Fifty-eight years ago – in the year of 1958 -, one of the leading figures of the avant-garde music composed the notorious 4’33”, a three-movement piece that instructed musicians to refrain from playing their instruments throughout the whole performance. John Cage’s signature piece explores silence as a dimension for the entire duration of the composition. In Pursuit of Silence opens as an ode to Cage’s piece, a silent surprise to viewers, swept by striking images of a single tree in a cornfield or a petrol station at night. This is a mundane clue of the meditative journey about to follow.

In a world where noise pollution has become part of our daily lives, the detrimental effects are overlooked at the expense of our own health and spirit. Far too often, for example, media devices such as phones serve as a distraction to such a cacophony, as we’re ultimately numbed down.

We have not come a long way since the experimental American movie Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982), and the subject is still as relevant and overlooked as back then. Koyaanisqatsi was a cry for help because relationship with nature is collapsing, while In Pursuit of Silence deals with the aftermath. We have become accustomed to this noise epidemic: instead of searching for a solution, we just seek refuge for brief periods of time. We have acknowledged the physical and mental impact of noise on our lives, and yet we have taken very little action to revert it.

American director Patrick Shen does not make any bold political statements, instead allowing specialists to make their case. The different perspectives from academics to audiologists ultimately reveal such eye-opening testimonials. The experience is both cathartic and sobering to the viewer. He treads on emotional ground with a very respectful tone, keeping the marriage of sound and image very minimalistic. From the bleakness of the metropolis to the wilderness of the forest, you’ll be immediately enraptured by the miracle that is life, where limits are created by speech only. Perhaps the world needs your silence more than your voice.

The doc and profound meditative experience In Pursuit of Silence is out in UK cinemas on Friday October 21st – click here for more information about the movie. There will some special screenings before then at Picturehouse Central.

You can watch the film trailer below:

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Oliver Stone’s Snowden sounds very promising. Will this be the biopic of the year? Will it solve the mystery behind the most famous computer wizard in the world? How could someone betray the FBI? Surely this film is a great opportunity to enter a very subversive mind. Sadly the film is nothing but a fantastic concoction probably with little connection to the real Snowden.

Stone told DMovies: “Snowden seemed transparent to me. I don’t see any flaws with him. The flaw he had is that he was too frail to work for the Army. Don’t make up flaws for a man that he doesn’t have”. So maybe Snowden betrayed the filmmaker, too. The entire movie is based solely on his testimonies. Mr. Stone only talked to one former FBI employee about the classified leaked NSA documents and it is not in the movie. Mr. Stone flew to Putin’s Russia nine times in order to interview Snowden and his wife Lindsay Mills.

Snowden is a very dangerous movie because it shifts your attention away from politics purely into the human side of Snowden. Indeed, the focus of the movie is his relation with his girlfriend and his struggle against epilepsy. Snowden is a frail and sickly character in this picture. And that’s a very political statement in itself.

There are some gaps between 2004 – when he was in the Army and was discharged after he broke his legs in an accident – and 2013 – when he leaked secret information to American journalist Glenn Greenwald, who back then worked for the British newspaper The Guardian. Throughout his life, Snowden chose to be part of institutions that rule over one’s privacy and demand unyielding loyalty. Snowden learnt not to trust anyone.

Stone’s biopic is an emotional drama that sustains Snowden’s points-of-view devoid of any political criticism. Snowden dictates the tone of the narrative. It is easier to relate to the loving relationship between Snowden and his wife than to the computer nerd. A nerd is often selfish, greedy, ambitious, egocentric and antisocial.

Snowden was part of BFI London Film Festival in October, and its theatrical release in the UK will happen on Friday, December 9th.

Watch the trailer below:

“Why couldn’t he just rape her?”, asks a passerby as she watches the police photograph the body of the latest rape and murder victim in a small Chinese town in the countryside. The officers taking pictures to seem extract pleasure from doing it, while other males seem to get satisfaction from describing the murder in graphic detail to their friends. There is a toxic mixture of sexism, sadism and voyerism that permeates the community, leaving women feeling vulnerable and exposed.

