“Have you ever loved a person?” In Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Passion, love is treated more as a concept than an experience. It is a mostly (but not exclusively) cerebral examination of what love is and how it fits into our lives. When Kaho and Tomoya announce they are...
“Entropy in on the rise.” Jakob Zapf’s A Handful of Water is a story of sanctuary. Sanctuary is often used to define a place of safety, but its root comes from being a place of holiness. In this film, the place of safety has the kind of life changing affect where we...
“Undoubtedly, the tremendous forces of history will cause the leader to fail to change reality as he wanted, but the leader’s primary obligation is to try to act.” Do leaders actually have the ability to change the world? Or are there so many factors involved that...
“What do two crooks know about raising a family?” A Thousand and One, written and directed by A. V. Rockwell, was honored with the Grand Jury Prize for US Drama at Sundance this year. It watches the development of a mother-son relationship through the years—alongside...
Mallory Wanecque as Lily and Timéo Mahaut as Ryan in a scene from THE WORST ONES. Sometimes filmmaking takes on filmmaking, giving us a look at a little bit of what goes into creating what we see on screen. That is the case in The Worst Ones, from directors Lise Akoka...
“What’s worse than being invisible is being seen as disposable.” Raising a child as a single mother is difficult. It is even more difficult when struggling with addiction. All the World Is Sleeping, directed by Ryan Lacen, is the story of such a woman. But the story...
“We’re stuck in a limbo…, broken in half.” In Carlos Amaral’s Infinite Sea, we find ourselves in a mildly post-apocalyptic world. More specifically, we find ourselves left behind. If I were someone who thought of an eschatological Rapture, I’m sure that this film...
?You are a very sad person.? Davy Chou?s film Return to Seoul is a searching for identity and belonging. But what if the discoveries are less than satisfying? And whose fault is it for the failure to connect? Return to Seoul is Cambodia?s submission for Oscar...
?Hope dies last.? The Oscar?-nominated documentary A House Made of Splinters, directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont, takes place in the shadow of the war in Ukraine. The location is only 20 kilometers from the front. While the war is not explicitly a part of the film, the...