Troubled Minds is several things: a story about brotherhood, a serious exploration of the limits of performance art, a satire of that same art-world and a road trip movie. Being able to find the humour within the bustling, over-the-top art world of Latvia while never losing heart of its central conflict, it represents a fine balancing act from the Abele brothers.
Robert (Toms Auniņš) seems to have no idea what his art actually represents, making references to the unconscious and ego death with little explanation regarding its underlying philosophy. His brother Martin (Marcis Lacis) has been living in a black cube — a 2001: A Space Odyssey-like (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) obelisk that could stand for both everything and nothing at the same time — and is the more raucous of the two. Directors Raitis and Lauris Abele, working with their brother other Mārcis behind the camera, make this distinction clear during one boating expedition: while Martin is standing on the top, stretching his arms out to the sky, Robert is sat at the bottom, staring at his phone.
The film raises interesting questions about the types of characters that thrive within artistic spaces. Crossing the line between art and madness, especially if you are a white male, is often more accepted than in other industries. After all, if the ends find a way to justify the means, critics might find it part and parcel of the final result. In one particularly cutting line, someone says that a madness like Vincent Van Gogh’s is OK, but only if people find out after you are already gone.
The Abele brothers are smart not to make the differences between Robert and Martin too pronounced, which would quickly make it cartoonish. While Martin is the more visibly unwell, Robert’s ideas and actions also skirt the bounds of acceptability. Robert is simply smarter at getting the necessary funding for their work, sweet-talking investor Gunnar (Juris Žagars) to part with his cash in exchange for an immersive exhibition that invites the spectator to become an active participant.
Nonetheless, bar a psychedelic finale, the film itself keeps things rather simple in this depiction of brotherly creation and collision, taking no sides as the two of them get into bar fights, smoke and drink copiously, hang out with older Russian sailors and alienate the world around them. This is what initially makes the film intriguing, especially as it departs Latvia to travel beyond the arctic circle, expanding its previous themes into something far richer than initially suggested.
While unable to tie up all its loose ends— a literal Chekhov gun introduced and forgotten about; an impending court date that dissolves into thin air — Troubled Minds never loses sight of its characters, sensitively and intuitively played by Auniņš and Lacis. They’re able to convey artistic slackery, brotherly compassion and self-infatuation with ease, carrying the film’s detours, digressions and detailed depiction of an art scene constantly collapsing on itself.
At a awards ceremony, one winner declares the end of the white straight male in art. When the two brothers are then given the final award, it’s hard to know exactly who is being satirised. It’s in this ambiguous space between satire and sensitivity that Troubled Minds thrives.
Troubled Minds plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.
What is art? Why do artists make art? These questions lie behind Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest film, like his earlier The Lives Of Others (2006) a German story exploring that country’s history and identity. It clocks in at over three hours, but don’t let that put you off because it needs that time to cover the considerable ground it does. Never Look Away spans the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in WW2, the liquidation of people considered by the Nazis inferior and therefore unfit to live and the very different worlds of post-war art schools in first East and later West Germany. This means it also spans two generations: those who were adults during the war, and those who were children at that time and became adults in post-war Germany.
Six year old Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) wants to be an artist. He is taken to Dresden by his Aunt Elizabeth (Saskia Rosenthal from Lore, Cate Shortland, 2012) to see an exhibition of Degenerate Art mounted by the Nazis. He is fascinated. She tells him she rather likes the works displayed, but warns him not to tell anyone else. Later, he finds her playing the piano nude. She extols the mysteries of art to be found in life and exhorts him to “never look away”. She’s both creatively gifted and mentally ill. Being taken away in an ambulance to be incarcerated in a hospital she again issues that same exhortation. She will never leave the hospital system, thanks to Nazi doctors who have the power of life or death over their patients.
During the war, one night Kurt watches tin foil dropped by bombers around his home “to jam radio communication” before they drop bombs on Dresden in the distance, razing it to the ground.
After the war, Kurt – now a young man (Tom Schilling) – works painting signs until his boss, impressed by Kurt’s artistic skill, has him apply to Dresden art school where he falls in love with Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer) whose gynaecologist father (Sebastian Koch from The Lives Of Others) regards him as inferior stock and tries to destroy the couple’s relationship. After a promising career as a Socialist Realist painter of murals, Kurt with Ellie in tow defects from East to West Berlin a couple of months before the Berlin Wall is built. Kurt becomes a student at that hotbed of modern art Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and later a famous artist.
