Archive for August, 2008
Georgia is in the news for all the wrong reasons this week, so this DVD release is something of a timely salve. It is by no means a jolly romp through the Caucuses, but its touching sense of humane irony lifts the spirits rather than crushing them underfoot. Writer/director Julie Bertuccelli worked with Krzysztof Kieslowski […]
The ceaseless woes of the Kurdish people have been far from unrecognised in the past decade. Their persecution at the hands of Iraq, Turkey and Iran (the countries which the unofficial territory of Kurdistan overlaps) has been unabatedly awful, to say the least. So, it is with the weightiest of historical baggage that Bahman Ghobadi’s […]
Ken Loach’s latest is a simple social realist film in a style not much different to what Vittorio De Sica was pulling out sixty years ago. The conflict is moral and economic, the characters humble but not necessarily noble. It is Loach’s gift for storytelling and rhythm that allow this well-run formula to evade cliché […]