4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (Mungiu, 2007) Romania:
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The Axe in the Attic
Director: Ed Pincus & Lucia Small, USA, Release: 2007, Runtime: 110When Ed Pincus and Lucia Small watched Hurricane Katrina play out on their televisions, they felt incapable of standing idly by. They began by simply filming the TV screen, and then set out for New Orleans, with stops along the way in cities and small towns that had offered refuge to victims of the storm. The stories they discovered are harrowing portraits of human survival and bureaucratic red tape, rendered in classical cinema verité style. Yet The Axe in the Attic is also a startling investigation into the ethics of documentary filmmaking, as Pincus and Small question their ability to remain neutral in the face of apocalyptic chaos.
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so stunning:
Flight of the Red Balloon (Hsiao-hsien, 2007), France:
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ineffably serene film is not so much a remake of Albert Lamorisse’s children’s classic as a complex homage refracted through the complications of life in modern Paris. Juliette Binoche is Suzanne, the proprietor of a marionette theater and the single mother of a lonely boy named Simon (Simon Iteanu) who spends his days with his Chinese au pair Song (Song Fang). Simon and Song watch as the adults around them come apart at the seams, with joy and anguish, love and hatred…while the red balloon drifts across the Parisian landscape. Hou’s film is heartbreakingly beautiful, and it is graced with a truly magnificent performance from Binoche.
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Dans La Ville De Sylvia (Guerin, 2007), Spain/France:
During a few languid summer days, a young foreigner spends his afternoons sketching in an outdoor café. He is looking for a woman named Sylvia who he’d met years before in the same city, but he is also sketching the many attractive young women he sees everywhere, any one of whom could be her. Then one fine afternoon, he thinks he’s actually seen her, and he sets off through the city to confront his memory. José Luis Guerín’s lovely, exceedingly graceful work eloquently captures the feeling of being in love with love, and the youthful sense of a world filled with an almost limitless sensuality.
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heaps more at the new york film festival site
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(Alexandra, Alexander Sokurov)
(I Just Didnt Do It, Masayuki Suo)
(Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach)
(The Orphanage, Juan Antonio Bayona + produced by Guillermo del Toro)
(The Romance of Astreé and Céladon, Eric Rohmer)
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