I can’t think of a better start to the Berlin Film Festival than Raúl Ruiz’s The Tango of a Widower and its Distorting Mirror (1967/2020), an eerie, imaginative story about a despotic professor, haunted by the ghost of his deceased wife, and which is also a tribute to experimental cinema. The film was to be Ruiz’s debut feature, but he never completed it. Ruiz’s widow, Valeria Sarmiento, who was also behind the completion of Ruiz’s other celebrated posthumous project, The Wandering Soap Opera (2017), effectively became its co-director.The film’s plot is quite simple, perhaps even schematic. A renowned professor (Rubén Sotoconil) sees his nightmarish dreams infect reality, assailed by her image in daylight. Wigs move around his apartment—surrealist, sensual, tormenting. In one dream, his nephew removes a wig from his body, as if he just gave birth to it. There’s plenty here to create tension,...
- 2/26/2020
- MUBI
StardustExile can take many forms. Several major filmmakers from Poland famously followed the Chopin route to France—Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Żuławski, to a degree even Krzysztof Kieślowski—while their pugilistic peer Jerzy Skolimowski, as well as Roman Polanski, was ranging even further across Europe and beyond. But the comically-oriented writer-director Andrzej Kondratiuk—an early Polanski co-conspirator, who died in June aged 79—found voluntary geographical exile without leaving his own country. He was able to renew his creative energies in rural isolation, seeking, gaining and retaining true independence amid a political system founded upon collective, communal effort. Kondratiuk’s five-decade career is thus a consistently idiosyncratic and enigmatic one, encompassing eight theatrical features, several shorts and five TV-movies. Among the latter is the work for which he’s now best known—at least at home—the raucous and irresistibly-titled black-and-white superhero/comicbook spoof Hydro-Riddle (Hydrozagadka, 1972), which after hostile initial reactions has...
- 12/6/2016
- MUBI
They won’t all be like this. Responding, after our inaugural dispatch, to the international vlogger community’s insistently histrionic cries that we get ourselves a cameraman, Neil acquired the skills of a friend’s friend who was also in town for the 16th edition of New Horizons, in Wrocław, Poland. We won’t always, it should be noted, have the luxury of such handy professional contacts. The location for this conversation was the roof of Wrocław’s Monopol Hotel, from which could be seen, not far away, a yellow Liebherr crane. Knowing the company has a branch in Sunderland, Neil speculated with much optimism that the crane might be from there—like him.Due to a technical mishap beyond our control, the published video concludes ten minutes sooner than the real-life conversation did. We have, though, an exchange covering Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights,...
- 8/25/2015
- by Michael Pattison
- MUBI
One of the joys of True/False, it turns out, is that nearly all of the post-screening Q&As are hosted not by programmers or associate programmers or awkward theater staff who’ve been left with a pair of mics and little context, but fellow filmmakers. Several of the screenings I’ve attended thus far were moderated by Jesse Moss, whose own exquisite film The Overnighters was part of last year’s lineup. Yesterday he moderated , amongst others, the Q&A with Brett Morgen, director of the deeply moving, humanizing portrait of the Nirvana frontman in Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, as witnessed above in the photo Moss himself took from the stage of the Missouri Theater (you can see me peeking out from behind someone on the end of the right hand side of the fifth row).
“While you were watching the movie, we were drinking,” Morgen confessed as...
“While you were watching the movie, we were drinking,” Morgen confessed as...
- 3/9/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Restored, re-edited version of The Deluge to open Michal Oleszczyk’s first year at Gdynia
Michał Oleszczyk’s first outing as the artistic director of the Gdynia Film Festival (Sept 15-21) will open tonight with the restored and re-edited version of Jerzy Hoffman’s 1974 classic The Deluge.
Under Hoffman’s supervision, the editor Marcin Kot Bastkowski has created Deluge Redivivus, a new, shortened version of the Oscar-nominated adaptation of the Henryk Sienkiewicz novel.
Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily ahead of the festival’s 39th edition in the Polish city, Oleszczyk says that he has made “two significant changes” this year.
“I reinforced the Young Cinema Competition, which puts emphasis on film directors who have just graduated from film schools - I strongly believe that it’s very important to support the new generation of filmmakers,” he said.
“I have moved this competition into the main festival cinema venue of the Musical Theatre, so that, currently...
Michał Oleszczyk’s first outing as the artistic director of the Gdynia Film Festival (Sept 15-21) will open tonight with the restored and re-edited version of Jerzy Hoffman’s 1974 classic The Deluge.
Under Hoffman’s supervision, the editor Marcin Kot Bastkowski has created Deluge Redivivus, a new, shortened version of the Oscar-nominated adaptation of the Henryk Sienkiewicz novel.
Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily ahead of the festival’s 39th edition in the Polish city, Oleszczyk says that he has made “two significant changes” this year.
“I reinforced the Young Cinema Competition, which puts emphasis on film directors who have just graduated from film schools - I strongly believe that it’s very important to support the new generation of filmmakers,” he said.
“I have moved this competition into the main festival cinema venue of the Musical Theatre, so that, currently...
- 9/15/2014
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
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