace is her third feature film as a director without support from the influential studio producers and mainstream distributors.   Ms Granik often works with US scriptwriter Anne Rosellini. Their collaboration has resulted in two notable independent feature films: Ms   Granik’s second feature film Winter’s Bone (2010) and Leave No Trace.   The duo picked   up two novels on individuals living on the fringes of society (one on the family of a drug addict, another of a traumatized war veteran), and transformed those into   the scripts of unusually magnetic feature films with very striking performances from carefully chosen actresses, propelling them from near obscurity to world attention. This happened with all three feature films directed by Ms Granik: Vera Farmiga in Down to the Bone (2004), Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone (based on a n...

M any cineastes are aware of Roberto Rossellini’s famous work called Stromboli . But how many are aware of its complete title Stromboli, terra di Dio, which translates as Stromboli, land of God? The full title is essential to grasp what Rossellini as its director and its original story writer wanted to state through the film he conceived and made for us to enjoy and appreciate. The bulk of the critical analyses of the film considers the story outside of the film’s narrative—the extramarital affair between Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini, which led to the birth of three offspring and a brief self-enforced exile of Ms Bergman from Hollywood. Ms Bergman, while working in Hollywood, had expressed her desire to work with Rossellini after viewing his two films prior to Stromboli — Paisan and Rome Open City —by writing this brief and famous letter to him without having met him. Dear Mr Rossellini, I saw your films Open City and Paisan , and enjoyed them very much. If you nee...

E rmanno Olmi (1931-2018) is not often discussed on the same plane as Orson Welles or Andrei Tarkovsky. Yet they have certain similarities in their body of film output.   Olmi made 20 feature films and bagged over 50 international awards. His best work The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) is as awesome as Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941). Olmi’s film was based on his own original script, which he directed, cinematographed, edited and for which he personally picked an array of non-professional actors. For Citizen Kane , Welles had co-written an original script with Herman Mankiewicz, directed, produced, acted in the main role, and chosen his own cast of professional actors (most of them making their film debuts) and crew.   Olmi’s film won the Golden Palm at the Cannes film festival for the best feature film; Welles won a solitary Oscar for the co-written original screenplay. Olmi and Tarkovsky have common streaks, too; both are evidently theistic, Olmi a fervent Roman Catho...

M ost directors yearn to make one film at least that deals with science fiction in their careers; some succeed in making amazing products, most fail to make a lasting impact. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), and Godard’s Alphaville (1965) are memorable efforts by directors to deal with science fiction and come out trumps. They make a singular effort and rarely return to the genre.   Others like John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974), Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973), Cornel Wilde’s No Blade of Grass (1970) or Robert Altman’s Quintet (1979) fumble in their attempts to make a lasting impact, while a host of other directors end up making make escapist, commercial, comic-book films like Star Wars or Back to the Future that will please the pop-corn eating audiences. Two major filmmakers whom I respect, attempted to make their latest films in the first category—Naomi Kawase with Vision (2018) and Cl...

“ Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind, simultaneously.   Hope and despair.   A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself .”     “How easily they talk about prayer, those who have never really prayed.”   ----- thoughts written in the diary of Rev Ernest Toller, via “voice over”,   in First Reformed, scripted by Paul Schrader A ny evaluation of the film First Reformed would be considerably enhanced by some knowledge about the American Trappist monk, theologian, social activist Thomas Merton (1915-68), who had interacted with Buddhist monks, and   studied Hinduism, Jainism, Sufism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and published his thoughts in his bestselling   autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain and other works. In the film First Reformed , the principal figure Rev Ernest Toller (Ethan Hawke) writes a diary (read by "voice over") on his thoughts just as Merton had put his ...

“Dovlatov was a sex symbol, an Elvis Presley, a legend (in Russia)” – director Aleksei German, Jr., on the writer Dovlatov,   in an interview published in Sight and Sound “I saw Brezhnev in my dream. We drank pina coladas and discussed socialism. He promised to help (me get published).” Dovlatov to his mother, waking up in the morning on the first of the “6 days of 1971” shown in the film D ovlatov is an exceptional film and one of the most mature cinematic works made in 2018. Why is it exceptional?   It encapsulates the world and travails of Russian writer Sergei   Dovlatov (1941-90), friend and contemporary of eventual Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky   and their interactions in Leningrad (now St Petersberg) preceding the decision of Brodsky to emigrate to the United States within a part-realistic, part-fictional representative 6 days of 1971. The year 1971 is typical of a particular Soviet mindset within former USSR (now primarily Russia, having subsequently div...