Chris Fujiwara is the author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins University Press) and the editor of Undercurrent.
He has written for Film Comment, Cineaste, InterCommunication, Osian’s Cinemaya, Cinemaction, The Boston Phoenix, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, Film International, Senses of Cinema, and other publications. He has contributed to numerous anthologies, including books on Yasujiro Ozu and Sergei Parajanov and recently edited a catalog on Peter Watkins for the Jeonju International Film Festival. Fujiwara has taught and lectured on film studies at Yale University, Emerson College, and Rhode Island School of Design.
Fujiwara’s edited anthology on key moments in cinema was published by Cassell Illustrated in November, 2007. His critical biography of Otto Preminger was published by Faber & Faber in February, 2008. He is currently finishing a book on the films of Jerry Lewis, to be published by the University of Illinois Press.
★5th Festival Recommended Movies★
A brilliant film in conception and realization.
Director:Mark Simon Hewis
A tour de force.
Director:Cagla Zencirci & Guillaume Giovanetti
Directed with skill, well acted.
Handles a difficult subject with delicacy and discretion, leaving much for the viewer to ponder.
The photography is beautiful, the text is exquisite, the lead actor is sublime; there is something academic about the filmmaking.
Director:Baek Seung Hoon
Discreetly unconventional, high-spirited.
The handling of the narrative is diffusive and ponderous, but the cinematography makes the film work.
Sustains narrative interest and atmosphere; subtle and involving.
The film begins with a very potent contrast - nuclear power plant vs. beekeeping. It is weakened by the voice-over narration whose concerns and points of view are too limiting.
Witty, well constructed and designed.
Very good yarn animation and use of music.
The subject is remarkable, though the filmmaking is not always equal to it. Why is the older footage presented in the wrong aspect ratio? This seems to express an incredible contempt on the part of the filmmakers.
Imaginative, if a bit melodramatic.
Well designed and executed exercise.
Director:OMAR RABUNAL VARELA
Competently directed and acted, with some interesting touches, but crude and simplistic conceptually and in sexual politics.
Lacks a firm point of view; mechanical and sentimental.
Overelaborate direction doesn't help obvious story.
Director:Margarita Cobilich Rizo Patron
Conventional in every way, including its fractured narrative structure (which unfortunately seems to be the whole point of the film).
Director:Evi Goldbrunner&Joachim Dollhopf
Heavy-handed, crudely manipulative, and undeveloped.
An unconvincing and overfamiliar parable.
★4th Festival Recommended Movies★
An enigmatic and strong film in which the question of point of view comes to the fore. Children are the subjects, but we are not close to them; the film does not propose to let us share their perceptions or feelings; instead, the children are treated as photographic subjects in a film on landscape and environment - a treatment that is troubling and ambiguous. The orders issued off-camera by the filmmaker create a tension that is both conceptual and political. The gutsy last shot is the most indelible image of the whole competition.
A visually surprising and richly textured film. The interplay of image and voice-over is dense and rigorous. The long wordless shots are striking; the stop-motion of things moving by themselves is marvelous
A surprising and imaginative film. The filmmaker does sustained work with shifting points of view. Within the short form, the filmmaker elaborates an unusual and elaborate experience of time.
A well-constructed film of witty vignettes, it tells its story in a simple and clever manner. It benefits from being mainly limited to a single location. The soundtrack, in its sparseness, is effective. The imagery, making use of shallow focus, is very interesting.
An impressive work in which the careful layering of still images raises questions about the relationship between photography and memory and about the nature of memorializing.
An engaging film that establishes a style, sustains it, and varies it with proficiency. It seems to strive for a rhythm and a sense of expanding narrative time that would be typical of a feature film, whereas the filmmaker might have been better advised to make a friend of brevity
A familiar approach to a familiar theme in recent documentary. The mournful music comments too heavily on the images, which themselves sometimes seem random.
Au hasard Balthazar with a shoe in the role of the donkey? An attractively shot allegorical film.
The use of short shots is well judged, and the life-remembered-calvary narrative structure is competently handled.
A lovely, delicate, spare work visually. The music does not enhance the film