Writer/director Wanuri Kahiu has made a twenty-minute science fiction film in Kenya about a future that takes place after great water wars have left the earth barren and lifeless. The short, called Pumzi, is playing at the Sundance Film Festival. It was produced by Inspired Minority Pictures. The film follows a woman who works for a museum in one of the great self-contained indoor cities of Africa. She finds a single germinating seed and escapes to the dead landscape outside where she wants to plant the seedling. The film looks beautiful. I can’t wait to see the whole thing.
Category Archives: Movies
All our films and animations!
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas on Living in Poetry
This is a clip from a documentary film, Meanwhile, a butterfly flies, about filmmaker Jonas Mekas. He shares a few thoughts about culture, country, poetry and what those things really are.
Jonas Mekas Film: As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Jonas Mekas is one of our great independent filmmakers. He spent years writing a film column in the Village Voice. He founded the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. He makes lots of films with small cameras that he can carry almost anywhere he goes. That is, by the way, how filmmakers should be working today. If a filmmaker needs a truck, he or she is making a commercial. I found this via the exceptionally brilliant underground film site, Bad Lit.
Bob Dylan’s Pink Christmas People
I love Bob Dylan’s recent album, Christmas in the Heart. Listened to it many times on Christmas day. This is his video for Little Drummer Boy. The people do seem awfully pink but maybe it’s just my eyes playing tricks on me.
Scarlett Johansson Has Made a Magnificent Short Film: These Vagabond Shoes
I spend a lot of my very limited brain capacity wondering why Hollywood directors don’t run around with small cameras making their own little movies for YouTube. Scarlett Johansson has made an excellent short film called These Vagabond Shoes which puts on display her obvious interest in and love for true cinema. The person who has uploaded it to YouTube has somehow squeezed the image from widescreen to standard, but the film shines nevertheless. I’m not sure why there’s a Russian overdub either, but just ignore it. I think Ms. Johansson should upload the film herself properly and if she does, I’ll change the video link. She has made a film that I’m certain is exactly what she wanted to make. It’s her personal expression of a fleeting and elusive subject. The film’s about being alone and damn well liking it. Kevin Bacon plays the film’s main character who gets dressed at just past 4:00 pm to leave his apartment and take a trip to a nearly empty Coney Island. The film contains only small incidental sounds and very minimal dialog. Its beauty lies in the attention to tiny details of behavior. The multiple clocks in Mr. Bacon’s tiny apartment, all precisely set. His careful re-tying of his shoe. His placement of a hat upon his head and his hesitation when locking his door behind him. These are the details of the lone person who sets out upon a small but important voyage through the terrifying public space. Mr. Bacon’s character puts on the armor of his attire with a resolute dread that I can remember from my own time alone. Ms. Johansson knows exactly what she’s doing. Her character’s trip to Coney Island where he will purchase a hot dog and sit on a bench by the sea is a seeking out of the pleasure of being alone with one’s very own self and the not knowing what will come of that. The uncertainty and the wide open strangeness of possibility when one is all alone in a very busy and enormous world is too much for most people to face.
Lord of the Rings Fan Film: Born of Hope
Born of Hope is an independent feature fan film inspired by The Lord of the Rings and produced by Actors at Work Productions in the UK. Kate Madison is the main producer/director. The film is a 70-minute original drama set in a time before the Lord of the Rings stories. It tells the story of the Rangers of the North and was inspired by a few paragraphs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices to the trilogy.