Night in the Lens

India / 2002 / Hindi

Directed by Fareeda Mehta

With Sadiya Siddiqui, Irrfan Khan, Vrajesh Hirjee

The writer Manto sits in a dim, open tavern with a few tables and a mirror, where men quietly drink tea and harder stuff. The hard-drinking writer is both living this life and observing as much as he can. He talks, he watches and remembers; he listens to people’s stories and returns to his room to render them in fiction. He seeks inspiration from the poetry of anecdotes, poetry of the grime. One such character he decides to name Sultana, a young woman newly-arrived in Bombay from Muzaffarpur. She tries to make a living as a prostitute, beckoning to men from her balcony but not getting much business, perhaps because of the sheer density of competition. While some women move into a brothel to get regular customers, she stays in a small flat with her husband, a photographer who hustles all day selling postcards to tourists. Read the rest of this entry »

Italy / 1986 / Italian

Directed by Gianni Da Campo

With Lorenzo Lena, Marco Mestriner, Alba Moturra

Lorenzo is a young man, still a university student, who has landed a temporary job as a secondary school teacher in a small village. Serious and dedicated to his assignment, he commutes by train from Venice to the village, quickly becoming very close to his students, many of whom are the children of farmers and laborers. Even though – or perhaps partly because – he is only a few years older than them, they look up to Lorenzo, listening intently as he reads to them in class. In his free time he pays visits to the boys’ families, and tutors, for no fee, a boy who is sick at home. While Lorenzo’s chumminess with the children (it’s a co-ed school, but he is only friendly with the boys), would, in a more contemporary setting, be viewed with suspicion (or at least watched very closely), it is accepted as just being the work of a kind and committed teacher. He is especially simple and genuine, even for the naïve environment of the village, and inspires genuineness in everyone else. Read the rest of this entry »

South Korea / 1993 / Korean

Directed by Park Kwang-su

With Ahn Sung-ki, Moon Sung-keun, Shim Hye-jin

The poet Kim-chul looks morosely out to sea as drops of a sun shower hit his face. He turns to his friend Moon Jae-gu, who is covered – over his suit and tie – in the traditional burlap suit and triangular hat of mourning.  The people in the boat with them sing a traditional funeral song as they roll over the waves toward Kwisong island. In the back of the boat a boy holds the portrait of the deceased, as the coffin trails behind them in a small dinghy. This is essentially a funeral procession at sea. Sun-dol, a local man whom Jae-gul paid to arrange his father’s burial on the island, boards the boat, and informs him that there has been a snag in the plan: the local people won’t allow it. They are adamant, he says, not to let the man be buried there. But the dozen or so people headed there won’t be turned away, and they continue to toward the island. Read the rest of this entry »

Greece / 1946 / Greek

Directed by Yorgos Tzavellas

With Miranta Myrat, Giorgos Pappas, Zinet Lakaz

On a steamship coming into Piraeus, Tony, a sour-faced gangster, is coming home again after fifteen years away. He has the air of a returning conqueror, the vague aura of wealth that he has brought back with him to the desperate city. On a train headed into Athens he runs into an old friend named Petrakis, a pickpocket and smalltime middleman. Petrakis contrasts his own “stagnant” life with that of Tony, whom he imagines has gotten spectacularly rich overseas. Tony doesn’t say much about what he has been doing all of these years, or even exactly where he has been. They arrive at Omonoia station and Petrakis takes him to a hotel, and then on to a cabaret to be reunited with Mary, an old flame. Read the rest of this entry »