What’s in the Darkness opens with police detective Qu Zhicheng (Guo Xiao) trying to impress his teenage daughter Jing (Su Xiaotong, pictured above) in a street market. He describes the blood splats, the musculature and texture of a butchered pig to the perplexed and confused girl, and the butcher is not pleased with the man’s lecturing either. This sequence comes to both symbolise and summarise the film, which constantly contrasts female naivety and innocence against male patronising and obsession with the body. It’s just that the pig is soon replaced by a series of mutilated women.

Men are often seen swooning and slobbering at females throughout the movie. It seems that the police and the locals perpetuate the pleasure of the rapist and murders through proxies of the violence, such as pictures and gossiping. Meanwhile, young male teenagers seem to get strange satisfaction from watching girl cry in the cinema. China does feel like a safe haven for females. It’s unsurprising that Qu demands his teenage daughter to keep her legs shut – he knows what men are like.

The most interesting element of What’s in the Darkness is that the point-of-view is mostly from the girl’s perspective, rendering the gruesome developments somehow more gentle and subtle. The cheesy pop music provides a nice backdrop the coming-of-age story. The imagery is little more somber, and there are beautiful takes through heavy rain, dirty windows and even a mosquito net in bed. However, the pace of the story is sometimes a little monotonous – a common teething issue for a budding helmer. Keep an eye on Wang: the director could become a pleasant surprise and welcome addition to the Chinese thriller genre in the future.

What’s in the Darkness premiered in the Berlinale earlier this year and it is now part of the BFI London Film Festival, which ends on Sunday. Click here for more information about the event.

And don’t forget to watch the film trailer right here:

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Werner Herzog likes to walk the Philosopher’s Walk. His curiosity seems to be never-ending. This time he turns his attention to the birthplace of internet and some of the consequences, since the first message was sent in UCLA in October 1969. Once his curiosity moves to a certain topic, it is hardly unlikely to look at somewhere else. Lo and Behold: Reveries of The Connected World brings back to the cinema some of Herzog’s obsessions, such as nature and death, with a profund and meditative voice and an inspiring humour.

But how do nature and death relate to the internet and electronic devices? The German documentarist interviewed a range of specialists and eccentric individuals who somehow were affected by the web. He finds a family who lost a member in a terrible accident and still today they receive many emails of people who took a shot of her disfigurated body. For the mother, “The internet is the spirit of the evil”. Lo and Behold recovers images of the most bizarre and unlikely twists of life. Similarly to his previous Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), this documentary goes around in circles in order to question if whether a cyber war has already started and we don’t even know it. In his previous feature film there was no reference to cyberculture; instead these acts of rebellion were directed linked to social-historical elements of the time.

Herzog also travels to an isolated valley in the US where recluses live in direct contact with nature, most of them suffering from a terrible condition: high sensitivity to the radiation of cell phones. Radiation is invisible, but its effects aren’t. We recommend that you also watch the doc Death by Design (Sue Williams, 2016) for more insight into the dirty consequences of our digital technology.

Lo and Behold also mentions addiction, and investigates a critical case in South Korea. A couple was playing a game for hours and hours and their kid starved to death. Some young Koreans wear diapers so that they can continue to play video games without having to go to the toilet.

The film goes deep into the mind of hackers and FBI agents. It points out that in 1969, when they started the web, it was a controlled community and everybody knew each other. So there wasn’t any protection against spying. Maybe Snowden began his activities under the same spirit. It is curious that Lo and Behold will be presented at London Film Festival hours before Snowden (Oliver Stone, 2016).

Shifting from the birth of the web to hackers is not what makes Lo and Behold a great movie, though. It is the grace of the interviewees that conquers us all. Herzog captures people’s expressions seconds before they start to “act” for the camera. He rolls alongside the stream of thoughts of their characters, transforming them into a pure object. Their image comes before their words – this is more important than what they have to say.

