Knife in the Clear Water – Xuebo Wang (2016)
In 2011, Béla Tarr presented his last feature film, The Turin Horse. The film, in which he had stripped everything bare, contains a lot of iconic images. There is the daughter sitting in front of…
A Love Unknown – John Clang (2020)
There are films that you watch. And there are films that you feel. Both forms have been part of my life for quite some time now. Some films go deeper than others, but that doesn’t…
Inland Sea – Kazuhiro Soda (2018)
How can we understand slow films? What do they show, what do they tell us? At some point during my (previously academic) research, I came to the conclusion that every slow film deals with death….
Organic Cinema – Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (2017)
Slow Cinema polarises. Even though it is no longer as prominent as when Jonathan Romney published his Sight & Sound article in 2010, the debate on the adequacy of the term ‘Slow Cinema’ prevails. There…
Spoon – Laila Pakalnina (2019)
Before I say a single word about Laila Pakalnina’s new film Spoon (2019), I need to thank Elina Reitere and the Latvian Film Institute, who allow me to discover the filmography of Pakalnina. It is…
Self-Portrait: Sphinx at 47km – Zhang Mengqi (2017)
Could it be that China currently has the single most promising output of contemporary Slow Cinema? I could, of course, be wrong. And yet it feels as though there are more and more slow films…
2019 – The Year in Review
Another year comes to an end and perhaps you’re as tired of “end of year” lists as I am. Every December (and increasingly every November), cinephiles and film critics rally to create a list of…
The Tree – André Gil Mata (2018)
Tarkovskian. Tarr-esque. Filmind. André Gil Mata’s The Tree had me thinking a lot, had me admire what I saw and had me marvel over the future of Slow Cinema. Mata is part of a growing…
The suspended step of the stork – Theo Angelopoulos (1991)
There is perhaps no better time for beginning to watch Theo Angelopoulos’ Border trilogy than now. On Saturday, we commemorated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the visible, concrete border which…
Vitalina Varela – Pedro Costa (2019)
It is difficult, if not impossible, to think of a woman in film, who has such a magical, such an overpowering aura around her as does Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela. The minute she appears, stepping…