Ioncinema

I Confess: Mohammadi’s Myriad of Memory Celebrates Women of Iran Who Don’t Stand Idly By

While we understand imprisonment as punishment par excellence, what Iranian filmmaker and activist Mahnaz Mohammadi explores in her searing sophomore feature Roya is how confinement methodically disorients logic, splintering the boundaries between past and present. Drawing from her own experience of incarceration, Mohammadi crafts a two-tiered psychological descent that is at once visually austere and aurally assaultive — jarring, off-putting and formally risky in ways that both immerse and unsettle the viewer. Who knew that there were not one, but two hells.

One of the film’s earliest images — the pressing of an elevator button descending to basement level minus three — becomes a distilled omen of the world of societal pain that awaits.… Read the rest

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Here are the winners! As we predicted, Yellow Letters was a formidable film in the competition of twenty-two films.

Golden Bear: Yellow Letters
Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize: Salvation
Silver Bear Jury Prize: Queen at Sea
Silver Bear for Best Director: Grant Gee – Everyone Digs Bill Evans
Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance: Sandra Hüller for Rose
Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance: (Tie) Anna Calder-Marshall & Tom Courtenay for Queen at Sea
Silver Bear for Best Screenplay: Geneviève Dulude-de Celles for Nina Roza
Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution: Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird) by Anna Fitch and Banker White (U.S.)… Read the rest

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Strategy of Tragedy: Chen Overdoses on Drama in Sprawling Family Portrait

The most succinct aspect of Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen’s latest feature, We Are All Strangers, which focuses on a modern day working class family in a country usually only defined by its opulence, is the title. Despite the prolonged running time, clocking in at over two-and-a-half hours, which allows for what feels like an endless parade of unfortunate events, the pressure cooker approach superficially bonds us to its characters’ woes, but we really don’t know too much about them at all. They are indeed strangers. If Edward Yang is who Chen aims to emulate, this falls perilously short by comparison (and, in fact, feels more spiritually aligned with something like Father of the Bride Part II, 1995).… Read the rest

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It Doesn’t Follow: Linares Villegas’ Queer Horror Forgets the Fright Factor

Horror has long been a safe space to explore queer stories; from cult classics Jennifer’s Body and Ginger Snaps to horror villains found in The Babadook and the androgynous gender fluid figure Pinhead from Hellraiser. Dominican filmmaker Victoria Linares Villegas ambitiously threads themes of closeted homosexuality into a horror framework in her debut feature Don’t Come Out (No Salgas). Invoking a homophobic killer as both threat and metaphor, despite its conceptual promise, the film struggles to generate genuine scares, fully realized characters, or a narrative pulse strong enough to sustain tension.… Read the rest

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Perfect Blue: Covi & Frimmel Marinate in Memories

“Everything changing all the time. Even the air you breathing change,” notes a character in August Wilson’s classic play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), which encapsulates the essence of The Loneliest Man in Town, the latest documentary feature from directors Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel. Unlike like their last title, Vera, which featured actor Vera Gemma as a version of herself while also navigating a fictionalized narrative, this is more aligned with their past catalogue, such as Mister Universo (2016), following a central subject’s experiences (and enhanced by a source novel penned by Covi).… Read the rest

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This Makes Two of Us: Mitić Explores Binding Connection of Trauma & Silence

Adolescence is once again cinematically explored as a breaking point between innocence and forced adulthood, and North Macedonia filmmaker Kosara Mitić‘s debut feature tackles this with blunt-force assault realism. Working within the confines of personal, and then shared psychological trauma, 17 visits the cycle of shame, the unseen, the unsaid and the long-game silence with an intense ground-level Dardenne Bros. type immediacy. Conceptually built with inspired by a real-life event curiosity and without sensationalism, while this suffocating, bleak Euro drama tends to feel contained and repetitive narratively, what it does best is present a rare form of female solidarity through violence.… Read the rest

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The Unbearable Likeness of Being: Trobisch Mines Banality in Family Drama

Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way…and sometimes those unhappy ways are boring. Such is the case with Home Stories (Etwas ganz Besonderes), the third directorial effort from Eva Trobisch, a film which the English language title already indicates as quite nondescript in an effort to encapsulate what it’s actually about. The original German language title, translates to ‘Something Very Special,’ which in actuality is more apt in capturing how innocuously twee Trobisch’s screenplay tends to be as it focuses loosely on three different narrative strands affecting one particularly bland family in Greiz.… Read the rest

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Capitalism & The Cosmos: Jinwei Ambitiously Explores China’s Future with a Stark Warning For Its Present

Long have Chinese filmmakers used the medium of film to address China’s growing industrialisation and embrace of capitalism. Modern master Jia Zhangke comes to mind as an inspiration but few have tried something quite as unique as with Light Pillar. For his debut animated feature, Xu Zao (also known as Xu Jingwei) has crafted a sometimes baffling, visually daring dreamscape grounded in reality with genuinely unique formal decisions. The animation is pushed to its limits as he weaves live-action performers into its zany, eclectic world — though not in any way you’ve seen before.… Read the rest

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All the Small Things: Eimbcke Explores the Pleasures of Disruption

The titular insects of Fernando Eimbcke’s latest feature, Flies (Moscas), metaphorically represent an unwanted, aggravating presence. But sometimes, these are elements which force us to snap out of stagnation and ennui, as is the case with the somewhat cold, and initially closed off Olga, an older woman who’s resigned herself to a sort of social oblivion in modern day Mexico City. Shot in black and white by DP Maria Secco, the Mexican metropolis is reduced to gray, dismal stretches of a sprawling apartment block, which visually feels more akin to East Berlin.… Read the rest

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The Torn Birds: Thornton Returns to Brutality of the Australian Frontier

The sovereignty of Australia was never officially ceded by its First Nations peoples, succinctly stated in the 1980s slogan “Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land,” coined in the land rights movement intended to reaffirm their stance as the continent’s original inhabitants. As custodians of their own cinematic stories, there are still very few Aboriginal Australian directors, but prominent among them is Warwick Thornton, who returns to darker days with his latest period piece, Wolfram. It’s a spiritual follow-up to his earlier 2017 title Sweet Country (read review), working once again with screenwriters Steven McGregor and David Tranter.… Read the rest

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