A Woman Without Love: The Early Promise of an Iconic Auteur
More than a decade prior to the release of Belle de Jour, Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel directed this Mexican melodrama about the effects of infidelity on a family. https://youtu.be/KvhiILFqGJM At first it may not seem as if there is much that distinguishes the 1952 Mexican movie A Woman Without Love from other films of its era. The narrative generally never strays far from the confines of romantic melodrama, and the film features a constrained, yet lush and glamorous aesthetic clearly indebted to Classical Hollywood. However, upon further inspection it becomes clear that what makes A Woman Without Love stand out is that it represents nothing less than the
Director Oleg Sentsov is a Hostage of Putin Regime
The World Cup in Russia has brought attention to injustices in the film world. Milos Stehlik discusses the case of a director imprisoned since 2014 under false pretenses in Russia. In a recent interview Facets founder and artistic director Milos Stehlik speaks with three preeminent figures of the film world from across Eastern Europe. On WEBZ’s Worldview hear from Askold Kurov a Russian documentary filmmaker who made a documentary about Sentsov’s sentencing, The Trial: The State of Russia vs. Oleg Sentsov (2017), Agnieszka Holland, chair of the European Film Academy and filmmaker herself, and finally Andriy Khalpakhchi, the director of the Molodist Film Festival in Kiev, Ukraine. https://youtu.be/GFohGYNapj0 Oleg Sentsov is a
The Poignant Confrontation of Reunification
In a style reminiscent of Chris Marker, Reunification (2015) meditates on the nature of memory, family, and art. Alvin Tsang is motivated to contextualize his family’s experience empathetically, historically, and philosophically. The intimate family history we are given is marked by immigration, betrayal, and divorce. But Tsang never relies on the shock of the real that reality-injected TV has worked so hard to manufacture. Instead, the film tries hard to be less sensational. This is a personal story and a personal drama. To create the needed intimacy, the film relies on matter-of-fact conversations, family photos, and the documentation of personal spaces. It is from
70MM Odyssey: The Music Box’s Celluloid Celebration Returns
Contributor Sean Duffy interviews Julian Antos, The Music Box Theatre‘s Technical Director, about the theater’s upcoming 70MM Film Festival. For the third time in three years, the Music Box Theater in Chicago is putting on a film festival dedicated specifically to showcasing 70MM. This year’s festival, “70MM Film Festival: The Ultimate Version”, includes previously shown classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Vertigo, Lawrence of Arabia, and It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, as well as first-time prints of Brainstorm, Starman, Krull, and even a collection of shorts co-presented with the Northwest Chicago Film Society. Not only is this the Music Box’s biggest 70MM festival yet in terms of its programming, it’s also the first with their new 41-foot