Dominik Kamalzadeh

By Dominik Kamalzadeh In his Cannes-awarded Post Tenebras Lux, Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas already dealt with personal matters, reflecting on his role as lover, father and husband in a semi-autobiographical film with a metaphysical bias. Our Time goes even further in his Knausgårdian self-observation as he himself takes the central part as rancher/award-winning poet Juan,…

By Dominik Kamalzadeh With Son of Saul, his immersive Holocaust drama about a member of the Sonderkommando, Hungarian director László Nemes made a lightning start with a topic few directors dare to face up to at all. His unusual—and, in this context, especially debatable—approach was the product of an aesthetic that claimed to convey the…

By Dominik Kamalzadeh In his Danish films, director Thomas Vinterberg prefers to turn his attention to more personal (and sociopolitical) matters than in his international productions. After The Celebration (1998) and The Hunt (2012), the ’70s-set drama The Commune, originally conceived as a theatre play that premiered at Vienna’s Akademietheater in 2011, is another examination…

By Dominik Kamalzadeh If melodrama as a genre is concerned with the suffering of the heart on a metaphorical level, French director Katell Quillévéré’s third feature Heal the Living takes the matter in an inventive turn, rather literally. In the fluently directed opening sequence, we see a group of teenagers ride away to a remote…