Ausma – Laila Pakalnina (2015)
How does one handle a film, which so strikingly resembles human memory, in particular traumatic memory? The Baltic states have had a tumultuous history, most of which isn’t known in the world, let alone in…
trauma
By the name of Tania – Mary Jimenez, Bénédicte Liénard (2019)
Since the Industrial Revolution, children have been massively exploited for work. Even though nation states regulated child labour, there is still a lot of work to do in order to safeguard them. What seems to…
The year after Dayton – Nikolaus Geyrhalter (1997)
Since summer last year, I have slowly but surely made my way through the filmography of Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter, who I have started to perceive as one of the most important filmmakers working today….
Dead Souls – Wang Bing (2018)
It seems as though Chinese director Wang Bing gets better and better. Each film improves on the previous one, and with this I don’t mean that he improves on his aesthetics. Wang Bing stoically, stubbornly…
Shoah – Claude Lanzmann (1985)
It is clear to me that Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) would never make it into a Slow Cinema list. Perhaps, it shouldn’t be. Perhaps, it should simply remain a film apart from the rest in order…
Andrei Rublev – Andrei Tarkovsky (1966)
It’s been weird lately. First, I struggled to find the time to watch films. I was immersed in books, really good ones, and I didn’t want to stop reading. Then, once I had a film…
Arresting trauma – Martti Helde’s In The Crosswinds (2014)
“On the night of 14 June 1941, more than 40,000 innocent people were deported from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The aim of this secret operation – done on Stalin’s orders – was to ethnically cleanse…
Austerlitz’s time
What is Austerlitz’s time, and where do I get this from? Well, I didn’t expect my wanting to write a blog post about Jacques Austerlitz when I picked up W.G. Sebald’s magnificent book Austerlitz. It’s Sebald’s…
Year 2017 in review
I’m not someone who likes lists, all sorts of The best films…, The worst films… etc I never saw a point of social media getting obsessed with someone’s subjective opinion, with someone they have never even met…
Book review: Chantal Akerman, Passer la nuit – Corinne Rondeau (2017)
A small book at the bottom of a shelf that is overwhelmed with books on the big names of Hollywood; films, directors, actresses. There, somewhere in between those oversized books, I found the new book…