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&
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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
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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
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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’
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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
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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,
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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,
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Paraguay0:00/324.4161× The thing about thrillers is that they’re highly structured, or at least they should be. Things happen in thrillers that don’t usually happen in real life. Crucially, for a thriller to actually cohere, the separate elements of the plot all need to tie together
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Kiribati0:00/305.1306671× I started with four rules: 1) A country as defined by the UN. 2) A commercially released film which is feature length (as defined by the BFI). 3) “The film would need to be either made in the country of origin, produced in it or meaningfully
Review
Eswatini0:00/289.5146671× The reason I’m favouring horror isn’t because I like being scared (although I freely admit that I do) but because extremes push us to show our real selves. Well, as much as narrative fiction can anyway. Buying a film from every country isn’t