Birha – Ekta Mittal (2018)
I have fallen in love. I have fallen in love with a film, with a filmmaker. I have fallen in love with a hypnotising atmosphere, a weight that is at once heavy and yet marvellous….
trauma
About Endlessness – Roy Andersson (2019)
I’m unsure as to whether I could name a single living director, who speaks to me in a way Roy Andersson does at the moment. His films are absurd, they are morbid at times, funny…
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…
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…