72: Skateistan: Four Wheels and a Board in Kabul (LAFF 2011)
(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.) A sunrise cutting through the haze overlooking a dusty cityscape, a gang of ragged street kids playing among crumbling buildings and burnt-out military vehicles: These are familiar establishing shots from any number of Afghanistan documentaries. (And Iraq films [...]
71: Salaam Dunk (LAFF 2011)
(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.) When you put together dozens of feature films in the concentrated time and space of a festival, a sense of juxtaposition and convergence develops. Common ground and shared ideas are more visible, and it’s easier to see when [...]
70: Curling (LAFF 2011)
(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.) Denis Côté’s Curling is also touched by issues of mortality; it’s the most oblique and challenging of the three Québécois offerings, starting with the fact that there’s a relative dearth of curling in the film. Bowling is instead the [...]
69: Le Vendeur (The Salesman) (LAFF 2011)
(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.) The art of the sale is a delicate one, a push-pull struggle for power between buyer and seller, a battle that we begrudgingly undertake when there’s a purpose to it. But what happens when that purpose is stripped [...]
68: En Terrains Connus (Familiar Ground) (LAFF 2011)
(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.) There’s been an incredible amount of snow in Los Angeles this week. It’s coming in from Alaska, from Wisconsin, from Latvia; it’s all up on screen, with a considerable number of movies set in bleak white snowscapes. Maybe [...]
Kung Fu Fighting
When the first Kung Fu Panda was released in China, it caused an existential crisis. Chinese audiences marveled at how well Western filmmakers had understood Chinese culture, but deep down they all wondered the same thing: Why hadn’t this movie been made in China? In an thoughtful op-ed in China Daily, Chinese director Lu Chuan [...]
67: Medianeras (Sidewalls) (LAFF 2011)
(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.) Written and directed by Argentine filmmaker Gustavo Taretto, Medianeras is less burdened by the questions of politics and history than the other Latin American offerings. But it can’t fully escape that context, as when Mariana (Pilar López de Ayala) [...]
66: Unfinished Spaces (LAFF 2011)
(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.) After Fidel Castro’s ascendancy in 1959, the entire island of Cuba was swept up in a wave of revolutionary ardor: For those Cubans who didn’t see the revolution as the end of the world, it was a new [...]
65: Paraiso for Sale (LAFF 2011)
(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.) Anayansi Prado’s documentary Paraiso for Sale is a study in ecology, where a seemingly pristine environment is altered by one wave of migration after another. The islands of Bocas del Toro off the coast of Panama have become a [...]
64: 108 (LAFF 2011)
(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.) The story told in the opening moments of the documentary 108 is structured like a whodunit: In Paraguay’s capital of Asunción, Rodolfo Costa was found dead and naked on the floor, his closets empty. He had an alias, Hector [...]
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