East Germany & Mongolia / 1961 / German

Directed by Ravjaa Dorjpalam & Gottfried Kolditz

With Jambaa Luvsanjamts, Tsagaan Tsegmid, Batsukh Zorig

A rather unique East German-Mongolian co-production, The Golden Yurt pushes documentary through a glittering mesh of fantasy to infuse a Mongolian folktale with a strong socialist message. The narration fills us in on the scene before us: Wise Arat, an “ordinary man of the people” is on a long journey to visit the shepherd Pagwa, who guards the key to a chest that, if opened, will dry up the beautiful lake and wither the valley of red flowers. As long as that chest remains closed, Arat had warned Pagwa long ago, the people can live in peace and prosperity. When he arrives outside Pagwa’s encampment, old Arat is happy to see that the circular lake is clear and unspoiled, indicating that the shepherd has so far heeded his advice. Read the rest of this entry »

China / 1990 / Mandarin

Directed by Zhang Yuan

With Qin Yan, Huang Haipo, Pan Shaquan

What do the parents of severely disabled children do when they don’t have the money to secure care? The issue becomes particularly vertiginous if the child is so disabled that they need twenty-four-hour care, and will need it for the entirety of their life. In China it seems like a blunt question of either giving up the child to state care or looking after them entirely on one’s own. Zhang Yuan’s first film, Mama is a subdued, pointed, subtly wrenching portrait of what that question might look like. In the first, poetic images of Liang Dan and her pre-adolescent son, Dongdong, she is massaging his naked body, a practice that she believes will help him return to the boy she knows he is. It is as though she is working a sleeping limb back to sensitivity, a part of her own body that needs to be recovered. Read the rest of this entry »

Portugal / 2001 / Portuguese & French

Directed by Rita Azevedo Gomes

With Maria Gonçalves, Bruno Terra, Sophie Balabanian

To most of us, life and existence are one and the same, inseparable, and we aren’t – indeed cannot be – aware of how delicate is the former and how indestructible is the latter. It’s a philosophical ideal to imagine being able to fully understand mortality, both its dimensions and its formless certainty, within the limitations of our personal reality, and even deriving some notion of beauty from that. Filmmaker Rita Azevedo Gomes’ carefully-devised film Fragile as the World is a confrontation of fear, contrasting love (which we want to be everlasting), with life (which we recognize is a single ration). It tells of “the fear of loving you in a place as fragile as the world” – and dissolving that fear into an understanding of that which lasts, that which we become, that which we come from. One cannot be frightened by that.
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Italy / 1976 / Italian

Directed by Elio Petri

With Gian Maria Volonté, Marcello Mastroianni, Mariangela Melato

A plague is passing silently through the country. We aren’t told much about it, except that it is claiming a few lives each day in different cities. Roadblocks and checkpoints are set up to keep the possibly infected from entering important places. Through this maze, and toward their important havens, important men are driven in black cars by chauffeurs. They converge on a compound that they visit once a year, and take an elevator down into a mysterious, multi-layered bunker far underground, a modernist church complex that adjoins ancient catacombs. Part hotel, part cathedral, part Area 51, this black spot beneath the city is where members of the Italian elite – politicians, bankers, industrialists, and other old men in suits – will engage in “religious exercises” overseen by a dubious head priest named Father Gaetano. Read the rest of this entry »

Japan / 1962 / Japanese

Directed by Tokuzô Tanaka

With Kôjirô Hongô, Shintarô Katsu, Takashi Shimura

On the seashore, the villagers have all gathered to view the fishermen who have died. This is the latest in a fleet that set out to destroy the enormous, seemingly invincible whale that has been terrorizing them, only to be shipwrecked and drowned far out at sea. The village has lost generations of men to this menace, and a young man named Shaki is the last whaler in his family left alive. First his grandfather was killed, then his father trying to exact vengeance, and now his older brother. They all died thrashing in the water, their boats smashed to pieces by the so-called “whale god” which generates around itself a supernatural storm. Both Shaki and his brother were raised from an early age with one purpose in mind: to kill the animal and bring back its nose as a trophy. Hunting, for the village of Wadaura, is no longer a matter of sustenance, if it ever was; it’s about honor, and for people to feel safe fishing on the high seas again. Read the rest of this entry »