“They woke up something that was asleep inside of us. They made us see what we didn’t know.” The imprecision of this statement — spoken by Justino (Regis Myrupu), an indigenous Desana man who lives and works in the industrialized port city of Manaus,…
Josef Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, at his Kuntsevo dacha, following a cerebral hemorrhage and a few days of complete immobilization. His body was embalmed and placed on display from the 6th to the 9th of that month, at which point he was…
by InRO Staff Festival Coverage Film
Toronto International Film Festival 2019 | Dispatch 7: Wavelengths Program
Our seventh and final dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, our third, our fourth, our fifth, our sixth) is also our largest, offering takes on all of the features (and one long short) present in this year’s…
In general, films about childhood, pedagogy and learning present a tricky proposition for filmmakers — they tend to invite the adult’s tendency to condescend, idealize, infantilize, or otherwise represent a child’s world as other than it is. French artist Éric Baudelaire’s Locarno premiere Un…
Somewhere in the Algerian portion of the Sahara desert lives Malika, the sole proprietor of a lonely café situated by the side of a road that stretches in both directions to the horizon. Hassen Ferhani’s documentary, 143 Sahara Street, takes this space as its subject,…
The instinct to gather ’round a fire and share stories is as ancient as human urges get. The impulse to make movies in which the primary action unfolds via long-winded speeches delivered to offscreen flames—preferably in long, unremarkable fixed takes—is a more recent anthropological…
Following a short film collaboration for the 2018 Thai Biennale — the first of its kind — Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong and London-based artist Ben Rivers went on to direct Krabi, 2562, a feature-film expansion of the ideas explored in their previous collaboration. Taking…
Jessica Sarah Rinland begins her experimental documentary/essay film Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another with an epigraph: “When discussing the importance of the replica in relation to the original, the experts mentioned that the Latin root of the word original is orior, meaning…
Endless Night falls into a recent spate of art cinema that foreground its political engagement at the expense of both aesthetics (usually patchwork, derivative) and narrative (always treated with mistrust). In an interview, Galician filmmaker Eloy Enciso highlights his suspicion of “the occupational habit…
