IFFR
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IFFR 2016: Garbage Helicopter review
★★★☆☆ What keeps running but never gets anywhere? This riddle is posed on a number of occasions during writer-director Jonas Selber Augustsén’s head-scratcher of a debut feature. Gym-goers may answer slogging away on a treadmill but the principle could just as easily be applied to a film which is wickedly odd from start to finish.…
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IFFR 2016: The Bride review
★★★☆☆ The bold and deeply felt symbolism of Federico García Lorca’s famous matrimonial drama, Blood Wedding, makes it ripe for cinematic treatment. There are rich thematic veins to be opened in the writer’s text and his beguiling visual motifs are screaming from the page to be fully realised on screen. Carlos Saura’s flamenco effort Blood…
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IFFR 2016: As I Open My Eyes review
★★★★☆ How do you solve a problem like Farah? Principled, articulate but pig-headed, she is the whirlwind around whom Tunisian director Leyla Bouzid builds her remarkable debut feature. As I Open My Eyes is set in a very specific time and place: Tunis, summer 2010. It advocates the noble idealism, determination and exuberance of youth…
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IFFR 2016: Our top picks
The International Film Festival Rotterdam kicks off its 45th edition this evening with the world premiere of Dutch survival drama Beyond Sleep. Directed by Boudewijn Koole, it follows an ambitious geologist on a search for meteorites in Norwegian swampland. It will be followed by twelve days of eclectic cinema from all around the world ranging…
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IFFR 2015: Stinking Heaven review
★★★★☆ Writer and director Nathan Silver again seeks to explore the dynamics of communal living just as he did in Exit Elena (2012) to Uncertain Terms (2014). In the latter film, pregnant teens take refuge in the home of Carla (Cindy Silver), who plays a maternal, educator role in their lives and aims to protect…