film directors
Susanna White
Last week a report was published by Directors UK laying out the cold facts of a trend that a lot of us knew had been going on for a long time - if you are a man you are six times more likely to make a feature film than a woman. The needle hasn’t moved for the last 10 years.What shocked industry insiders was the funnel effect on women’s careers. Unlike science and engineering which have had trouble attracting girls, 50 percent of the entry into film schools is female, and 49 percent of people entering the industry in vocational roles like runners or production assistants are women. What the Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
In the last century, when the BBC took arts documentaries seriously, Arena was one of the highlights of the week. Nowadays its appearance is as rare as that of a Midwich cuckoo. Money, or rather the lack of it, is the problem. In our grave new world a single promo for EastEnders can cost more than a 60-minute film.Three cheers then for Arena: All the World’s a Screen – Shakespeare on Film, a cavalcade of clips that show the Bard really is all things to all men. None of the talking heads belongs to a woman. None of the interviews is original, but David Thompson and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Distributor Second Run’s second collection of the Czech New Wave (strictly speaking, Czechoslovak, although the three films included here are from the Czech side of the movement) reminds us what an astonishing five years or so preceded the Prague Spring of 1968. What a varied range of film-makers and filmic styles it encompassed, making any attempt to impose any external category – whether political or artistic – redundant.The fate of the directors involved was as varied as the works they produced during that short-lived period of political thaw and formal experimentation. Many of those who Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Young Bulgarian writer-directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov have made a tight, bleak, suspenseful drama in The Lesson (Urok), driven by a commanding, unforgiving performance from actress Margita Gosheva who leads the film. Clearly made on a tight budget (though that doesn’t intrude on production values), their first feature tells an often remorseless story of what happens when the money runs out, which replays themes familiar from the Balkans while also attaining an almost existential dimension.For a story set in the countryside, and in the summer, their cinematographer Krum Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Mexico City itself is the dominant presence in Alonso Ruizpalacios’ debut feature Güeros, a road movie that restricts its journey to that megapolis and its environs. It’s not just the traffic that holds them up, more the fact that they don’t really have a destination. As one of its initially dispirited student protagonists says, “Why go if we’re going to end up back here again?”Sombra (Tenoch Huerta) and Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris) are studying at Mexico’s National University – except they’re not, because it’s 1999, when students there went on strike to protest the introduction of fees. The Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Director Sarah Gavron tends to make films with strong social content. Her TV movie This Little Life (2003) concerned a couple’s struggles after the premature birth of their son; her first feature film was an adaptation of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2007) about two Bangladeshi sisters, one confined to an arranged marriage that takes her to London, the other eloping in a "love marriage" in Bangladesh. She followed that with a documentary, Village at the End of the World (2012), a year in the life of a remote Inuit fishing village in Greenland, whose 60 residents fear the closure of their Read more ...
emma.simmonds
After his pop at Berlusconi, The Caiman, and cheeky peek inside the papal selection process, We Have a Pope, beloved Italian director Nanni Moretti returns to the melancholy territory of his Palme d'Or winner The Son's Room for his sombre, predominantly subtle latest. Inspired by the death of his own mother Agata in 2010, Mia Madre is a pared-down drama, coloured by genuine grief, peppered with and enlivened by moments of farce.The Son's Room dealt with the raw anguish of the sudden, violent demise of a child that rips through a happy family like a tornado. Mia Madre, on the other hand, is a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s easy to forget about the Slovak side of the Czechoslovak “New Wave”: works coming out of Bratislava often seem to receive less attention, even on their home territory, than those from Prague, where the now legendary FAMU film school that gave birth to the film movement was based.And that’s despite Štefan Uher’s Slovak film of 1962, The Sun in a Net, being generally acclaimed as the one that set the New Wave rolling. It makes for a situation, as Eastern Europe film scholar Peter Hames notes in a filmed extra on this Second Run DVD release, in which Slovak film of the period hasn’t so much Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Antonioni’s celebrated trio of films, L’Aventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, established the Italian director as a major and influential force in world cinema. All three of the works deal with the failure that resides at the heart of human relationship, offering a Mediterranean mirror to the Nordic angst associated with Bergman’s films of the same era.The women in Antonioni’s films – often played by Monica Vitti, his wife and muse – invariably upstage the men. Vittoria, in L’Eclisse, leaves her rather limp boyfriend Riccardo (Francesco Rabal) and drifts away from the wreckage of the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Pedro Costa’s Horse Money begins with a silent montage of Jacob Riis’s grim photographs of late 19th-century Manhattan slum dwellers, some of them former slaves or their offspring. One photo shows a bowler-hatted young black man sitting athwart a barrel; beside him stands a white woman with a filthy face. The former looks like he had enough wits to survive the squalour for a while, the latter looks doomed. As ghosts immobilized in time by the Danish journalist and reformer Riis’s camera, they open the door to the ghosts, alive and dead, who populate the post-colonial misery of Costa’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s somehow unsettling that, while the physical resemblance between Willem Dafoe and Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is remarkable to the point of being almost uncanny, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini almost consciously avoids elucidating the character of its hero in any traditional sense.This is as far away from the usual biopic format as can be. Ferrara’s previous film Welcome to New York may also have hedged certain details on its (purported) subject, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but that was for completely different reasons. If the French financier-politician and the influential Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rumour has it that there's a proposal floating around Hollywood to remake Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, his enthralling 1973 masterpiece of love, grief and death foretold. Anyone foolish enough to contemplate such a move should be made to watch this skilful and absorbing film about Roeg's career and work. It was a vivid illustration of how a singular artist pursuing a distinctive vision goes about his business, as opposed to being a mere component in a commercial clone-factory increasingly bereft of original ideas. On the other hand, what it didn't show us was Roeg's debilitating struggle Read more ...