“I prefer to walk near the edge than down the middle of the road”, once said the pioneer photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, who has been working with the director Laura Israel for more than 20 years now. Her personal acquaintance and contact with the ground-breaking artist enabled her to create a very precise and in-depth portrait of Frank.

Israel’s latest documentary Don’t blink – Robert Frank is a fascinating way to discover this brilliant and unconventional photographer. Transferring her enthusiasm and admiration for the artist to the audience, Israel takes us on an exciting journey to explore the photographic style and the artistic personality of Frank within the historical and political context in which the photographer emerged and developed.

Frank isn’t just another photographer; he is one of the most significant and influential artists of the 20th century; “the most influential photographer alive” as described by the New York Times Magazine. His radical and revolutionary methods broke the norms, challenged traditional forms and introduced plenty of innovation in photography. The Swiss-born photographer, an immigrant in the USA, travelled from state to state to capture the loneliness, the segregation and the harsh reality of American life. His book ‘The Americans’, published in 1959 in the US – probably his most famous work – was the result of a 9-month road trip, across 30 states, over 10,000 miles. Consisting of 83 black and white photographs, ‘The Americans’ was a pure and straightforward representation of the brutal American life and landscape, revealing the illusion of the American dream.

Apart from presenting the work of Frank, Laura Israel gives a comprehensive image of the mentality, lifestyle and ideology that defined his work: his connection with the Beat Generation culture in the 1950s (he had a close relationship to Ginsberg, Burroughs Jack Kerouac) and his collaboration with musicians like The Rolling Stones. His book ‘The Americans’, the introduction of which was written by Jack Kerouac, was regarded as a cinematic expression of the Beat generation. Although Frank might be more well-known for his revolutionary photography, from the late 1950s he turned to cinematography, directing a number of short films, such as Pull my Daisy (1959), a portrait of the Beat Generation, and Cocksucker Blues (1972), a chronicle of the Rolling Stones American tour in 1972.

Israel reveals a man with a highly rebellious and experimental personality even at old age. Shots of the now 91-year-old photographer in his apartment in Manhattan are mixed together with scenes from his own short films and his black-and-white still photographs. The director follows Frank’s cinematographic style: bold compositions, spontaneity, freedom in the frame and no strict composition rules. The documentary’s soundtrack, including music of Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Rolling Stones and Yo La Tengo, gives the final touch to the charming style of Robert Frank while creating a sense of nostalgia for the 1960s and ’70s, a period of political awareness and counterculture.

Don’t Blink – Robert Frank is part of the BFI London Film Festival, which is taking place right now – click here for more information about the event, including how to get tickets.

Finally, don’t forget to watch the film trailer below!

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There are many ways of gaining notoriety for your suicide. German pilot Andreas Lubitz crashed his plane into a mountain taking away 150 lives with him, and forcing airlines to review security regulations. But Christine Chubbuk chose a very different route into instant post-mortem fame: she shot herself live on American television in 1974 while reading the news. No one knows how many people witnessed the shocking act firsthand from the comfort of their home.

New York filmmaker Antonio Campos, aged just 33, created another haunting tale of human depression and failure, which will probably become his greatest hit to date. In Afterschool (2008), an Internet-addicted prep-school student captures on video camera the drug overdose of two girls, while Simon Killer (2012) revolves around an American sociopath living in Paris. With Christine, Campos once again deeps dives into human dysfuntionality and hopelessness.

He succeeds to concoct a deeply gripping and human movie without being vulgar or exploitative. The films shuns thiller and horror devices in favour of a far more subtle and realistic narrative. He never uses foreknown closure of the movie as a sadistic tool in order to torture or entertain viewers. Instead the film is a empathetic and sensitive study of the psychological collapse of a human being.

Rebecca Hall’s delivery of the film protagonist is outstanding. Christine is a 29-year-old virgin with a relatively successful career in television, but also a deeply frustrating personal life. While able to deliver the news with confidence to millions of people, she is thoroughly unable to communicate and relate to people at a personal level. People find her incrustable, but in reality she insecure and deeply depressed. She craves love and attention. She had a history of suicidal tendencies and depression, but she concealed those from her employers lest she could be fired.

