#sergei-parajanov

#sergei-parajanov

The Lower East Side institution's OMA-designed, $82 million expansion debuted this week to mixed reviews, reflecting a range of opinions on its new look and functionality.

Ilker Catak's Yellow Letters and Emin Alper's Salvation, two politically outspoken films that examine Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan's autocratic regime, shared the top prizes at this year's Berlinale: the Golden Bear for Catak and Silver for Alper. These striking works share a lot more. Both titles are co-produced by Liman, an indie film company from Turkey.

You can be alone, with a camera in your hand, and you can walk. In that moment, the medium sheds the expectations attached to narrative production. You don't need to have something specific in your mind. You don't need to have in mind that you have to do something with it at some point. This is freedom.

At the Hamburger Bahnhof, the props, costumes, and set pieces of the musical are staged in vignettes throughout a large hall: a life-sized horse sculpture in a pink clearing surrounded by dirt, a curtained cart set up as a stage with a figure on its steps, two life-sized human figures in animal masks perched in a high window, as if observing the events.

Their gathering still had to be dispersed, but the enthusiasm that Ored Recordings inspires even among enforcers of the law speaks volumes about the power of what Khalilov and his friend and label co-founder Timur Kodzoko call punk ethnography: the recording of religious chants, laments and displacement songs at family gatherings, local festivals, in people's kitchens, to fight against the erasure of Circassian culture.

The conference brought together festival director Tricia Tuttle and the seven people who will be selecting the winners of the Golden and Silver Bears: Jury president Wim Wenders, director of acclaimed films including "Wings of Desire" and the Oscar-nominated "Perfect Days," and his fellow jurors Nepalese director Min Bahadur; South Korean actor Bae Doona; Indian director, producer and archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur; US director, screenwriter and producer Reinaldo Marcus Green; Japanese director, screenwriter and producer HIKARI and Polish producer Ewa Puszczynska.

Filmmaker Simplice Ganou, from Burkina Faso, spends his time documenting people and relationships, but when he travels to Winterthur, Switzerland, he faces a new challenge: nobody wants to talk to him.

It was like living in two worlds, and having to go from one to another in a dramatic way. From attending film festivals and walking down red carpets to crossing the Poland border and getting into the trenches, recalls Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov (Kharkiv, 40 years old) of September 2023, when he was headed from screening to screening, kicking off the race to the Oscars that he would ultimately win with his documentary 20 Days in Mariupol.

The title of Andrzej Wajda's 1958 film is taken from lines by the Polish Romantic poet Cyprian Norwid: Will there remain among the ashes a star-like diamond, the dawn of eternal victory? They are words imbued with bleak irony and disillusion; a pair of lovers in this movie discover them written in a ravaged church and have difficulty deciphering them, and also cannot decide where their loyalties and future lie as the second world war comes to its chaotic end.

an Act of Killing-style re-enactment of the 1919 conquest of the Adriatic city of what is now Rijeka by a rag-tag army assembled by the proto-fascist dandy-poet Gabriele D'Annunzio. It was precisely the kind of quirky cinematic gem that the European film awards should be there to champion: a film ignored by the main festivals, about an overlooked but relevant episode in history.