‘Melancholia’, dictionary description… “a mental condition and especially a manic-depressive condition characterized by extreme depression, bodily complaints, and often hallucinations and delusions”.Smash ceremony to pieces. Hype, ego, pomp, sensationalism, formality, persona, ceremony… Blow it to smithereens and what is left? A whole new way of looking at the world around us, whether real or imaginary, an altered perspective. Well, we’ve all seen that Lars von Trier is a fan of ...

A past Cannes tribute to RUBBER (2010)... A Cannes 2010 feature...  REVIEW of RUBBER (2010) by Quentin Dupieux. ‘Meet Robert. Little Tire. Big Dreams.’How many times can you say to yourself ‘WTF?’ during a film? Well, I dare you to watch this Magical Realism, Western, Slasher, Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Art-house, Experimental, Fantasy and just plain Weird genre jumble fiction perspective feature that keeps you wondering long after you’ve seen it what exactly it is that yo...

PORTRAIT OF A MAN (Finland, 2010) by director Visa Koiso-Kanttila screened in competition at this year’s Thessaloniki Doc Fest to international audiences. It is a beautifully filmed story about the truth of one man’s search for new meaning in his life. While a true story, this has the feeling of a fiction film as it follows one main character and his personal search for truth. A Finnish man, Kalle Rissanen, is in now in his 40s. His father killed himself at the same age and recent...

  PORTRAIT OF A MAN (Finland, 2010) by director Visa Koiso-Kanttila screened in competition at this year’s Thessaloniki Doc Fest to international audiences. It is a beautifully filmed story about the truth of one man’s search for new meaning in his life. While a true story, this has the feeling of a fiction film as it follows one main character and his personal search for truth. A Finnish man, Kalle Rissanen, is in now in his 40s. His father killed himself at the same age and r...

still from the film HERO OF ALL SEAS (Syria, 2010) is a poignant and heart-felt short documentary film, 27’, about a Kurdish man named Abo Yashar who is one of the few men from his native country to have escaped successfully to Athens, Greece. Thousands of Kurdish emigrants have tried to flee to Europe illegally and have failed, making Abo a kind of local hero for his so-called successful passage as many of these emigrants lost their lives at sea during the perilous passage to Greece...

THUNDER SOUL screened at the 13th Thessaloniki Film Festival last week at the Olympian Theater to an international audience. Winner of the Pan-African Film festival of Los Angeles 2011, is the documentary film THUNDER SOUL (USA, 2010) about inspiration, heroism, music, the vibrant 70’s and last but not least Thunder Soul… This is the story about a funk/soul band in the 1970s (my favorite decade) that began in the all-American Kashmere highschool, Houston, Texas. This was a tim...

THUNDER SOUL screened at the 13th Thessaloniki Film Festival last week at the Olympian Theater to an international audience. Winner of the Pan-African Film festival of Los Angeles 2011, is the documentary film THUNDER SOUL (USA, 2010) about inspiration, heroism, music, the vibrant 70’s and last but not least Thunder Soul… This is the story about a funk/soul band in the 1970s (my favorite decade) that began in the all-American Kashmere highschool, Houston, Texas. This was a time...

photo still from Guanape Sur Guanape Sur (Italy, 2010. 24’) is a short documentary film about the small island of the same name off the coast of Peru. Humanly uninhabitable, the island is home to hundreds of thousands of birds, resembling something like a Hitchcock film come to life. Despite being an island comprised of rock and bird excrement, two guards live on the island and in the film, two of these guards usher in hundreds of workers to gather excrement in sacks and bring them ba...

Kinbaku- Art of Bondage (Finland, 2009), at 13th TDF, Thessaloniki Film Festival This fascinating short documentary film by director Jouni Hokkanen tells the story of ‘tight binding’, a Japanese form of art through bondage on women who want to be bound. Apparently, tying things up is a sacred quality in the Shinto religion, and this does not exclude the tying up of people as well. Rope artists who express themselves through bondage are considered to have ‘rope fetishes’ usin...

Kinbaku- Art of Bondage (Finland, 2009), at 13th TDF, Thessaloniki Film Festival This fascinating short documentary film by director Jouni Hokkanen tells the story of ‘tight binding’, a Japanese form of art through bondage on women who want to be bound. Apparently, tying things up is a sacred quality in the Shinto religion, and this does not exclude the tying up of people as well. Rope artists who express themselves through bondage are considered to have ‘rope fetishes’ using o...