Katherine Connell
Too Good at Goodbyes: The Souvenir Part II and Joanna Hogg’s Cinema of Memory
By Katherine Connell | 01/04/2022 | CS89, Features, From Cinema Scope Magazine
By Katherine Connell Joanna Hogg chases authenticity. Her reluctance to call “Cut,” instead letting a scene’s action carry on via languid takes, static camerawork, and unscripted dialogue, reflects her intuitive sense of how small but telling slips within the typically dull cadences of British upper-middle-class social chatter can reveal roiling undercurrents of feeling. Yet while…
Read More → Night Raiders (Danis Goulet, Canada/New Zealand)
By Katherine Connell | 09/20/2021 | CS88, Currency, From Cinema Scope Magazine
apocalyptic cityscape backdrops an anti-authoritarian alliance between two characters from traditional Cree stories (Wesakechak and Weetigo). Goulet’s first feature, Night Raiders, not only returns to the realm of dystopia, but also shows the degree to which its creator’s interest in the genre goes beyond the use of futuristic settings as a mere aesthetic surface.
Read More → TIFF 2021 | The Devil’s Drivers (Mohammed Abugeth & Daniel Carsenty, Qatar/France/Lebanon/Germany)
By Katherine Connell | 09/15/2021 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2021, TIFF Coverage & Reviews
By Katherine Connell Car chases, the customary crescendo of the action genre, are a tense everyday reality for the subjects of The Devil’s Drivers, Mohammed Abugeth and Daniel Carsenty’s documentary that follows Palestinian drivers who smuggle workers living in the West Bank into Israel. Plumes of orange dirt trail behind vehicles navigating desert roads at…
Read More → Festivals | Fantasia 2020: Unexpected Pleasures
By Katherine Connell | 09/22/2020 | Festivals, Web Only
By Katherine Connell A maze is designed to puzzle and possibly frustrate; conversely, the pleasure of a labyrinth is in submitting oneself to a route that, when traversed, might reveal the mind of its designer. This is certainly true of the late Obayashi Nobuhiko’s Labyrinth of Cinema (2019), one of the headlining films of Montréal’s…
Read More → Invisible Life (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil)
By Katherine Connell | 12/28/2019 | CS81, Currency, Web Only
By Katherine Connell Chronicling the life of the legendary Rio de Janeiro drag performer, hustler, and street fighter, Madame Satã (2002) announced Karim Aïnouz as a filmmaker attuned to the conceptual richness and subversive potential found within liminal spaces: individuals who fluctuate between seemingly fixed identity categories, and whose fullness of life outside the social…
Read More →