By Azadeh Jafari After two films set in Morocco—You Are All Captains (2010) and the Cannes Critics Week winner Mimosas (2016)—French-born Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe returns to his parents’ homeland of Galicia for his third feature, Fire Will Come, which the director has called a “dry melodrama.” The narrative is certainly simple enough: a middle-aged…

By Azadeh Jafari Published in Cinema Scope # 80 (Fall 2019) After two films set in Morocco—You Are All Captains (2010) and the Cannes Critics Week winner Mimosas (2016)—French-born Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe returns to his parents’ homeland of Galicia for his third feature, Fire Will Come, which the director has called a “dry melodrama.”…

By Azadeh Jafari In his new crime thriller, Diao Yinan returns to the noir tropes and bleak atmosphere of his 2014 Golden Bear winner Black Coal, Thin Ice to tell the story of on-the-run cop-killer gangster Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge), who gets involved with a mysterious prostitute, Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun-Mei). The film begins with…

By Azadeh Jafari The debut fiction feature by Ognjen Glavonic is the second time that the Serbian writer-director, who lived through the Yugoslav wars as a child, has explored the same shocking incident from the time of the Kosovo conflict. In his feature-length documentary Depth Two (2016), he mixed spoken testimonies from those involved with…

By Azadeh Jafari In Asghar Farhadi’s family dramas, there is always a crucial piece of narrative information that  is kept from the viewers and also from some of the characters, and which serves kicks off the director’s stories of secrets and lies. Then, through the meticulously well-written scripts, all the events, actions, and reactions are engineered…

By Azadeh Jafari Published in Cinema Scope 76 (Fall 2018)   The debut fiction feature by Ognjen Glavonic is the second time that the Serbian writer-director, who lived through the Yugoslav wars as a child, has explored the same shocking incident from the time of the Kosovo conflict. In his feature-length documentary Depth Two (2016),…

By Azadeh Jafari Of all the films that Jafar Panahi has made after being officially banned from filmmaking, 3 Faces is the one most visibly influenced by Abbas Kiarostami. After watching a video phone message in which a young girl, an aspiring actress named Marzieh, attempts suicide, Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari take a road…

By Azadeh Jafari Obsessive memories from the past haunt Yi-An, a sad, inattentive little boy who claims that he remembers his previous mother and his past life by the sea. In reality, Yi-An’s grandpa has fallen ill and needs constant care, which forces his mother to take him and go live with her sister—a situation…

By Azadeh Jafari Ilian Metev’s fiction debut, following his award-winning 2012 documentary Sofia’s Last Ambulance is a touching portrait of family relationships that explores the lives of a physicist, Todor (Todor Veltchev), and his two children, Niki (Nikolay Mashalov), an energetic and imaginative teenage boy, and Mila (Mila Mihova), a talented young pianist preparing for…