It’s a lot more complicated than that, but it’s difficult to give away much more without spoilers. The whole is based on the life of internationally renowned artist Gerhard Richter, who has read the script by the writer-director and made one or two suggestions which were incorporated. However, Richter has subsequently disowned the film (despite not having viewed it). Kurt’s tutor at the Kunstakademie is based on equally celebrated artist Joseph Beuys. Von Donnersmarck describes the piece as a work of fiction, although a great deal of the material appears to be historically accurate with names changed.
This is masterful storytelling with top-notch performances. More importantly, it seems to pick at the soul of a nation (Germany). There’s a lot of very nasty material festering beneath the surface and as you watch certain elements really start to get to you. Having watched it twice, this writer can attest to its being even more powerful on a second viewing: lots of little details elude you first time round as you grapple with the shocking overall story only to make themselves known second time around as you have a chance to take in the detail.
Never Look Away garnered two well deserved Oscar nominations earlier this year, for Best Foreign Film and Best Cinematography (it was shot by Caleb Deschanel whose impressive credits include The Black Stallion, Carroll Ballard, 1979). Alongside The Lives Of Others, which dealt with the Stasi (the East German secret police), it feels as if von Donnersmarck is building a panorama of German history through a series of historically grounded narratives of which this is only the second.
Finally, the German title Werk Ohne Autor translates literally as Work Without Author in reference to the artist’s claim that the photographs which form the basis of paintings “are just photographs”. This film suggests there’s a lot more to these apparently random images than that. Possibly the most effective slice of narrative storytelling we’ll see in the cinema this year. Supremely powerful, dirtylicious stuff.
Never Look Away is out in the UK on Friday, July 5th. On VoD on Monday, October 28th.
The techniques used in this remarkable short include both computer and puppet animation, with all the surfaces of both the puppets and the sets resembling that of a canvas painted with oils. It’s the perfect artistic form in which to express the story the film wishes to tell.
Louis is a painter suffering from dementia. Neither he nor his wife and model Michelle are coping well. He struggles to recognise different items of food by name at the dinner table – a bit of a problem when Michelle asks him to pass the pepper – and attempts to eat a banana without taking the skin off it first.
He jokes about degenerative mental diseases when being interviewed by a visiting health professional, but can’t recognise the mobile phone on the table in front of him. As his memory banishes the very concept of a mobile phone to beyond Louis’ mental grasp, the already disfigured object breaks up into little black droplets floating upwards before him.
Worse is to come: a system of post-it notes each containing a simple drawing attached to its appropriate object, such as a sun to indicate an anglepoise lamp, starts to break down. The notes fall from their designated objects creating a sea of incomprehensible imagery to wade through and for Michelle to tidy up on the floor. Louis is shocked to discover the bathroom occupied – his wife has to point out that the alien occupant causing her husband such distress is in fact only his reflection which he no longer recognises as such.
At one point in the proceedings, she’s had enough and sinks to locking him in his room so he can’t pester her. At another, she explains there are no fish in the fish tank because Louis failed to feed them.
Finally, he mistakes his wife for a hired carer. He comes on to her, but pulls back telling her, heartbreakingly, that his wife gets jealous and waltzes round the room with her instead. As they dance, she is reduced to an empty space parts of whose surface is defined by her husband’s sparse brushstrokes to which he adds a few more.
This is dangerous, emotionally charged and highly challenging material underscored with commendable humanity.
Memorable (Mémorable) played in Annecy where it picked up three awards – a jury distinction for powerful storytelling, a junior jury award for a short film and an audience award – making it a likely contender for this year’s Best Animated Short at the Oscars. Watch an extract below (French no subtitles):
Another Vincent Van Gogh biopic, but with a synthesis of Willem Dafoe in the lead role and Julian Schnabel behind the camera, who can resist? Despite being a legend of the New York art world, Schnabel’s cinema comes under criticism for leaning too middle-brow. But these artists are always fascinating beasts, constantly examining how artists communicate the indescribable in their head into some kind of language. Think of Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (2007) learning to write by blinking.
Schnabel turns here to perhaps the most famous artist ever, who had to create an entirely new language to communicate the things that he saw. Schnabel and Dafoe do a great job of contrasting that interior genius with a man who can barely speak to others, who is so overwhelmed by his visions of nature that he appears to be entirely mad.
