Tag: childhood

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

My Favorite War
(Mans mīļākais karš)

Director – Ilze Burkovska Jacobsen – 2020 – Latvia, Norway – Cert. N/C 12+ – 77m

****

Autobiographical documentary employs cut-out animation to describe a childhood in Latvia when it was part of the Soviet Union – Glasgow Film Festival Thursday, February 25th to Sunday, February 28th

In World War Two. Latvia was caught between the Nazis and the Russians. After the Nazis capitulated, the country was absorbed into the Soviet Union. Ilze’s grandfather, a small farmer, was declared an Enemy of the State and sent to Siberia because he owned a small piece of land. Her Communist Party member father became a City Manager but he was killed in a car crash leaving her mother to bring up her and her brother alone.

At age three, Ilze’s parents risk everything by taking her to a forbidden beach a few miles from their home just so their young daughter can see the sea. This is the self-proclaimed “happiest country in the world” where party officials can queue jump and take the last pack of butter, where peace is paramount but shooting lessons are mandatory at school. As Ilze grows, she must keep quiet about all sorts of things or her mother will lose her job.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Black Barbie

Director – Comfort Arthur – 2016 – Ghana – 3m 36s

*****

In the programme Today, African Animation – A Tribute To The African Continent – from the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival hybrid and online editions

This is structured around a reading of a poem by a girl whose mother gives her a Black Barbie doll for her birthday. She hates it – “I want the white one”. Using a variety of 2D animation styles and the occasional bit of human pixilation, Arthur produces simple, arresting images of black girls alienated from the physical basics of their existence by a society that constantly tells them white skin colour is significant and black skin and curly hair is something to deny. The film maker lifts all this above the level of mere polemic by making her images, some of which are no more complex than animated child’s drawings, constantly arresting, doing both her cause and the medium in which she’s expressing it proud.

This film is not suitable for children.

Festivals

2021

Annecy Animation Festival special hybrid and online editions:

Monday, June 14th to Saturday, June 19th.

Festival Trailer:

2020

Annecy Animation Festival special online edition:

Monday, June 15th to Tuesday, June 30th.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Virus Tropical

Director – Santiago Caicedo – 2017 – Colombia, Ecuador – 97m

****

Currently streaming on MUBI: scroll down for the link to subscribe.

Quito, 1976. Paola (voice as child: Martina Toro)is born as the youngest of three sisters, Claudia (Camila Valenzuela) is the oldest and Patty (voice as child: Maria Parada) the middle one. Her father Uriel (Diego León Hoyos) is a Catholic priest supposedly retired from the church but in practice still working. Apart from one daughter’s first communion, we see virtually nothing of his life as a priest. Fairly early on in the narrative he departs for another city to carry on his ministry, leaving his wife Hilda (Alejandra Borrero), the girls and the family housemaid Chavela (Javiera Valenzuela) behind. Although he returns to the family much later on, he is never more than a peripheral figure in what quickly becomes a story of a girl growing up in a mostly female environment.

At home, Paola plays alone with Barbie dolls and a lone Ken while mum struggles with the disobedient Claudia, worried that she’ll ruin her life with the wrong boy. Claudia turns this around to study fashion design in Italy, then unexpectedly marries someone and moves away to the Galapagos Islands at the last minute instead of going to college.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Nahuel And
The Magic Book
(Nahuel Y
El Libro Mágico)

Director – Germán Acuña – 2019 – Chile, Brazil – 99m

****1/2

Opening Spotlight in the New York Intl Children’s FF 2021 on Saturday, March 6th at 7pm ET followed by a Q&A with the director. Previously in the Annecy 2020 Online Animation Festival

Nahuel is afraid of the water. This is a problem since he lives in a coastal town and his single parent father – his mum died before he knew her – is a fisherman who’d like him to help him on the boat. Whatever his dad asks him to do, he can’t seem to get right. For example, he never gets to the boat in time. If sent to the market to buy eggs, they get broken on the way home. To make matters worse, a couple of local bullies pick on him too.

One day he’s exploring an abandoned house an discovers an old book of spells. The old, blind man who lives there and who possesses strange powers – including a walking stick that sports an eye – appears to be some sort of guardian for the tome. That doesn’t stop Nahuel sneaking out of the house with it. Soon, he’s being followed by crows in the service of a sorcerer who wants the book for his own evil purposes.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Live Action Movies Shorts

La Jetée

Director – Chris Marker – 1962 – France – Cert. PG – 28m

*****

This movie has been resonating around my head these last weeks of the COVID-19 crisis as pertinent to where we are at present.

La Jetée / The Pier remains unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, black and white still images with voice over (which means that the English language dub, excerpted below, works just as well as the French language original). Little bits of it are really tough to watch in our current situation. For me, watching it again helps me deal with where we are right now. It’s about grief, about a world we’ve lost, to which we can never go back. It’s a film that regularly and rightly crops up on critics’ lists of the best films ever made. At the time of writing this, the film reads differently from the way it did three months previously. Not for everyone at the present time, but if you’re up for it, highly recommended.

Watch the opening minute below: