Article by: Fabrizio Spagna
Translation by: Emiliana Freiria
What clear shots this film has, and what natural colours, free from the aesthetical and lighting limitations that some works show. Temporada has a carioca soul, thanks to the vitality and the refinement that the viewer can feel and understand from the first images, while walking the boulevards on the hills of Contagem, a southern metropolis in Brasil, a huge and contradictory country.
Article by: Annagiulia Zoccarato
Translated by: Cecilia Facchin
Over the past few years, we have been used to see high-quality films coming from Scandinavia, and in particular Denmark. This is also proved by the fact that films such as The Hunt by Thomas Vinterberg and Land of Mine by Martin Zandvliet entered the top five Academy Awards nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. It is important to mention these films, because The Guilty (Den Skyldige in Danish), first work of young Danish director Gustav Möller, is both one of the nominees for the TFF36 contest and Denmark’s choice for the next Academy Awards.
It should be added, as pointed out by producer Lina Flint during the press conference, that “in Scandinavia there’s a generation of filmmakers who grew up with noir and wanted to offer something new to their audiences in order to promote this genre”. Möller belongs to this new wave of brilliantly written and staged noir, thanks to his brilliant and confident first work, that never ceases to impress.
Continua la lettura di “DEN SKYLDIGE/THE GUILTY” BY GUSTAV MÖLLER
Article by: Tommaso Dufour
Translation by: Giulia Quercia
Family, interpersonal relationships, forgiveness and violence are just a few of the topics that we can find in David Nawrath’s first feature film. The German director, with the producer Britta Knoller, has presented his film at the TFF36 contest. Walter (Rainer Bock) is the protagonist’s name whom, employed by an entrepreneur colluded with mob, clearing evicted residents’ houses for a living; stoically resisting to trouble and being indifferent to the youngest colleagues’ brutality and aggressiveness, he lives alone, speaks as less as he can and sleeps on the floor of his apartment. Even if it seems like the external events don’t affect him directly, his life is going to change.
Article by: Andrea Bagnasco
Translation by: Cristiana Manni
The botanist Julio Betancur and his assistant Cristian Castro walk through the Colombian jungle collecting and cataloguing numerous plant species.
Continua la lettura di “HOMO BOTANICUS” BY GUILLERMO QUINTERO
Article by: Lorenzo Radin
Translation by: Letizia Bosello
It’s funny how our concept of “self-realisation” may change. Leaving the suburbs of Chicago, learning a new sport in the streets, becoming the Horizon League’s “player of the year” for two years in a row, being a step away from the NBA and being transferred to one of the major Italian professional teams means being successful. However, someone in the audience disagrees: if a basketball player doesn’t join the NBA, he is a loser.
Article by: Gianluca Tana
Translation by: Alice Marchi
Director Stanley Kwan doesn’t need introduction. First Night Nerves represents for the director, who grew up during the Second New Wave of the Hong Kong cinema, a chance to come back home after a long absence. Even if many sequences have been filmed in a sound stage, the city plays a marginal yet fundamental role. The director sets the scene of the fictitious play Two Sisters in the Hong Kong city hall, for which a demolition proposal has been recently put forward. The director’s choice is a declaration of love for this building, where he spent a lot of time directing plays or taking part in film festivals. Continua la lettura di “FIRST NIGHT NERVES” BY STANLEY KWAN
Article by: Alessia Durante
Translation by: Maria Elisa Catalano
Probably, only Valerio Mastandrea could title Ride (which means ‘to laugh’ in Italian) a film about pain and mourning: a title which becomes caustic and, as he declared during the press conference, a little paradoxical too. Especially considering that the protagonist Carolina laughs very little in those ninety minutes of darkness and, if not for what the other characters say to her (and to us), we would not see her laughing at all.
Article by: Chiara Gioffrè
Translation by: Massimo Campostrini
Excess.
Absence.
These two words tormented me as I tried to rearrange my impressions on Mandy, a film that is atypical but coherent with the (short) filmography of its director.
Article by: Laura Barbella
Translation by: Melania Petricola
Bodybuilder, taxi driver, thief and art dealer: Walid called The Beast is the first person that the director Marco Proserpio met after crossing the checkpoint from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Along the way the huge taxi driver told him about how he carried off four tons of cement from the artwork Donkey with the Soldier by Banksy and how he put it up for auction on eBay for 100.000$.
Continua la lettura di “THE MAN WHO STOLE BANKSY” BY MARCO PROSERPIO
Article by: Cristina Danini
Translation by: Silvia Fontana
Howie (Brendan Meyer) is sixteen years old and he’s at mercy of his life. His parents want to divorce, or so it seems, and at school a classmate of his brother shows interest in him, but he only has eyes for the beautiful girl he takes the bus with. They have never talked to each other, she is older and he is very clumsy, but when their eyes meet, they both smile. Continua la lettura di “ALL THESE SMALL MOMENTS” BY MELISSA B. MILLER
Article by: Maria Cagnazzo
Translation by: Giulia Maiorana
The description of someone’s life through words and musical notes. This is Blaze, a film by Ethan Hawke, presented in the Festa Mobile section at the 36th Torino Film Festival. It is the story of the country singer Blaze Foley, who died at the age of 40 because of his extreme dissoluteness, or for his audacity.
The narration is a constant coming and going between past and present, as a matter of fact it unravels in three different time-frames: Blaze’s life with his muse before success; the singer after Sibyl; friends who talk about him on the radio after his death.
