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Videoklipünk bejutott a belgrádi Kinoskop kísérleti- és analógfilmes fesztiválra!

A szervezők több száz nevezés közül válogatták ki a 12 kategória legjobbjait, a videoklipek kurátora pedig Aleksandra Dalichow volt, az elismert Mubi.com korábbi szerkesztője. A válogatásba a tavaly ősszel Super8-as keskenyfilmre forgatott halloweeni atmoszférájú WARSHOW-klipünk jutott be. Az operatőr Papp Tamás volt ezúttal is, én szerepeltem benne, rendeztem és vágtam (azt már nem analóg módon), és mindkettőnknek az egyik kedvenc eddigi munkája :3

A fesztivál Vimeo-csatornáján látható a válogatás mind a 6 klipje, és egy angol nyelvű panelbeszélgetés is a készítőkkel. Ennek során én is beszéltem a celluloidra forgatásról, az inspirációimról és a jövőre forgó filmtervemről. Az alábbi videóban ez a rész 57:24-től kezdődik: 

A klip pedig itt látható: 

The story is universal: a brave son must defeat his wicked father to save the world. The setting, if not Pan-African, is at the least Pan-Malian: a sprawling journey through Sudan and savanna, stagnant wetlands and sandstone cliff-sides. The time is eternal: an era before colonization, when each people had their land and the land their spirits. In this story, in this place, in this time Souleymane Cissé weaves his film Yeelen, a tale that is all tales in its scope, tragedy, and triumph. When first released in 1987, it heralded a breakthrough for African cinema, winning a Jury Prize at Cannes and becoming one of the first African films ever distributed on video. Though Cissé was trained in the Soviet Union and cut his teeth with documentaries, the film is a defiant rejection of many American and European cinematic modes, electing instead for a broader stylistic esotericism rooted in formalized rituals and ceremonies. Scenes and sequences move less like traditional narrative beats—though the story is linear, uncluttered, and straightforward—instead favoring the meticulous unhurriedness of a priest preparing for vespers or a surgeon for surgery. Scenes of eating and bathing, crafting and praying make up as much of the run-time as the film’s many battles, visions, and scenes of sorcery. In Yeelen we see another reinvention of cinema as an African art form, a continuation of the legacy of Ousmane Sembène and Idrissa Ouédraogo.

To read the rest of this review, click on the link!

Sayat Nova, The Color of Pomegranates (1969) - Wide master shots

Sarah Winchester, Phantom Opera (2016)

[Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin (2013) is showing December 9 – January 7, 2019 and Walter Salles' Jia Zhang-ke, a Guy from Fenyang (2014) is showing December 10 – January 8, 2019 in the United States as part of the series Behind the Viewfinder.]

When Jia Zhangke was just a boy, his father took him to the top of the ancient wall surrounding their hometown of Fenyang, a small industrial backwater nestled in northern China. From those heights, Jia could see the entirety of the world available to so many young Chinese born in the shadow of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms: a cloistered one of poverty and toil. He could see his family’s home in Courtyard #5, the building with foot-thick concrete walls built as a prison but repurposed as apartments for laborers. He could see the two apple trees growing between the buildings, some of the sole surviving remnants of the verdant Shanxi plateau before the arrival of sooty, countryside-sickening coal mining. He could see the desiccated concrete skeletons of high-rises being torn down by the same workers who originally put them up, now smashing them to rubble for redevelopment. And in the distance, Jia and his father could see the road that snaked into the distance towards the rest of China and the world. For a long while the two sat and stared at the road until a single car finally sped by. In Walter Salles’ documentary Jia Zhang-ke, A Guy from Fenyang, Jia recalls how the apparition of the car brought tears to his father’s eyes. “A few years later,” he reminiscences, “I also felt this limitation. I also felt that, on the other side of the wall of the fortified town, there was immense space, an inspiring world that I probably would never know.”

Flash forward several decades and the guy from Fenyang has grown into one of the most essential filmmakers of the 21st century, a man equally admired by audiences and harried by Communist authorities. Following the prohibition of many of his early films, Jia’s work was forced into a twilight world of pirated DVD sales and Western festival screenings. But Jia has endured, and Salles’ documentary sees him return to the locations of his early films as he braces himself for the shooting of one of his greatest works, 2013’s A Touch of Sin, an anthology film examining the rise of violent crimes in modern China as a phenomenon caused and exacerbated by domestic corruption and international economic depredation.

To read the rest of this review, click on the link!