Acquisition
Batches 16 170:00/230.3786671× There are several titles here which should raise eyebrows. I'll discuss them in detail when I finally get round to watching them, but for Bahrain, Palau, Saint Kitts and South Sudan I have had to...bend my rules. By breaking them. Palau
Review
Bulgaria0:00/440.2133331× Folklore is a powerful thing. It lays clear our deepest fears. It’s primal in its intensity. It’s revealing. Except here. Roseville manages the unusually impressive feat of presenting unusually elaborate folklore while remaining utterly vague and incomprehensible. There’s a tree which is old
Review
Slovenia0:00/294.0373331× Last time I mentioned three kinds of horror films. The second kind, films made not for any artistic merit but because they're fun, most definitely applies to the silliest film I've seen since we left Pakistan. The film opens with an extremely
Review
Hungary0:00/351.8933331× The next three reviews were never planned as such (now that I've have a decent backlog of films for this project I'm watching them in acquisition order), but together they form a genuinely good overview of several distinct kinds of films. I&
Review
Romania0:00/336.4481× I struggled with The Whistlers, a Romanian film, and for reasons it’s taken me some time to understand. Obviously most of the films watched for this blog will be in other languages. I expect that. And I don’t mind watching a film that’s
Review
Georgia0:00/390.5493331× Before watching And Then We Danced I knew only three things about Georgia: they take dance very seriously (the Georgian State Dancers are globally famous – the movement of the original Daleks was based on them because they were seen as so memorable); they’re a former
Review
Ukraine0:00/335.0826671× I really struggled with this, and the reasons for it fascinate me. The Tribe is a film from Ukraine about a group of students at a residential institute for the deaf. (They may also be unable to talk – the film is ambiguous on that point. It’
Review
Colombia0:00/385.5146671× Twenty minutes into The Squad I found myself thinking this seems very familiar. There’s an unusual phenomenon in which very similar films are often made at the same time. This is sometimes due to smaller studios cashing in on a big studio film (The Asylum
Review
Mauritania0:00/373.2266671× It’s haunting when a film is made so beautifully yet the subject matter is so harrowing. Timbuktu, my Mauritanian entry from 2014, concerns the jihadist takeover of the city by Islamic extremist group Ansar Dine in 2012. Timbuktu itself is in Mauritania’s neighbour Mali,
Acquisition
Batches 14 150:00/480.5761× I have completed the easy part: the titles I can acquire quickly. The final 50 will be more difficult. The frustrating thing - for someone that values physical media above all else - is that I know Botswana is making films. Most of them are on
Review
Marshall Islands0:00/276.0321× I mentioned this film many posts back as the kind of thing I was hoping for from each country; the people of the Marshall Islands were unhappy that they hadn’t been represented on film. There were many things they could have done, but they
Review
Iran0:00/290.4533331× There are two films here. The first is an astonishing technical tour de force, a 135 minute film shot in a single take, complete with flashbacks. How you can manage flashbacks within an uninterrupted take is something I never thought possible, but it’s done here,