THE SILVER CLIFF was inspired by a song by Brazilian musician Chico Buarque, called Eye to Eye, about the impossibility of love and forgiveness. Having already won many admirers with MADAM SATA, SUELY IN THE SKY and I TRAVEL BECAUSE I HAVE TO, I COME BACK BECAUSE I LOVE YOU. Director Karim Ainouz here takes us on the lyrical and poetic journey of Violeta, who retrieves a voicemail during her work at a dentail clinic, in which her husband informs her he won’t be returning. Graham Hughes reviews.
Continuing with the HOLD THE FRONT PAGE series of films, the Cambridge Film Festival brings us SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. A cautionary tale, we follow the Machiavellian machinations of one Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), a press agent with a problem. He needs pieces for his clients in the widely syndicated column of J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), but he’s been shut out.
Jos Stelling’s third film examines the painting of Rembrandt as he moves to Amsterdam in the latter part of his life. An extended study in light and composition, the film pursues Rembrandt’s – and Stelling’s – search for ideal representation of the world.
Introducing us to Durban in the same year as South Africa played host to the World Cup, this documentary records an event that was just as paramount to those involved – the Street Child World Cup. Review by Naomi Barnwell.
Opportunity and opportunism form the central themes in Christi Puiu’s tense, simple Romanian road movie. Ovidiu (Alexandra Papadopol) plays the young man who undergoes the transformative odyssey, delivering some “medical supplies” for a local gangster in his home town, to an address in Bucharest.
The beauty of documentary is that no matter how brilliant an author or how talented a screenwriter, there really is no competing with real life. In the case of Joyce McKinney, no author in the world could even begin to dream such a surreal tale.
Part of the 31st Cambridge Film Festival’s retrospective on the Dutch film director Jos Stelling, THE ILLUSIONIST (1984) sets the spectator straight away into an oneiric world in pure Fellinian vein.
In 1909, the Electric Cinema in Birmingham opened, and through the decades, wars, eras and films, took on different titles and roles within the film exhibition world, finally now remaining the longest running cinema in the UK. Tom Lawes’ THE LAST PROJECTIONIST is in essence the story of this cinema.
Set in an unspecified near future, Croatian director Nevio Marasovic’s THE SHOW MUST GO ON begins with a daunting play on the familiarity of a certain reality television show; a handful of contestants stuck in an enclosed space where their every move is exposed to both a variety of cameras and projected to thousands of baying voyeurs.
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