Flow: Hopeful post-apocalypse
We have gotten used to the idea of a post-apocalyptic world filled with violence and greed. The...
Tag: Official Oscar entry
Memories of a Burning Body: Women’s lives
“Being a woman is beautiful. But there is also an ugly side of it…” Okay, first off, I’m male, so...
AFIFest – I’m Still Here – A Family’s Trauma
Walter Salles’s film I’m Still Here is the story of a family that is torn apart by the acts of an...
The Promised Land: Eden in negative
“God isn’t civilized. God is chaos. Life is chaos.” I look at The Promised Land as the story of...
Four Daughters – Psychodrama of grief
How does one speak of losing not just one child, but two? In Four Daughters, Kaouther Ben Hania...
Bye Bye Tiberias – A home left behind
Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias is essentially a way for the filmmaker to get a better...
The Missing: Recovering what was lost
As I watched Carl Joseph E. Papa’s animated film The Missing, I spent most of the first half...
Rojek: Meet ISIS
ISIS (or Daesh or the Islamic State) often seems like a monstrous evil. I’m not saying it isn’t,...
The Taste of Things – Food for the soul
Films about cooking aren’t usually about cooking. That just serves as the framework to tell a...
Shayda – Celebrating strong women
An Iranian woman and her daughter hope for a new life while in an Australian women’s shelter....
AFIFest: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood – True communion
Anna Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood provides a glimpse into the lives of a group of Estonian women. Their lives are shared with humor, sorrow, and compassion. The documentary won the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award and...
AFIFest: The Teachers’ Lounge – World within the world.
When we visit a school in İlker Çatek’s The Teachers’ Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer), we discover a...
Return to Seoul – Not belonging in two worlds
?You are a very sad person.? Davy Chou?s film Return to Seoul is a searching for identity and...