Tag: filmmaker

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Bouchra

Directors – Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani – 2025 – Italy, Morocco, US – Cert. 15 – 83m

***1/2

A queer artist and filmmaker jackal living in New York desperately wants to come out to her mother back in conservative Morocco – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 7th

This opens with a lengthy, bravura shot framing a section of a moving carriage on an urban, New York train. Inside, passengers include our main protagonist, the eponymous, anthropomorphised, leather jacket-clad, female jackal Bouchra, standing. The shot is static in the sense that the camera and the train are moving completely in sync, so that the moving carriage, although clearly moving, is motionless relative to the viewer (apart from the occasional judder caused by the travelling of the train).

As the train travels its route, our moving view of the moving carriage is constantly interrupted by objects between us and the carriage – grids of cabling, sections of barrier and other trackside features. This momentarily recalls the similar urban carriage interior early on in Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997), although there are no reflections here, merely levels, and any similarity between the two films stops beyond this point.

Bouchra is very different from Perfect Blue in intent, with a narrative – such as it is – that feels as if someone is shooting a documentary within New York’s queer subculture, capturing footage on camera and seeing what turns up, then trying to turn the resultant footage into a film.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Riefenstahl

Director – Andres Veiel – 2024 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 115m

*****

An unsettling, deep dive into the indisputable artistic talent, evasive personality and self-reconstructed memory of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl through her personal archive of some 700 boxes – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 9th

Sepia / yellow images. A woman walking by the sea. Incidental music suggesting a reaching, a striving. Out of focus images of crowds lining the streets, coming into focus to proclaim, “Heil, mein Fuhrer.” The lighting of the Olympic flame, the firing of a gun at a track event. Leni Riefenstahl, as a young woman, examining hanging strips of 35mm film at the editor’s bench. And then an extract from a talk show: would she do it differently if she could live her life again? What were her mistakes? Her close association with Hitler? She hesitates – you can almost feel her squirming, trying to find a way round the question. She starts talking about her first film as director, The Blue Light (1932), a mountaineering picture in which she did all the rock climbing stunts herself. She didn’t know of Hitler at this point, she says. “If the Fascists saw you”, she was told, “you would become their hero.”… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Snow Leopard
(Xue Bao,
雪豹)

Director – Pema Tseden – 2023 – Tibet – Cert. 15 – 109m

*****

A monk invites a filmmaker friend to a remote farm in the Tibetan mountain region where a snow leopard trapped in a sheep pen has killed nine sheep – the late Pema Tseden’s final completed film is out in UK cinemas from Friday, November 22nd

Film maker Dradul (Genden Phuntsok) has been informed by his friend Nyima the Snow Leopard Monk (Tseten Tashi) of an incident and so sets out for the region of the Tibetan Mountains with a small crew in his car. Following roads in the freezing wilderness, the car arrives at a remote farm which consists basically of a stone farmhouse and a sheep pen where the Snow Leopard Monk awaits them, along with the old farmer and his family.

The sheep pen has been breached by a snow leopard, a rare animal that’s a protected species in Tibet, and the old farmer’s adult son Jinpa (Jinpa) is furious that it has killed nine sheep. Confronted with the camera, he argues vociferously that man must live with the snow leopard, and that a small number of kills would be acceptable, but an amount as large as nine is most definitely not okay.… Read the rest