Willem, a 65-year-old in the role of a man who died at age 37, plays the part as myth. And perhaps that casting inherently allows us to see heretofore unseen shades of the man, his old soul, and Willem’s youthful exuberance. It’s a part that allows the actor to show off everything that makes him such a beloved character actor, the wild energy, the sadness behind his eyes, the controlled physicality. It does a service to both actor and subject, and one hopes that the Academy goes the same way as Venice and gives Willem the Best Actor Award for a role that works perfectly with his persona.
I did have to laugh at the appearance of the postman Joseph Roulin and his gigantic beard, though, ‘May I paint you?’ intones a shitfaced Vincent. Willem gets strong scene partners, in the form of a moustached Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin, Mathieu Amalric as the famously painted Dr. Gachet. A stand out scene towards the end has Willem sparring with Mads Mikkelsen as a priest, who charges that Van Gogh’s painting is an insult to God.
Schnabel shoots the process of painting with an urgency. These scenes are so vibrant, the paint pops off the screen as though in 3D – what might Bi Gan do with this material? There is an effort to relate Van Gogh’s style to photography, through the abstraction of rain on a window. With coloured lenses and hurried camerawork, Van Gogh’s form becomes the film form.
So how well does this fit into the Van Gogh canon? The recent Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela/ Hugh Welchman, 2017) is a glorified kids film, that plays to the silver screen crowd, and these American takes – including Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo (1990) and Minnelli’s Lust For Life (1956) – are too respectful and stately to really capture the genius. More successful are Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) and an old episode of Doctor Who, which treat the artist in terms of his influence and confront our wish to reach back to him. This lands somewhere in the middle.
For despite the formal tics and a game Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate still follows the expected beats of a Van Gogh biopic. The Ear. The kids throwing rocks. The insane asylum. The notion of tortured genius isn’t really challenged by Schnabel, who doesn’t really bring anything new to our understanding of events surrounding Van Gogh. It’s a straightforward depiction of his last years, which may be enough. Its pleasures are varied, and the Dafoe performance is wonderful, but this is a tribute act, rather than an earth shattering new take.
At Eternity’s Gate showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam,when this piece was originally written. It is out in UK cinemas and also on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, March 29th.
A real curiosity falling somewhere in between a gay movie, a London movie, an arthouse movie and a movie about paintings, this is the story of a youth who comes to London’s Soho in search, as he puts it, “of mysteries and possibilities”. He swiftly moves from homeless hopeful to successful rent boy for clients interested in classical painting. However, it turns out he suffers from Stendhal Syndrome, which means he is so overcome by great paintings that he collapses in front of them. Indeed, this is telegraphed by the opening scene in a gallery where he faints in front of a Titian.
Director McLean takes inspiration from a stylised episode in the middle of his earlier Postcards From America (1994) and the bigger than life, obviously studio-created urban environments of Hollywood musicals which eschew verisimilitude for colourful design. McLean’s sets for Soho, while reminiscent of its Sin Alley with neon signs for Girls Girls Girls and more, drip with artifice. But his bars, rooms and alleyways are all on the cramped side and the viewer longs for a set on a bigger stage to punctuate the proceedings. His style being far removed from realism, taking such a liberty would not seem unreasonable.
While Harris Dickinson carries the film, his performance is not pushed as it was in the extraordinary Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman, 2017) where he brilliantly expressed tortured and closeted homosexuality. McLean is less interested in either his actors’ performances or explicit representations of gay encounters than in stylised homoerotic imagery such as a bar full of boys and girls dressed in white sailor hats, vests and trousers. To move the plot along, he throws Jim in with a group of escorts known as The Raconteurs led by David (Jonah Hauer-King) who specialise in post-coital conversations about the great painters.
The director employs Dickinson and other cast members to stage Caravaggio tableaux for the scenes where Jim’s passing out takes him inside the world of the paintings while they are being created by the artists concerned. Yet overall the piece lacks either the social realist grittiness of that Soho artist Francis Bacon/his lover George Dyer drama Love Is The Devil (John Maybury, 1998) or the sheer shock value of horror thriller The Stendhal Syndrome (Dario Argento, 1996) which latter movie is where many cineastes will have previously come across the term for Jim’s condition.
