The trouble with the long titles, especially when accompanied with even longer subtitles, is that they reveal too much of the film’s content. Well, almost the entire content… This is certainly the case with The Sun and the Looking Glass – for one easily forgets but the tree remembers by the Brussels-based multidisciplinary French artist Miléna Desse.
The documentary starts as a series of interviews, with Voin and his parents, occasionally cut with some of the 8mm home movies from the decades ago. But as the runtime progresses, the memories become more diverse, the footage is more and more distorted and the lines between the past and present, memories and the reality, gets blurrier and blurrier
Sidi Wang is a Chinese filmmaker living and working in Beijing and Austin, Texas. The quarantine order got her while she was in China, living with her mother, brother and step-father during the day and spending her nights in Skype talks with her father, whom she missed.
As complicated and as random as it seems, there is a clear method: the footage itself is in its technical aspects and “home movie” style (hand-held filming, abrupt cuts) is a nod to the times in the past, but are also debunking the thesis that everything was easier and simpler back then.
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.
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.
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.
