Posts Tagged ‘ICA’

Cidade Rabat (2023)

Dir: Susana Nobre | Raquel Castro, Paula Barcia, Laura Afonso | Drama 101

Portuguese director Susana Nobre won the prestigious La Femis Scholars’ Award with her short film Provas, Exorcismos. She is back in the Berlinale with Cidade Ribat a follow-up to her unusual feature No Táxi do Jack, a part-road movie part-ethnological portrait of small-town rural Portugal.

Grief and the unsuspecting consequence of mourning are the focus of this laconic drama that centres on 40 year old Helena (Castro), a typical 21st century ‘everywoman’ who seems to take life in her stride, juggling a lover, an ex-husband, a daughter, and her elderly mother – who we meet briefly in an early vignette – and whose death is viewed as just another daily task to be dealt with: we watch her choosing a casket with her sister. Yet, despite her obvious sadness the death provides an unexpected relief for Helena who has been so weighed down with her responsibilities and can now finally let her hair down, and she does.

With its limpid colours and artful compositions Cidade Ribat is quotidian yet thematically rich as a study of just how much 21st century women have to deal with and accomplish in their seemingly mundane everyday lives. Cidade Ribat is testament to how the world has moved on for women since the days of Jeanne Dealmann, yet this liberation and freedom has brought with it infinite complications. MT

IN ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | BERLINALE 2023 | FORUM

 

Orione (2017) ***

Writer/Dir: Toia Bonino | Doc | Argentina | 65′

Orione is a haunting expressionist portrait of grief in the aftermath to a shooting in Don Orione, Buenos Aires. The man who died was Alejandro “Ale” Robles, a gang member and petty criminal who was eventually betrayed by a friend and killed by a police bullet. In the days following the tragedy, Ale’s mother Ana finds soothing solace and therapy in baking – and so do we – as we watch her methodically stirring the cake mixture and kneading the topping for a football-themed cake in tribute to his life. Her feelings of shock and profound pain seep through the voice-over of this exposé of life in the barrio. Playing out in a collage of memories, footage of recent events and home movies of Ale’s childhood: A boy recalls his father being taken away, police questioning takes a sinister twist as events turn sour. As we try to fathom out what happened, an arrested suspect is led to a dimly-lit cell. Grim scenes in a mortuary follow: a greying torso still dented by clothing marks, provides the focus for the surgeons’ discussions. A lifeless hand flops over the gurney, as blood swirls away in a nearby sink. Toia Bonino’s cinema vérité mood piece slips between the macabre horror of the morgue and the tender memories of a family home, kiddies gurgling in a cosy bed. A life of crime comes out of a story of love: that of a mother for her son, and a woman who would bear him a child – post mortem. Ale chose a life of crime for the wages of death. Tonino shows how women create and men destroy in this ethnographic study of urban South America. MT

ORIONE is an ICA CINEMA distribution project | SCREENING AT THE ICA

 

Our New President (2017) ICA LONDON

Dir. Maxim Pozdorovkin, Russia/USA, 2018, 77 mins, English and Russian with English subtitles
Ever since a fateful visit to a mummy’s glass-encased tomb in 1997, Hillary Clinton has been plagued by fainting spells, drug use, and even allegations of sexual abuse and murder. Don’t believe it? Just ask the reporters at Vesti and NTV, two of the most-watched state-run news shows in Russia, where outlandish stories like these reach millions of viewers every night.

As more details of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election emerge, acclaimed filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin assembles a fever dream of Russian propaganda aimed at both Clinton and Trump from YouTube, RT, and other media platforms. Within this alternate universe of misinformation, we witness the seeds of the 2016 fake news cycle take root and successfully infiltrate the collective conscience of a Russian populace trained to distrust truth and objectivity.

The divisive stories peddled by these journalists, handpicked by Putin, range from sinister to absurd, but they all point to a coordinated effort to alter public opinion at home and abroad. COURTESY OF THE ICA.

OUR NEW PRESIDENT – THIS WEEK AT THE ICA

It Looks Pretty From A Distance (2011) **** (Z daleka widok jest piekny) Kinoteka 2013

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Director: Anka Sasnal, Wilhelm Sasnal

Script: Anka Sasnal, Wilhelm Sasnal

Producer:  Anton Kern Gallery

Cast: Marcin Czarnik, Piotr Nowak, Elzbieta Okupska, Jerzy lapinski, Hanna Chojnacka, Michel Pietrzak

Poland                      77mins       Drama

A very different flavour to this years Kinoteka comes from filmmaking team Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal, who give us a hard slice of life in present-day rural Poland, redolent in style and depiction to our own Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank).

Nominated for awards at the Jeonju and Rotterdam Film Festivals, this minimal approach to storytelling packs a very powerful punch. Life, death and the human instinct for survival is what is on display here, among the grimed reality of an everyday life bumping along the surface of complete destitution, where it seems even words are too expensive to be bandied about willy-nilly.

There is simply no room for frills and niceties and everything is up for grabs, be it in nature or a car.  Into this frame comes the love between a young woman and her beau, a scrap metal collector, living with a mother lost to dementia.

There’s a compression, a palpable claustrophobia despite the bucolic setting, brought on by ever-present poverty and that other accompaniment to country living; that everybody knows your business. There’s no plastic castle for hiding in this goldfish bowl.

It’s a super bleak take on life, shot with an economy, an absence of fat that complements the harsh beauty of their living landscape. There’s precious little to aspire to, so anything that alleviates the grind or the boredom is picked clean by hungry fingers. It’s a constant battle just existing in an arena where no quarter is given. Ever.

First film then from the Sasnal Writer, Producer and Director team and what a strong debut it is; an excruciating portrayal of the constant anger and frustration simmering just below the surface when lives are given no hope of relief. Hopefully it proves strong enough for them to get their next one off the ground.

Like taking a cold shower with a scouring pad. AT

IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE IS PART OF THE ICA’S REGULAR ARTISTS’ FILM CLUB SERIES AND WILL SCREEN AT THE ICA, LONDON ON 16TH MARCH 2013 AS PART OF THE KINOTEKA SERIES.  KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 2013: LONDON, BELFAST, LIVERPOOL AND EDINBURGH 7-17 MARCH 2013

 

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