Although there are references to Bacon and Dyer, and – even more fleetingly – Picasso, the view of art presented is here is both limited and highly specific, with few recognisable paintings on display beyond Caravaggio and Titian. True, there’s a hotel room staging of the martyrdom of St Sebastian complete with rubber sucker-headed arrows flying through the air and a twentieth century painter Max (Richard Durden) who slashes numerous canvases for which Jim was his muse, not to mention a pile of cardboard in front of which Jim swoons in an all too brief nod to more contemporary art, but these lack the gravitas of the visualised Titians and Caravaggios at the film’s centre. If the stylized Soho sets are impressive and the performances adequate, an overall lightweight feel to the whole rather lets it down.
Postcards From London is out in the UK on Friday, November 23rd. Out on VoD on Monday, December 10th.
On one level, Nathaniel Kahn’s latest is a filmmaker’s dream. Kahn, who made the compelling documentary My Architect (2003) about his father Louis Kahn, had an idea for something about art and money and persuaded his backers to let him just go out and start shooting. And he got some great material. The Price Of Everything is mostly vox pops, although that’s augmented with footage of the subjects doing what they do – artists working in their studios, dealers checking proofs of catalogues, buyers showing us artworks in their homes – and the odd bit of historical footage such as of 1973’s infamous Robert Scull sale.
New York taxi driver Scull was both a brilliant publicist of events and an avid collector of modern art by then unknown artists. His sale at New York’s Sotheby Parke-Bernet of some 50 of his paintings saw them sell for up to 50 times the price he’d originally paid. It established the idea that artworks could be traded for considerable profit, enraging the artists who made no money whatsoever from such sales. Although, as Scull points out in archive footage to painter Robert Rauschenberg, the new prices set the bar for future sales of such artists’ works which would benefit them too in the long run.
Celebrated artist Jeff Koons, whose ‘Rabbit’ casts an inflatable silver-coloured rabbit in solid steel, is here revealed as as much a player of the art market as a maker of art. Like a Renaissance artist employing a vast team of over 100 artisans, his studio produces a steady stream of work designed to sell to collectors at the highest prices. The contradiction doesn’t seem to worry him, but it leaves a nasty taste if you think art is something more than commercial product.
At the other end of the scale, abstract painter Larry Poons was praised in the late sixties for his widely collected Op Art dot paintings. But when he abandoned that painting style for something looser, his newer works failed to sell like his favoured ones. The market is shown to elevate its chosen art practitioners such as Nigerian-born Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose 2012 painting Drown catapulted her into the ranks of top selling artists when it fetched around five times its estimate at auction in 2016.
Alongside the artists, the film parades a veritable circus of dealers, buyers and others. Sotheby’s Amy Cappellazzo protests that contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter (seen in the film, but not that much) is happy to take money from private buyers, but would rather his works went to galleries where the wider public can see them. This assumes neither collectors nor museums have hidden them away in storage.
Elsewhere, collector Stefan Edlis proudly shows off works in his collection as well as his battered, ‘J’-stamped passport that came with him when he escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager. He clearly believes art is meant to be seen and in 2015 rather than secreting them out of sight somewhere as their collection increased, he and co-collector wife Gael Neeson donated some 42 works to the Art Institute Of Chicago where the public could see and enjoy them.
This (and much more besides) may be fascinating stuff, but the problem is that Kahn doesn’t seem to know what to do with it once he’s shot it. The resultant mishmash of watchable character studies lacks any real central thesis to pull it together. If you can get past the obscene sums of money moving from collectors to dealers, some of the people pictured come across well and others less so.
I had the feeling that the prices paid for the art works had little to do with their intrinsic (non-monetary) value. Kahn seems to recognise that most artists do what they do out of compulsion, not to make money. However, the only contemporary artists seen here are those who have been rewarded handsomely in financial terms at one time or another. The Price Of Everything is ultimately about capitalism and trading much more than the artists, who mostly appear incidental to the selling process and all too often separated from their work once it’s sold.
The Price Of Everything is out in the UK on Friday, November 16th. Watch the film trailer below:
In an ever-changing world, the documentary film helps us comprehend things greater than our simple daily lives. Owing a debt to the pioneering work Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922), Walk this Way follow in the footsteps of that film in delivering cutting-edge documentaries about topics that really matter to humanity.