The photography of the film is equally impressive. Campos achieved a 1970s’ vintage feel and look by giving the images a high saturation, some sepia tones and fading. The result is that viewers are transported back in time, as if real footage of Christine’s last days had miraculously surfaced.

Christine’s self-murder is, in a way, a sadistic and revengeful act on the people that had failed her. She is giving to them the most gruesome and grotesque performance that she could conceive. She probably thought that her suffering was so intense that it could not go unnoticed. There are a lot of people out there suffering while doing their utmost to conceal it. Christine had been screaming inside for years, and sadly this was her chosen way to externalise her tormet.

This suicide is also an alarm call for a society obsessed with celebrity, media and guns. A twisted interpretation of fame and success was likely one of the leitmotifs of the suicide. The gun was both a catalyst and an intrument. The spark in Christine’s eyes the first time she holds a revolver is evident. Finally she could get the attention and affection from those surrounding her. The final and fatal act of penetration.

Christine is out in cinemas on Friday, January 27th. This piece was originally published during the BFI London Film Festival, in October 2016.

Also, don’t forget to watch the film trailer below:

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The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Goddard was once asked why he killed animals in his films, in an interview for Rolling Stone. He replied: “Well, why not? A lot of people are killed in Africa and Vietnam. Why shouldn’t I kill animals? It was not done because animals are animals compared with human beings; it’s just that if I had killed a human being I would have been put in jail.” The consintently provocative Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl takes full advantage of Goddard’s argument in his latest film.

Safari takes viewers on a horrific tour of Austrian holiday-makers who picked killing animals as their entertainment choice. The film is extremely graphic, with plenty of shooting, animals writhing in pain, being skinned, disemboweled and having their bones cut up. The gruesome experience is a very vivid reminder that such a morbid sport is still very much alive in the poorest continent on Earth.

The hunters are only preoccupied with the shooting and the pictures taken thereafter. They have no knowledge of whether the animals are endangered, they are not bothered by animal suffering or any sort of sustainability. Their arguments border the absurd. A young hunter explains: “death is deliverance, and we are delivering the old and the sick, and encouraging them to reproduce”. The owner of the abominable business is unrepentant: “why should I justify myself? It’s not illegal to shoot animals”. By the end of the movie, it’s these people you will probably want to shoot.

British viewers more used to David Attenborough’s fascinating nature documentaries, movies celebrating animal life and preservation will be undoubtly shocked by Seidl’s latest feature. Not only is the film merciless in its graphicness, but it’s also a distressing and inconvenient reminder of the wounds of colonialism. The white tourists never get their hands dirty. It’s the black locals that do the messy job once the zebras, giraffes, lions, gnus, wildebeeste or a myriad of other mammals are killed purely for pleasure.

Racism is pervasive in the film. One white man explains: “it’s not their fault that their black”. The blacks here are entirely dehumanised, they only exist to serve the whites. It’s as if they were another wild animal, except that they don’t get killed. The Algerian film Roundabout in My Head (Hassan Ferhani, 2015) also cunningly delves into the relation between slaughtering animals and colonialism – click here in order to accede to our review.

Seidl’s documentary-making style in unparalleled. The camera-work is almost entirely static, there is no voice-over, the pace is very slow and repetitive, and the subjects stare into the camera in a very unusual interview-style, interspersing monologues with long and awkward silence, and direct eye contact with the viewers. Once again Seidl uses documentary in order to expose the most repulsive obsessions of Austria. The difference is that last year Seidl went into people’s cellars in his own home nation to reveal guns, Nazi memorabilia and other disturbing secrets (in the doc In The Basement), while this time he travelled to Africa in order to expose colonialism and racism in very vivid, hot and thick red.

Safari is part of the BFI London Film Festival taking place this week – click here and get one of the few tickets remaining.

And don’t forget to watch the film trailer below:

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