Tag: film

By Naman Ramachandran According To The variety Thai debut feature “A Useful Ghost,” which won the grand prix at Cannes Critics’ Week earlier this year, continued its festival success at the 13th QCinema International Film Festival in the Philippines. Directed by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, the film won the Asian Next Wave best picture and the artistic achievement award for production design. “A Useful Ghost,” which tells the story of a wife’s spirit reincarnated as a vacuum cleaner amid themes of environmental and family struggles, was also the festival’s closing film. The jury — comprising Filipino actor John Arcilla, Karlovy Vary programmer Martin Horyna, Epic Media’s Bianca Balbuena-Liew, and journalist Liz Shackleton — praised the film “for seamlessly weaving together a...

By Tomris Laffly According To The variety Rooted in unassuming pastoral rhythms, veteran Kyrgyz writer-director Aktan Arym Kubat’s “Black Red Yellow” gently weaves a placid story of love and tradition around a proud Kyrgyz village that has seen better days. Co-written by Topchugul Shaidullayeva, the delicate drama channels a kind of unfussy and serene clarity that obliquely brings to mind the films of Edward Yang and Yasujiro Ozu. Often erring on the side of excessive stillness and silence, “Black Red Yellow” — this year’s Academy Awards submission from Kyrgyzstan — doesn’t quite find its emotional footing within its compact running time. Still, there is something worthwhile about the window Kubat opens into the community depicted and all the people who contribute to it in the best...

By Ryan Swen According To The variety Rithy Panh can credibly hold the title of both Cambodia’s most important film director and one of the greatest documentarians alive. A survivor of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime that claimed the lives of his family members, he began studying filmmaking in France before returning to his native country in the late 1980s. His nonfiction output largely focuses on the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide and moves fluidly between brutally direct vérité (“S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,” 2003), archival material (“Irradiated,” 2020) and, in the case of the his most celebrated film “The Missing Picture” (2013), claymation. With his most recent film, “We Are the Fruits of the Forest,” Panh opts for a more restrained but still incisive approach to t...