Shields frames Lynch’s story as part of a broad historical canvas interwoven with quotes and film clips featuring iconic Bay Area writers, artists and activists including Jack London, Angela Davis, Bruce Lee, Alice Walker, the Black Panthers, Philip K. Dick, Sly Stone, Sonny Barger, Clint Eastwood, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tupac Shakur and Ryan Coogler.
In Xavier Marrades’ short “Misericórdia”, the titular location could be seen from a highly religious and spiritual point of view: God had mercy on the people of that place, rewarding them with a beautiful nature, weather and the opportunity for leisure.
The structure of “Flesh” is exceptionally clever: the film is divided in five chapters titled after the five stages of meat cooking (“rare”, “medium rare” and so forth) with a different protagonist / narrator and a different animation style to each of them.
I have started watching films, exploring artwork and understanding the world in the same way that I do my grocery shopping. One tab is a virtual book splurge, where I literally and endlessly add knowledge I ought to have into an, albeit virtual, shopping basket. It’s funny that the supposed end point to this activity is to ‘check out’.
For the sake of his ideals, Arges Artiaga had left his seemingly normal life in Galicia to join the cause of the Kurdish people fighting the Islamic State in Syria. After three years of combat, he is back to Europe, with a stop in the UK to attend the funeral of one of his brothers in arms who had lost his life on their last day in the war.
In Chinese, the term “shanzhai”, has changed its meaning from the original “mountain fortress” or “mountain village” to “forged, replica or parody product”. The whole city of Shenzhen was practically built on “shanzhai” industry of the tech goods from the West, Korea or Japan.
The camera angles are sparse and direct, providing as little interference as possible to hint at the seriousness of the discourse and avoid distracting flourishes. There are no voiceovers or talking heads.
Lene Marie’s special place was Chios, Greece, where she did some of her best work, including the collection of self-portraits in an abandoned health facility that lead her to fame. In those photos, she exposed her fragility, vulnerability and the pain of the everyday life, with the striking contrasts highlighting the skin, the eyes and the bones, which was everything she had left from her body.
For a documentary covering some grave subject matters, Linda Goldstein Knowlton’s We Are the Radical Monarchs takes an unexpected, perhaps subversive approach to covering the activities of the quasi girl’s scout group whose focus is on American girls of color.