Partnering with DMovies this year, The Film Agency, in association with Under The Milky Way, are combining forces again in the Docs from around the World Collection. A means of this, all parties plan to shine light upon films from across the globe which might have escaped audiences upon their initial release. All from a very European perspective (all films are co-productions from the Old Continent).
By using the power of the medium, as well as VoD, DMovies, The Film Agency and Under The Milky Way seek to support true independent filmmaking. In our shared targets, we sat down with Walk this Way Coordinator Nolwenn Luca to discuss this particular collection further.
DMovies – Why documentaries? Are people more likely to watch docs on VoD than the cinema? Is this an opportunity to catch the hidden gems of European documentary-making?
Nolwenn Luca – The Docs from around the World Collection take the main stage, inviting the audience to travel around the world and discover how complex and rich current societies are. The documentary is the place of new interrogations of the man by the man. Not to establish certainties but to reformulate on the scale of human microcosms the essential questions of life.
Walk this Way defends the diversity of European documentary works. The public thanks to the programme have the chance to have access to films that they would not have been able to discover otherwise if they were not available in VoD. The idea is to give a second chance to the movies to meet their audience. If the film has not had the opportunity to have a theatrical release in a country we propose it in VoD as an alternative. In recent years, the VoD offer for documentaries has grown considerably, giving viewers a wide choice to watch quality movies from home.
DM – What is it that these films have in common? Perhaps a desire to reveal the dirty truth, to deep-dive into controversial topics, etc, or something along the lines?
NL – The Collection will take the public through intense investigations from characters going around the world to find answers. Whether they address our love of nature and art, our fascination for criminal minds or our eating habits, these movies will definitely give to the audience food for thought. These films tackle fascinating and relevant thematic with broad interest and are therefore marketable on VoD to several niches.
DM – Can you please tell us a little bit about the curatorship? Roughly how many docs are made for cinema each year in Europe, and how many did you have access to? Any nice figures to give the initiative a grounded aspect!
NL– The documentary is a format that is growing rapidly. Documentary production in Europe has almost doubled over the 2015-2016 period, reaching 698 films in 2016, or about a third of the films of the year in Europe. On average over the period 2007-2016, documentary films represent 1.4% tickets to all genres. In general, feature-length documentaries have a lifetime in room superior to that of all the films.
Documentary is a genre that can easily reach a large audience beyond their country of origin. In general terms, documentaries perform relatively well on international VoD distribution channels partly because they do not request a high level of marketing and promotional expenditure to find their audiences. Already 26 documentaries released in VoD around the world since 2015 with Walk this Way.
What will happen when the food runs out of food? Well, in his 2015 documentary Valentin Thurn places this very notion front and centre!
Exploring the scientific, agricultural and environmental ways we can prevent global food shortages, all due to global warming, it’s not a feature filled with bias but educated solutions to an impending world problem. Globe jumping from India to England then Germany, the multifaceted nature of its tone makes the issues it is dealing with a tangible reality for the viewer.
Part of Europe’s natural beauty, The Alps are towering force over every country they touch. Approaching the scope of the natural phenomena in a highly cinematic manner, directors Peter Bardehle and Sebastian Lindemann deploy a cineflex camera to capture every inch of its beauty in filmic splendour. Telling the tale of its history, socio-political and geographical story, the sweeping shots of the snow-tipped mountains interpolate you into its vistas. Accompanied by the Germanic tones of Emily Clarke-Brandt, man and nature are combined into one form.
This Spanish documentary explores Tomeu L’Amo’s maverick purchase of surrealist artist, Salvador Dali’s, first work for a cut-price 25,000 Spanish pesetas in 1988 (£132 in today’s money). Scratching away at the persona of L’Amo, scenes from the documentary allude towards a recent trend of re-creating history or pastness through a post-modern reimagination. Though the elaborate nature of the man could shadow the work, what emerges is a contemporary discussion on elitism, to which is unearthed in many aspects of society. Unlike the recent retelling of the life of Van Gough in Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, 2017) it is undeniable that The Key to Dali is grounded in the real world, opening pathways for art fans or not into the world of painting.
