STAND BACK FROM Agnieszka Holland’s film Charlatan, loosely based on the life of herbalist Jan Mikolášek (1889-1973) and the grand impression that it leaves sits like lead on your chest. Not that this is a bad – or inaccurate – thing. This intense portrait of, in large part, […]
VERY RARELY ARE you privileged enough to experience a piece of work that is so supremely flawless in its articulation, coordination, depth and integrity that it raises a simple tale to biblical heights. Aleem Khan’s debut film After Love, featuring Joanna Scanlan is one such work. This tale […]
WHEN YOUR LIFE, and everything you thought it was, shifts irrevocably in a five minute medical consultation, you enter a complicated vortex of loneliness and reality that cannot be sidestepped. Run Uje Run, directed by Henrik Schyffert is an autobiographical foray into Swedish musician Uje Brandelius’s confrontation with […]
THE KIDNEY. IT’S the one organ in our bodies designed to function as a kind of ‘spare’. We are born with two, but can survive on one, if we really have to. Hence the idiomatic association that takes the donation of a kidney all the way to the […]
We all do it: Look at the generation after us askance, with a “so you think you’re smarter than us” kind of leer and a wish to trip them up on their own cleverness. It’s a way of holding onto our own sense of value in the world. […]
Sometimes it takes a relatively small conflagration to set the whole world on fire and let it burn to the ground. Alexander Nanau’s brilliant documentary Collective tells a story that will trigger your sense of urgency as it will trouble your gut. It features on this year’s Encounters […]
SHE SQUINTS HER beautiful eyes and frowns gloriously. Her tan body is health and lithe, playful, watchful, vulnerable, tough. This is Zeytin, a mixed breed large dog in Istanbul, central to an extraordinary piece of filmography called Stray, made by Elizabeth Lo, which features on this year’s Encounters […]
BEHIND THE FEISTY face and wry sense of humour of 98-year-old Capetonian Ella Blumenthal is a history that underpins the life of many European Jews who lived through the scourge of the Holocaust, bereft, broken and with scant wherewithal to pick up pieces and start life all over […]
WHEN THE TRADITIONAL lines of documentary are allowed to blend into the messy whimsy of what fictional tales are about, real magic happens. A kind of universal sacred magic that speaks to what all of us are, as human beings. This is what you can anticipate in Maite […]
EVERY ONCE IN a while, you may be lucky enough to come across a piece of documentary work which is so direct and simple, so clear and deep that it takes your breath away from its opening frame to its credits, and you emerge with something new in […]
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