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Tag: The Labia

Life’s a detour. Enjoy the mushrooms

WHEN ALL THE silly bureaucracy, political correctness, humdrum and basic monotony of being in a job has ended, what happens next? Do you quietly lie down and wait for the end? Or do you let your hair down and party like there’s no tomorrow? Barbara Kulcsar’s film Golden […]

Pretty little Mother Earth

TOSS TOGETHER THE notion of undisguised good and evil, with a bit of lumpen docility in between; the forces of nature with those of easily corruptible and gullible humanity, blend it with hard-boiled yet utterly gorgeous computer-generated animation and a traditional Ukrainian and Slavic legend and you have […]

We plan. God laughs

OUR LIVES ARE replete with things that happen for reasons we don’t know. Things force our plans to change. Sudden news changes what constitutes our identity. We don’t really know what causes what, and why. Even though, in our hubris, we think we do. The Romanian film Mikado, […]

Three women and a machete

THE UNCERTAINTY AND wildness of a country in a constant state of civil war comes under the loupe in José Miguel Ribeiro’s astonishing achievement of a film, Nayola. Animated with a deep and convincing understanding of hand-drawn colour and landscape and a respect for the bubbles of air […]

Poor man’s medicine

PICTURE THE SCENARIO: You’re on the cusp of adulthood, the eldest of many children. Contrary to your father’s wishes, you have decided to be educated. It’s the late 19th century and your mother supports this great wish of yours to make a life for yourself. And it’s all […]

Of jumping, falling and holding on

PUT TWO PASSIONATE intellectuals together in a remote chalet in the French Alps. Add an almost disabled tween and his seeing-eye Border Collie, and sprinkle more publishing success on the one than on the other, and you get some extraordinary fireworks. Toss in a sudden violent death, and […]

Too many cradles, not enough hands

WHAT DO YOU think you were put on this planet for? To hone your artistic instrument? Make babies? Save the world? Whatever the question, the answer sometimes comes rather unexpectedly and with great gusto, from the universe itself. The Bulgarian film Mother, written, directed and produced by Zornitsa […]