AV Festival: some coverage

20 March 2012

MP here (and 'Stalker' above)

This post brings together all of my AV Festival coverage for Front Row Reviews so far. A second part will follow in a fortnight or so. [April 7: second part here.]

The Art of Time (2009)
Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh’s 2009 documentary examines how leading contemporary artists are responding to and utilising ever-changing perceptions of time in their work.
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Aurora (2010)
This long film about killing is Romanian writer-director Cristi Puiu’s second entry in a planned series of six, dealing with stories set in Bucharest.
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Colossal Youth (2006)
Shot on DV using only natural light assisted by reflective surfaces, this unique, deeply moving film aesthetically and narratively embodies the marginality of its on-screen ensemble.
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Double Tide (2009)
Sharon Lockhart’s film presents two long takes of Jen Casad digging for clams twice a day in the mudflats of coastal Maine.
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Five (2003)
Kiarostami's retreat into self-prescribed aesthetic regression, disingenuously subtitled "Five Long Takes Dedicated to Ozu".
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The Honour of the Knights (Quixotic) (2006)
Albert Serra's DV-shot, sparsely-plotted, Catalan-language adaptation of Spanish hero Don Quixote aspires to the elemental.
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Hors Satan (2011)
French writer-director Bruno Dumont's typically restrained and ambiguous drama, filmed on France's Opal Coast.
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Nightfall (2011)
James Benning's strangely beguiling 97-minute take of night falling upon a Sierra Nevada Mountains idyll, 8,000ft high.
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Once upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's best film yet is an ambitious and challenging work, achieving a balance between its talky police procedural plot and a melancholic human drama.
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Russian Ark (2002)
Aleksandr Sokurov's formally impressive tour of St. Petersburg's Winter Palace investigating Russia's history. Curiosity gives way to irritation.
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Stalker (1979)
Tarkovsky's classic antecedent to "slow cinema" sustains a beauty even if its ambiguities betray its director's apparent intellectual confusions.
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The Turin Horse (2011)
Its director's final film (read Srini's review here): a troubling swansong for the inimitable powerhouse auteur Béla Tarr.
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