Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life’s meaning as they live through everyday quandaries.
Two neighbors form a strong bond after both suspect extramarital activities of their spouses. However, they agree to keep their bond platonic so as not to commit similar wrongs.
“The figure is the lover at work.”
In De grote vakantie Johan van der Keuken learns he only has a few years left to live after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. He and his wife Nosh decide to go on a long vacation to make a final film.
Inspired by the Surrealist concept of the exquisite corpse game, the film crew travels from village to village in Thailand, asking various people they encounter to build upon a tale and advance its storyline in whatever way they like, each one picking up where the previous one left off.
“Some filmmakers say “this is my work and I want it to stay that way”. That is their right, and we respect that right. Those are the films we don’t buy, and those are the films we don’t transmit.”
“Close the window shutting to a crack, film my reflection in the mirror as my hand moves in front of the mirrored light.”
Opening title
“Dear Anne-Marie Miéville,
Your film Après la réconciliation stunned and delighted me.
It has elements of both the whip and the tightrope.
It tells a story without telling a story. Without the usual ingredients of a story, I mean.
“I look at it as productive frustration. Films that are entertainments give simple answers, but I think that’s ultimately more cynical, as it denies the viewer room to think.”
Michael Haneke
“In our alley we see men searching through the refuse for treasure. The Gleaners and I places them in an ancient tradition.
“Reiteration becomes reversal in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), the most complicated instance of Hong’s doubling.
“His work teems with Hong look-alikes, alter egos, and surrogates, most of them self-absorbed, obtuse, feckless, forever doing the wrong thing: insisting on paying a host for a home-cooked meal; crying out the name of another woman in the middle of sex; drunkenly demanding a blowjob from a long-a
“You are the sun. The sun doesn’t move, this is what it does. You are the Earth. The Earth is here for a start, and then the Earth moves around the sun. And now, we’ll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand, about immortality.
Pedro Costa’s longest and most challenging film is also the one in which he most fully discovers his present method (shooting beautifully composed tableaux without camera movement in digital video, with scripted dialogue) and subject matter (immigrants from Cape Verde and junkies, all nonprof
