Communism, nudity and ‘romantic ennui’
YOUTH: Zhu Rikun’s new doc captures Chinese youths as they experiment with their relationships and belief systems.
communism
What they didn’t learn in school
CONTROL: Years after its fall, the remains of the GDR socialist education are pasted over, hidden, and forgotten.
Karel Vachek: Films just have to make you laugh!
Director Karel Vachek just died, so we publish this interview. Fifty years after Prague Spring and thirty years after the Velvet Revolution, he looked back on the evolution of our society and predicts a transformation to direct democracy.
The killing joke
NORTH KOREA: After the mysterious murder of North Korean royal family member Kim Jong-nam, two women go on trial. But are they criminal assassins or political pawns?
In our hands
ECOLOGY: Watch it and weep: Jennifer Abbott’s remarkable, poetic, and lyrical film about the profound urgency, grief, and gravity of climate change is deeply moving.
The everyman for our times
LABOUR: Miners trained for the manual skills of the 20th century come up against 21st-century realities when their pit closes.
High priests of climate denialism
ENVIRONMENT: A masterful confrontation with the deceptions and self-deceptions of central climate deniers – and the sinister consequences of their successful campaigns.
Christmastime: Where globalism and communism meet
GLOBALISATION: In a city where it is Christmas all year long, those that produce cheap and tacky seasonal decorations care little for Western traditions.
Life in the Delta
COMMUNISM: The extensive history of Bucharest’s Văcăreşti Nature Park has endured many iterations, from monastery to prison to the world’s largest urban Delta.
Ordinary people. Ordinary activities
COMMUNISM: The banality of evil in communist-era Poland explored through archive footage of secret police audio and film recordings.
Filmatic rebellion
CINEMA: Morgan Adamson’s Enduring Images brings new life to the 1960s revolutionary film and reminds us of the need to fight the prevailing forms of representation.