Category: Uncategorized

Ultimate betrayal

WHEN YOU ARE confronted with the idea of losing your person, you will turn into a demon if you have to. You will break heaven and earth with the hope that these combats may twist the path of the stars. Even if you know that you are just […]

Suffer the little high school children

“IF YOU WERE born in Morocco, but only lived there for two years, why do you still consider it your homeland?” This and other myriad, somewhat intrusive and philosophically complex questions put to adolescents are central to Maria Speth’s immersive documentary, Mr Bachmann and his Class, which will […]

Show me your urine

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, […]

How to live one day at a time

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 […]

Ella’s story: So near and yet so far

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 […]