Undercurrents: this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week focused on “sur-realism,” a mode of Latin American filmmaking that doesn’t imagine an escape from reality but instead is fully, vividly, nightmarishly of it.
Mirror mirror: Marguerite Duras’s acclaimed classic India Song and her less well-known Baxter, Vera Baxter offer striking examples of her knack for colliding literary language with the audiovisual form
Straight, no chaser: Alain Gomis’s artful remix of a 1969 French TV interview with Thelonious Monk dissects the casual racism suffered by the musical genius
Binary systems: two Berlinale standouts, Our Body and Orlando, My Political Biography grapple productively with the boundaries between subjective and objective experience
Life spans: the Scottish artist discusses Berlinale highlight Being in a Place – A Portrait of Margaret Tait, his experimental portrait of the great Orkney filmmaker
On the grind: Mark Asch, Beatrice Loayza, and Devika Girish get together for an epistolary exchange about the thoughts and, yes, feelings elicited by Magic Mike’s Last Dance
Let there be light: in the radiant One Fine Morning, Mia Hansen-Løve conveys an auto-fictional tale of grief and new love with disarming and affecting sincerity
