IFFR

Poupelle of Chimney Town At this point, it’s fairly useless to ascribe Studio Ghibli qualities to any new anime release, so diluted have such comparisons become, but there’s an undeniable touch of that familiar eco fabulism to Studio 4°C’s latest, Poupelle of Chimney Town.…

Scarecrow Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung and frosty reaches of Eastern Russia has been slowly but surely building a robust regional cinema separate from the Russian…

IFFR returns this week, a short couple months after its last iteration. As a response to the pandemic, IFFR 2021 decided to split itself a bit, showcasing a virtual-only fest in February that ended with an ellipses. Finishing things up here in the first…

Black Medusa In a thankless role as one of the most morose femmes fatales in memory, Nour Hajri plays Nada, a (mostly) mute office worker by day, serial killer (men only, natch) by night. We never find out why. Such is the pseudo-provocative premise…

Bipolar The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith that things will get better. Grief-stricken after the death of his wife, he seeks out Hades himself and is told:…

As We Like it The idea of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, set in an ultra-modern Taipei with an all-female cast, certainly sounds appealing. As does the idea of transmuting Shakespeare’s Edenic Forest of Arden into an internet-free zone of play and…

We’re still working our way through our Sundance hangover, but that’s not stopping us…just slowing us down a bit. Forthcoming are 15-20 new pieces on IFFR ’21 titles, but in the meantime, we have below the six slated films playing Rotterdam that we have…