New York Film Festival With its tableau aesthetics and mechanical humor (in Bergsonian terms), Social Hygiene is a hilarious take on the ridiculousness of performative decorum in our social interactions. A satire of social norms and human communication in long static shots immediately reminds us of the master of this cinema, Roy Andersson, with his “human trilogy.” But Denis Cote’s film is full of dialogue, unlike the quiet cinema of Andersson. While Andersson focuses on humans’ inability to communicate with each other, Cote is more interested in how we waste words, time, and our own emotions by depending on arbitrary…
Author: Hamidreza Nassiri
The new film by Leos Carax, the winner of Best Director at Cannes Film Festival, is a must-see, but will the audience “miss the joke,” the same way many did for similar satires, like Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997) and Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)? While the first half of Annette can feel staggering, the second half is everything, narratively and stylistically. Making a satire about cancel culture, media exploitation, herd mentality, public elevation and destruction of celebrities by manufacturing mass consent, and how all of that destroy individuals and the society as a whole, in the middle of…
We talked with Tomer Shushan, writer and director of 2020 SXSW’s best narrative short film, WHITE EYE. The film is in consideration for Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Short Film (Live Action). A tense and suspenseful movie, WHITE EYE is shot in one long take and portrays race and class inequalities in Israel. It was nominated for Bridging the Borders Award in 2020 Palm Spring International ShortFest. “This topical film has screened at over 70 film festivals, including 22 Oscar-qualifying. This Live-Action short has won numerous accolades including the Oscar-qualifying Best Narrative Short Award at SXSW Film Festival. White Eye…
“Maryam (22) accidentally kills her husband Nasser (65) and is sentenced to death. The only person who can save her is Mona (37), Nasser’s daughter. All Mona has to do is appear on a popular live TV show and forgive Maryam. But forgiveness proves difficult when they are forced to relive the past.” This is the synopsis of Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness, the latest film by Massoud Bakhshi, and the winner of 2020 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition and the nominee for 2021 Lumières Awards, the French equivalent of Golden Globes. Hamidreza Nassiri has sat down to…
A wandering camera follows a performance crew as they prepare for an upcoming show. This documentary style stops once we get to see an audition taking place, where a few old people are asked to play victims of an incident. They are asked to cry and scream and beg for their lives. The film immediately sets up its tone: It is going to be a dark comedy. I Don’t Care If We Go Down in History As Barbarians (Radu Jude, 2018) is about Mariana, who wants to direct a public performance recreating the 1941 Odessa massacre, or the Odessa Holocaust,…
Cold Sweat is one of those films that is right out of newspaper pages, or in this age, right out of social networks pages. A female futsal player of the Iranian national team (Afrooz) is banned by her husband from traveling abroad to play in a tournament’s final game. The husband is a famous TV show host. This story took place in the real world so recently that is still in the Iranians’ memory with all details and this is the film’s Achilles’ heel. The film does not have much more to offer to its viewers than what they already…
Shown as part of the 2019 Wisconsin Film Festival, Tito and the Birds is one of those animations that can appeal to a wide range of audience. Its surface message can easily get to children, and at the same time, adults can pick up on the hidden images and deeper messages. But before getting to the messages, we should praise its visual style. A combination of oil painting and computer graphics have given a uniquely dynamic and otherworldly look to this animation. The backgrounds and landscapes are especially very dynamic in the way that they smoothly transform to different images…
Marcus Lindeen’s new documentary confronts its viewers with their obsession with sex and violence. Santiago Genovés, a Mexican anthropologist, decided to isolate and study a group of people on a raft while crossing the Atlantic ocean for 3 months in 1973. He got the idea for this study when, in November 1972, he was flying to a conference on violence and his plane was hijacked by a group of terrorists. Santiago was hoping that by this isolation and confronting the participants with harsh situations, he would find the root of the human conflicts. After many people volunteered to participate in…
Right out of the theater and both hyped up and disturbed by this important film. A great work of investigative journalism, Cold Case Hammarskjiöld is a must-see for everyone to see the dark history of the genocide of Africans by white supremacists. Shown as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival, the film starts with a black-and-white animation showing a plane being blown up in the sky. Soon, we find out the plane belonged to Dag Hammarskjiöld, the second secretary general of the United Nations. Mads Brügger adopts a combination of animation, photos, and live-action to make a breathtaking thriller, an…
A group of young girls argue with each other on what they’ve seen and done on Instagram as they walk on street. One of their fathers calls and the girl starts to come up with excuses for why she hasn’t come home yet. Suddenly people around them start to run. We follow the girls until we see a chopped off head on the sidewalk. This is how Pig starts. All this time, the sound has made us uncomfortable to finally give us the final shock. The sound of the girls talking over each other mixed with the urban noises, especially…