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Still from Bring Me The Head of Carmen M.

by :Ela Bittencourt
01-23-2019
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Future Bodies and the Tired Ghost of Carmen Miranda: Brazilian Cinema at Mostra de Cinema de Tiradentes

My stay in Tiradentes, Minas, where the 22nd edition of Mostra de Cinema de Tiradentes, is still taking place, was brief. And yet, it was enough to sense the intensity, both of the films and the debates, which I associate...

by :Ela Bittencourt
01-11-2019
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Short, Loud and Bold: London Short Film Festival (LSFF) Rolls In

I cannot speak to the long tradition of presenting bold shorts at the London Short Film Festival (LSFF), this being only my second time writing about the festival. And yet, if the past two years are any indication, it is...

by :Ela Bittencourt
12-24-2018
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Hirokazu Koreeda’s SHOPLIFTERS: Mythologies of Marginalized Families

Marginalized families have their own mythologies as far as their portrayal in popular culture goes. There is plenty of it in one of this year’s most lauded films on the festival circuit, Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro (2018), in which...

Yang Zhang's Up the Mountain about painter Shen Jianhua and his apprentices

by :Ela Bittencourt
12-20-2018
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IDFA Highlight: Brughel, Vermeer and the Visual Pleasures of Yang Zhang’s Up the Mountain

Watching Up the Mountain (2018), a documentary debut from Chinese filmmaker Yang Zhang (who has made a number of fiction films, including Shower, 1999), I was reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s extolling the virtues of narrative ambiguity: The fact that many...

Diane is behind the feel looking very depressed

by :Ela Bittencourt
11-15-2018
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Small Epiphanies: Kent Jones’ Diane at Viennale

“The film being like a play was not my intention,” American filmmaker and accomplished film critic Kent Jones mentioned at the Q & A of his fiction debut, Diane (2018), at the Viennale Film Festival (which we have also covered here)....

by :Ela Bittencourt
11-14-2018
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Late Afternoon of a Faun, or Carlos Reygadas’s Our Time at Viennale

Maddening, exasperating, overindulgent. Without a doubt, Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas can be all these things. And yet, his latest film, Our Time (Nuestro Tiempo, 2018), in which a married couple nearing middle age must come to terms with love and...

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