I wonder why sense of measure is so uncommon among filmmakers. Sometimes I cannot help feeling classic Hollywood, despite its being hopelessly commercial in the intentions, had more sense of measure in its less accomplished works than many specimens of authorial film-making at their best. Sense of measure means having the guts, when necessary, to […]
RIFF 2010
North Iraq, 2003, two weeks after Saddam Hussein’s fall. Ahmed (Yassir Taleeb) is a twelve-year-old boy. His only relative is his grandmother (Shehzad Hussen), an old woman of Kurdish lineage. They are traveling together looking for Ibrahim, Ahmed’s father, who was forced to join the Gulf War years before and never returned. A letter testifies […]
Friedrich Dürrenmatt had written a film script entitled Es geschah am hellichten Tag (It Happened in Broad Daylight). Not happy with the ending he had devised for the first version, he decided to write a new one. This time he chose the novel format, completely changing the epilogue and the morals implied in the story […]
Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu is an old acquaintance of the Reykjavik International Film Festival: in 2005 his The Death of Mr. Lazarescu won the Discovery of the Year Award. To the Special Presentations category of this this seventh edition of the film festival, Puiu brings his Aurora, a film that not only he scripted and […]