Article by: Fulvio Melito
Translation by: Cristiana Manni
In 237’ of pleasant and interesting interviews, Kristina Kondrad’s documentary, Unas preguntas wants to narrate the identity of Uruguayan people, tormented and, at the same time, tired from years of poverty and dictatorial and military governments, as well as its will to live freely. The opportunity to describe what was happening on the streets with a microphone and a camera arrived in 1987. At that time began the first demonstrations, which asked the Government the abrogation of amnesty to those soldiers who during the dictatorship were convicted of many crimes like the torture and kidnap of several people. From these waves of protest came the director’s will of acting as a catalyst of ordinary citizens’ thoughts. She intentionally avoids the names of politicians, writers, distinguished people and with lively curiosity walk through streets, squares and markets, looking for answers for the numerous questions, beginning every interview with: «What is peace for you? ». Peace was the word disputed between the right and the left alliance. It was what politics promised to a tired population, both with the maintenance of impunity law and with its abrogation. In a centrifuge of election propaganda, most people had their own concept of peace and everyone wanted it.
Article by: Annagiulia Zoccarato
Translation by: Daniele Gianolio
“To accept your role in life or to rise up against it?” Angelo, the main character of Markus Schleinzer’s film competing in Torino 36, must answer this rhetorical question.
What is his role in life? Angelo was torn off from his family and land and was sold as a slave in Europe. A countess decided to buy him in order to turn the poor kid into some sort of living educational experiment. Therefore one might say that he was luckier than the average of his fellow slaves. But is it really so? The movie is set at the dawn of the 18th century, when the so-called “white man’s burden” sort of feeling was widely spread across Europe. According to it, the white, acting like a savior, would take upon himself the mission of bringing civilization to those savage and barbaric tribes and to those men who were considered as “godless, unaccustomed to hard work and born to be enslaved”. Angelo receives the upper-class upbringing, focused on music, arts and the Christian religion, and lives the well-fixed life of the nobility. However, he will never be regarded as equal by his own peers. Despite playing an important role at the Viennese court, for his entire life he will have to suffer because of the more or less subtle racism of those around him.
Article by: Cristian Viteritti
Translation by: Cinzia Angelini
An explosion is a rapid and localized release of energy, mainly consisting in an exothermic decomposition of explosives, generally following an ignition; or in the sudden and fast expansion of a compressed gas. It is followed by significant effects due to the transformation into mechanical work of the energy released. If the explosion interacts with obstacles, the more the surface invested is and the closer it is to the centre of the explosion, the greater the energy exerted on themselves is. Which means that, if a bomb explodes close to a man’s body, it will be completely disintegrated.
Article by: Elisabetta Vannelli
Translation by: Laura Facciolo
Loneliness is an emotion that you can feel in an empty room as well as in a square full of people. It’s a reflection of the private feeling of inadequacy, a physical limit that it’s hard to overpass.
Sebastián Silva is a young Chilean director who is now committed in the United States. After presenting another film called La nana (The Maid 2009), now he returns at the Torino Film Festival in the After Hours section with his film Tyrel (2018), which has been presented at the Sundance Film Festival in a world premiere. In the United States this film has been defined as “the new Get Out” (Get Out, 2017, Jordan Peele). Tyler (Jason Mitchell) is an Afro-American boy who spends a weekend with a group of white guys, but he can’t fit in because he is black.
Article by: Gianmarco Perrone
Translation by: Gianmarco Caniglia
Two battles, running in parallel but intertwined, are evoked by the title of this brilliant feature and told with remarkable mastery.
Turin’s audience already knows Guillaume Senez for his debut film Keeper, winner of the Turin Film Festival in 2015. This year the French-Belgian director competes in the main section with Nos Batailles, that investigates the difficulties of a man facing the collapse of his every certainty.
Article by: Samuele Zucchet
Translation by: Giulia Quercia
A biopic about the life of the famous dancer Rudolf Nureyev, is the third director work of Ralph Fiennes, well known for his acting career (Harry Potter, Schindler’s List, Grand Budapest Hotel, to name some of the most notorious titles). In this own film, Fiennes decides to play the dance teacher of the dance Academy of St. Petersburg (at that time, Leningrad).
Article by: Alessia Durante
Translation by: Letizia Bosello
A woman talking about emotions to a cat. Maybe. A girl purring to her mother as if she was a cat. Some women wandering on a stage with fake pork heads on, creepy as if they were real. These are some of the images shown in the first five minutes of Josephine Decker’s new feature film, presented at the Torino Film Festival. The resulting confusion is the only certain element perceived by the audience, and it immediately appears as the film’s main feature, which is disturbing both in contents and in representation. Continua la lettura di “MADELINE’S MADELINE” BY JOSEPHINE DECKER
Article by: Cristian Viteritti
Translation by: Massimo Campostrini
There are films easy to review and others that are difficult. Relaxer, directed by the American director Joel Potrykus, deserves to enter the second category. The film is certainly one of the most singular and eccentric experiences of the Torino Film Festival: not only comedy and drama, but also science fiction and gore – shown in a totally unexpected way – come together in a mixture ready to explode in the most catastrophic event among all: the Apocalypse.
Article by: Giorgia Bertino
Translation by: Cecilia Facchin
Some people may remember him as the quiet and peevish guy hidden by his long black hair in Little Miss Sunshine, or as a writer on the verge of a crisis who falls in love with one of his characters in Ruby Sparks; for all the film-lovers, he is also an actor pushed down by the weight of a career born and dead in blockbusters in Youth, and, for the most curious ones, he is the best friend of a zombie with superpowers in the eccentric Swiss Army Man. It goes without saying: Paul Dano acted in many movies, working with directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Ang Lee, Steve McQueen, Paolo Sorrentino and Denis Villeneuve. It is important to keep that in mind if you are watching the first film directed by this 34-year-old man, who decided to take on the challenge of filmmaking after many years of acting at high levels.
Wildlife – one of the nominees for the TFF36 contest – tells the slow and transparent story of the implosion of a family which moves to Montana.