Adopting the same global view as 10Billion (Valentin Thurn, 2015), Barbara Eder’s hard-hitting work on the men and women whose job it is to investigate killers does not any soft punches. Intertextually referencing The Silence Of The Lambs, (Jonathan Demme, 1991) in numerous conversations, the grotesque nature of the classic is expressed as a means of the verbal descriptions. Not venturing into sadistic footage of murders etc, it holds respect for the victims. A natural intuition, we as humans constantly seek to explain the un-explainable and Eder’s film elicits this notion poignantly..
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5. Free Lunch Society (Christian Tod, 2017):
What would you do if your income were taken care of? Just a few years ago, an unconditional basic income was considered a pipe dream. Today, this utopia is more imaginable than ever before – intense discussions are taking place in all political and scientific camps. Free Lunch Society provides background information about this idea and searches for explanations, possibilities and experiences regarding its implementation.
17-year-old Kevin, sentenced for violent behaviour, is just let out of prison. To start anew, he moves in with his aunt and her family and begins an apprenticeship at her store. Quickly he adapts to his new home and gets along well with his cousin Sammy, in his last year of high school. Through Sammy and his friends, Kevin meets John. Upon discovering John’s unbearable situation with his mother, Kevin feels the urge to help his new friend. One evening fate intervenes and questions of betrayal, trust and loyalty start to direct their daily lives more than ever.
Loneliness, disillusionment and the experience of first love reveal the character of Raya, a 17-year-old living in rural Latvia with her grandmother and her little brother Robis. A staggering turn of events shakes up their lives, and the young girl must come to decisions that even a grown woman would find difficult to make.
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8. Quiet Bliss (Edoardo Winspeare, 2014):
Three generations of a family have to move back to their picturesque coastal town of their family’s origin and survive off the family farm after their family company goes bankrupt. A feel-good drama about possibilities after a crisis.
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9. Fair Play (Andrea Sedlácková, 2014):
Set in Czechoslovakia in the 1980, young and talented sprinter Anna (Judit Bárdos) is selected for the national team and starts training to qualify for the Olympic Games. As a part of the preparation she is placed in a secret “medical programme” where they begin dopeing her with anabolic steroids. Her performance improves, but after she collapses at training, she learns the truth. Anna decides to continue training without the steroids even though her mother (Anna Geislerova) is worried that she won’t be able to keep up with other athletes and might not qualify for the Olympics, which she sees as the only chance for her daughter to escape from behind the Iron Curtain. After Anna ends last in the indoor race, her mother informs the coach (Roman Luknar) that Anna is no longer using steroids. Together they decide to inject steroids to Anna in secret, pretending it’s nothing but harmless vitamins.
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10.God Willing (Edoardo Maria Falcone, 2015):
A young man’s decision to become a priest affects his whole family, especially his father.
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11.I Can Quit Whenever I Want (Sydney Sibilia, 2014):
A university researcher is fired because of the cuts to university. To earn a living he decides to produce drugs recruiting his former colleagues, who despite their skills are living at the margins of society.
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12. One Wild Moment (Jean-François Richet, 2015):
Two friends bring their daughters with them on a beach vacation and find themselves in an awkward situation. A remake of In a Wild Moment (Claude Berri, 1977).
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14. Heart of Glass (Jérôme de Gerlache, 2016):
Heart of Glass is a journey. A road trip through several countries on two continents in pursuit of a story. The story of a young glass blower with a singular talent: Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert. The film follows him in his daily life working in the studio and on the road. Jeremy recounts growing up in Africa, where he drew inspiration for his first pieces. He speaks of his family of Franco-American origin, difficult events he faced, the challenges of returning to Europe. He speaks of his first encounter with glass at age 19. The first time he saw the hot glass moving at the end of a blow pipe was his seminal moment. The way the glass, fluid, delicate and mysterious, danced that day has forever changed him. The film reveals how passion can undo a tragic fate and is sadly not a Blondie documentary.
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14. Step Up to the Plate (Paul Lacoste, 2012):
In 2009, the three-Michelin-stars French chef Michel Bras decides to hand his restaurant over to his son Sebastien. Between Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino (2004) and Raymond Depardon’s La Vie Moderne (2008), this documentary draws a moving and joyful portrait of this outstanding family devoted to the haute cuisine for three generations…
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15. Santa Claus (Alexandre Coffre, 2014):
One night, a burglar in a Santa Claus costume is surprised by Victor, a young boy who believes he is the real Santa Claus. Victor then follows him, and they embark on an unexpected adventure that will change their lives.
