💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~hammie › lff-2022.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:09:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A personal record of what I watched, written up in November 2024 ✿
Director: Mikhaël Hers
1980s Paris comes alive in this tender, richly observed drama, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg as a woman starting a new life on the radio waves.
Beautiful, lovely, warm, nocturnal, evocative – just a wonderful film. It took all the elements (Charlotte Gainsbourg in Paris in the 80s on night-time radio) and did not fail to deliver. Joe Dassin's <Et si tu n'existais pas> will now forever be associated with crème brûlée.
Director: Marie Kreutzer
Taking liberties with history and adding some fabulous anachronisms (including an evocative soundtrack by Camille), Corsage finds a perfect balance between melancholy understatement and liberating punkish attitude.
Surprisingly depressing! I really liked this – refreshing like a blast of wind on a stuffy autumn day.
Director: Alexandre O. Philippe
In his latest love letter to the movies, acclaimed documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe argues that the key to unlocking Lynch lies in the most familiar of places: evergreen family classic The Wizard of Oz.
A compelling deep-dive into connections, motifs and personal perspectives on David Lynch's work.
Director: Christine Ko
A distraught woman arrives at a remote hospital to report a vicious attack on her sister. But what seems like a simple police procedural quickly unravels.
A convoluted and twisty thriller, like a 26-episode K-drama compressed into two hours.
Directors: João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata
Revisiting locations from Paulo Rocha’s 1963 Cinema Novo movement classic The Green Years, Rodrigues and collaborator Joa¯ o Rui Guerra da Mata discover a Lisbon mostly emptied of its inhabitants (primarily due to the pandemic), and where the city’s infrastructure and setting – its buildings and surrounding landscape – take on their own character.
A ruminative meander through Lisbon. I remember there was a really hilarious scene where a man kept trying, and failing, to open a door without touching the doorknob with his hands to avoid COVID germs.
Director: So Yun Um
From Spike Lee to Gregg Araki, Korean liquor store owners have frequently appeared in pop culture and American cinema. By the late 1980s, three quarters of stores in the US were owned by Koreans. In her excellent debut feature, So explores her own memories of growing up in the liquor store her father owned, while also reflecting on their relationship and the generational gap she is trying to bridge. Imaginative storytelling interrogates the stereotypes and racial tension between Korean and Black American communities, fanned by the LA uprising in the early 1990s. Bottled-up feelings are harmful in this vibrant, nuanced portrait. So uncorks both dreams and heartbreaks; she reckons with the issues that are hard to talk about and witnesses the transformational work already in progress.
A moving and insightful documentary that many second-generation immigrants like myself can relate to. It dares to confront anti-blackness within the East Asian community and the filmmaker's honest conversations with her father laid bare pain and hope.
Director: Trinh Minh-ha
Prominent feminist film scholar Trinh presents a hugely imaginative cultural critique of China that resists the idea of a single historical narrative, instead evoking the plurality of indigenous perspectives. Combining travelogue-style video footage shot in the 1990s during her visit to rural areas of the country, with poetry, folk songs and oral histories, the film ruminates on China in the past, present and future tenses.
I remember this film being so slow-paced that it felt like it would never end. The video footage from the 90s was really interesting but the film seemed to primarily be about vernacular roof styles. My partner got a UTI during this screening and Q&A because it was so long.
Director: Chan Tze-woon
‘What is Hong Kong for you?’ It’s a question posed by Chan Tze-woon’s radical, inventive and illuminating film … This engaging and committed hybrid documentary not only conveys the layered history of Hong Kong, it is a riveting work of political activism … Adding an extra layer to this timely work are re-enactments of the island’s previous flash points, all staged by young activists. This intriguing formal experiment lends a political dimension to the intersection of reality and fiction, and demonstrates the linkages between generations; as each faces a recurrent form of social oppression, solidarity and defiance keep the spirit of resistance alive.
This is the most interesting, nuanced and thoughtful film on the 2019 Hong Kong protests that I've seen. By bringing political activists from the 1960s and 1980s together with those involved in the 2019 movement, the film highlights Hong Kong's long history of resistance. It shows the importance of drawing that connecting line between anti-imperialism and present-day movements, the importance of situating activism within a continuum.
Director: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit
Kao’s mission to become sport-stacking world champion is hindered by a ten-year-old rival and his own immaturity in this madcap sports underdog spoof.
A really funny, silly and sweet film that still manages to say something serious about growing up. I've actually watched this a couple of times now since it's on Netflix.