Nathaniel in Venice: "Official Competition" and "107 Mothers" surprise

Nathaniel reporting from Venice, a smorgasbord of days 3 through ??? ... I've lost track of days. What is time?

107 Mothers (Péter Kerekes)
A ‘tough' movie doesn’t have to be hard to watch. 107 Mothers isn’t ‘easy’ in its characters or themes, but it’s a surprisingly gripping watch, even entertaining. For a few scenes in the beginning of 107 Mothers, a new film from a Slovakian director Peter Kerekes, it feels like you’ve stumbled into an unfeeling doc about a women’s prison for violent offenders. And, indeed, this narrative feature is based on real stories about a specific prison in Odessa, Ukraine and Kerekes usually does documentaries. The establishing scenes interview several of the inmates, all pregnant, about their crimes which usually involve murdering their boyfriend/husband or his lover. It’s a curiously incongruous feeling that settles in: how could such hard-eyed numb women muster enough passion to commit a “crime of passion"?

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Doc Corner: Sundance winner 'Acasă, My Home'

By Glenn Dunks

Acasă, My Home’s opening passage ends with a single shot that is so startling it would normally be quite hard for the rest of the film to live up to its surprise. It’s little wonder then that it won a Special Jury Award for cinematography at 2020’s Sundance Film Festival, having some of the best use of drone documentary photography I’ve seen—something that should silence the naysayers of this common doc tool, at least for a little bit.

It’s lucky then for first-time Romanian filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc—previously only known as a journalist and for featuring in something called, yes, Sick Chicken: What You Need to Know—that drama follows his subjects wherever they go...

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Doc Corner: Three International Feature Oscar Contenders

By Glenn Dunks

Documentaries have been popping up more and more in the line-ups for Best International Feature (née Best Foreign Language Film) since Cambodia snagged a remarkably unlikely nomination for The Missing Picture. Last year’s double-whammy nomination for Honeyland in both the international and documentary categories (from an equally unexpected country, North Macedonia) has no doubt emboldened national selectors to choose non-fiction titles, which I am certainly happy about.

Three such selections are playing DOC NYC, the New York documentary festival that opened its virtual doors yesterday. It may be too early to see what the Best International Feature category delivers us this year (as of right now the number of submissions sits at 43), but the three films here representing Kenya, Romania, and Venezuela are all strong and fine contenders. In fact, there is at least one title here that I reckon could deliver for its home country—one that has been routinely ‘snubbed’ by the category, so much so that they changed the rules. Could this be their year for redemption with one of the best movies of 2020?

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NYFF: "Malmkrog"

by Jason Adams

The urge to wander off into our own personal worlds has become, presently, understandable. Many of us have been literally forced into it in 2020, covering our faces and taping up our windows, our only human interaction through Zoom. How many of us have watched pixelated people blow out their birthday candles from their corner of the Brady Bunch squares on our laptop screens? But I mean more than physical isolation here -- I mean it feels as if in some ways our imaginations are having a renaissance; in the absence of open spaces and fresh air at the least our brains have been given a moment to breathe.  It's in some ways terrifying and in others liberating, but there seem to be ways of embracing this shitty moment that aren't shit in themselves.

Reality dictates that Cristi Puiu's new film Malmkrog, named after the region in Romania where it is supposed to be set, must have been filmed before right now. But it feels of right now, right this minute, at least in the way of its isolated white-windowed impenetrability...

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Posterized: Romanian Cinema

by Nathaniel R

Whistlers, the Romanian submissions for this past Oscar race opened in a few US cinemas this past week (we reviewed it in November). It's a blackly comic noir that's been compared to the work of the Coens and it comes from one of the most celebrated Romanian New Wave auteurs, Corneliu Porombiou.

Romanian cinema was largely neglected and underfunded until after the fall of Communism in 1989. Things began to pick up after that. In the mid-Aughts the country's cinema became a critical cause with prize-winning films emerging with great frequency. The country's most acclaimed cinema is often categorized by gallows humor and incisive or satiric socioeconomic and political commentary.

For the second episode of this new season of "Posterized" and  "Making Waves" a retrospective of Romanian cinema currently playing a US tour, we've selected the (arguably) 15 most famous and/or acclaimed films from the country over the past 30 years. How many of these  have you seen? Don't feel bad if your number is very low (we haven't seen the majority of them either) but do you see anything you've been meaning to catch up with or that now piques your interest? 

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