a 30 second google search will bring up films on the subject by Kaneto Shindo, Akira Kurosawa, Yoshishige Yoshida, Shohei Imamura, and Nobuhiko Obayashi, and that's without even delving into nonfiction.
People seem to love
#Oppenheimer
but I'll just say it: I was uncomfy watching yet another movie about tortured white male genius when the victims of the atrocities glossed over by the script—Japanese people, interned Japanese Americans, and Native Americans—had no voice.
David Lynch criticises individuals who watch films on their phones.
“I always say: people think they’ve seen a movie, but if they’ve watched it on a phone, they haven’t seen anything. It’s sad.”
(via: )
remember when the chief film critic of the ny times basically tweeted "lol i just learned how to spell his name" when talking about objectively the most acclaimed and influential arthouse filmmaker to come up in the 21st century
this should be required viewing for everyone, one of the essential films of the 21st century. just for context, this clip is from the first 5-10 mins. every interview is this bad. it's a 4.5 hour documentation of a vile, violent, racist colonial state.
Michel Khleifi is best known for his fiction films, but I'm staggered by his collaborative film Route 181, a three-part road film through Israel during the Second Intifada
Between Heaven and Earth بين السماء والارض (Salah Abu Seif, 1959)
a group of strangers stuck in an elevator in the heat of Cairo as a microcosm of society. one of the great Egyptian comedies. story by Naguib Mahfouz. good quality rip with English subs.
had no idea that Med Hondo's first short Ballade aux Sources (1965) was a gorgeous landscape film/travelogue about his journeys through a newly independent Algeria and other parts of North Africa
large file of Palestinian films, including several rediscovered via the good work of Azza El-Hassan ().
also the following books:
-Palestinian Cinema: Landscapes, Trauma, and Memory
-Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution
Short Films by Fanta Régina Nacro 📽️ Now playing on the Criterion Channel!
The first woman from Burkina Faso to direct a narrative film, Nacro's work addresses complex social issues with a gently subversive, lightly comic touch.
as news of a Chantal Akerman boxset start to fill my timeline amidst this ongoing genocide it seems necessary to bring this question of her zionism back up to a film world that i am certain will leave it fully & shamefully unaddressed in their new rounds of praise.
bit of a nice coincidence because it's his birthday, but i put together a little something for folks who might be interested:
The Films of Idrissa Ouedraogo and Other Associated Media
just realized that i've now watched every film Omar Sharif starred in from 1960. an incredible year for him. all five are good (one an all-timer). lots of variance: screwball comedy, Hitchcockian romance, melodrama, and two literary adaptations (one of which is Anna Karenina).
had no idea that Med Hondo's first short Ballade aux Sources (1965) was a gorgeous landscape film/travelogue about his journeys through a newly independent Algeria and other parts of North Africa
Hou Hsiao-hsien says that watching Pasolini's Oedipus Rex (brought to him by Edward Yang) was what flipped the switch for him when it came to his appreciation and understanding of film syntax
Fatima, the Algerian Woman of Dakar is a masterpiece and one of the best movies i’ve seen in a long time. a caustic, thorny appeal to pan-Africanism and maybe the best film i’ve seen about Islam and Islamic society. just an incredibly rich film. i found it to be deeply moving.
does criterion actually use the money from selling mainstream stuff to fund the restoration and release of lesser known films or is that just something people like to tell themselves
top 10 of the 80s
Do the Right Thing
A City of Sadness
The Land Before Time
Mirch Masala
Wedding in Galilee
Sarraounia
Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting
The Thing
Reds
Love Massacre
Do the Right Thing
A Rustling of Leaves
An Autumn’s Tale
Rosa La Rose
If This Ain’t Heaven
The Home and the World
Bless Their Little Hearts
Losing Ground
Personal Problems
it's one thing to use it for the purpose of constructing the greatest wides imaginable, quite another to use it as a way to build layer upon layer of montage.
Chronicle of the Years of Fire is one of the great Algerian films and the only African film to win the Palme d'or. is this the US premiere of its restoration? i could be wrong here but i don't think its screened in the United States in over 30 years.
There's a huge series of films preserved by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project at
@AnthologyFilm
right now, including movies from Iran, Sri Lanka, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Mexico, Hungary, Turkey, Algeria, India, Egypt, and Kazakhstan
something to put on your watchlist: the short film Drums (1968) by Said Marzouk, about an actor who is late to a film shoot. features some of the most radical editing i've seen in an Egyptian film. only 25 mins! no subtitles needed.