Lena Králiková Hashimoto’s ‘Atomka’ is a beautiful documentary that explores two seemingly unrelated events: the disaster that was the nuclear blast at Chernobyl, USSR in April of 1986 and the Nuclear disaster that followed the 2011 earthquake in Fukushima, Japan.

Although the documentary explores the similarity both in terms of the devastation that took place after the events themselves as well as how local media covered the stories, Králiková Hashimoto focuses more on the way in which the events directly relate to the outlook of those affected by it. By interviewing both her family, who was in Japan at the time, as well as locals who caught the events of Fukushima, Králiková Hashimoto creates a very beautiful, but equally depressing, portrait of the effects natural and nuclear devastation inflicts on its victims.
Králiková Hashimoto use of both civilians in Japan and Slovakia, as well as Greenpeace professionals and other environmental activists helps to truly paint a whole portrait of the aftermath of the nuclear disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Králiková Hashimoto uses her unique perspective as both a Japanese and Slovakian citizen to explore how the two events impacted her own life and those of the family around her. She recalls spending time with children who had been affected by the Chernobyl disaster as well as worrying for her family and friends in Japan after Fukushima. She narrates the events of the two disasters from her unique perspective; as she felt personally very close to the two events because of her heritage and family while managing to be on the other side of the globe at both times.

The film is beautifully shot and edited, with incredibly moving cinematography and sound design. The use of cellphone and security footage alongside professional images allows Králiková Hashimoto to truly invite the viewer into the narrative, helpig set the tone with the juxtaposing video quality. Králiková Hashimoto’s use of footage from Cherobyl also helps her narrative, reminding those who may not remember the events of the nuclear disaster, of the horrific and unprecedented devastation it brought. The glimpses we get of those who lived through the events are incredibly moving and the flawless editing between interviews with experts and civilians both in Slovakia and Japan help truly tie Králiková Hashimoto’s story together.

A beautiful short documentary from a talented filmmaker who is sure to continue producing and directing meaningful and heartfelt content for years to come. I truly appreciated the intimate glimpse we got into her life and how these two separate yet similarly devastating disasters helped shape her view of the world.

Like Ossessione, Poison, Y tu mamá también, and so many other queer films before it, Intrinsic Moral Evil explores the liminal space between male homosocial behavior and gay eroticism, and how that space has affected all kinds of young men. Unlike so many other films, however, Intrinsic Moral Evil uses dance and the body to tell the story of a young man’s entrance into his sexual being. The film has no dialogue or plot, per se. Instead, we see two young men dance together, maybe fighting (or something else?), and then a third androgynous dancer enters, and the three dance together.

Even without dialogue, however, the film’s narrative arc is quite clear. A young man, perhaps queer, attempts to engage in the semi-violent, jocular behaviors so often found in male adolescence. But the constant homosocial touch is also something else: a punch turns into a caress and wrestling turns into an embrace. When the new dancer arrives, the two boys fight for this dancer’s attentions, and a burgeoning love story begins.

The major concern with filming a performance is whether or not the camera adds anything to work. Can we think about Intrinsic Moral Evil as a film, or is the camera only the vessel through which we are able to view the performance? Thankfully, although the dance appears more apt for the stage than the screen, the film uses the camera quite impressively here. The camerawork is significant without being overwhelming, the film juxtaposes long shots of the dance sequences with intimate close-ups. It is through these close-ups that the film raises questions of intent and identity; as each jab lingers too long, the close camera shows a caress. While the motivations of the young men remain unclear (although, do we ever know the motives of adolescents? Do adolescents have motivations or are they simply pure id?), the acts are beautiful, erotic, and moving. Similarly, the camera’s shifts between circular motion and absolute stillness give the film a breathless, sexy beauty to the dance sequences. Clearly, this is the emotional space where love emerges. While premiere ballet has long shown love blooming though dance, we rarely see this love occur amidst such gender ambiguity. The empty stage set, classical piano, and stark milieu only serve to underscore the delicate beauty and raw sensuality of dance, while minimizing the significance of the genders of the persons involved. By giving its audience such a traditional version of beauty and grace but undermining traditional gender norms, the film calls into question the idea of same-sex love as an “intrinsic moral evil.”

Low-budget films that are set in space incredibly challenging to pull off. Given the set design, special effects, costumes, and make-up associated with producing an engrossing film set in another universe, the challenge isn’t to produce an authentic world but to produce a film that doesn’t look like Dr. Who circa 1965. And while campy sensibilities are wonderful, there is something unique about creating an enthralling, sophisticated world that audiences can believe in. In the Shadow of Dara does this delightfully, producing a gripping space action thriller with a svelte runtime of fourteen minutes. Drawing from a host of science fiction films, from 12 Monkeys to Star Trek, In the Shadow of Dara skillfully and successfully creates an exciting story, sympathetic characters, and disturbing enemies with more success than some mainstream science fiction films.

In 2280, Earth has been essentially destroyed by a race of dangerous, disreputable aliens called Shadows. A renegade band of humans finds the only way to save Earth: to go back in time to rescue the one who tells Earth’s coordinates to the invaders. The earthlings attempt to get this other alien to wake up from his fugue state, in which Shadows are attempting to extract this information. The fact that his dream world is a banal, British corporate office is both absolutely absurd and surprisingly creepy. It’s a credit to the director and crew that the film works so well given its narrative and aesthetic constraints; the acting is good, the dialogue is artful, and the plot is clear, even given the film’s short length. Particularly, the film’s interior spaces are empty and blank—the dream space of the office, for example, and the rough interior of an intergalactic spaceship—that could be anywhere or everywhere without seeming stagey. The digital special effects are judiciously well done, in that it keeps primarily to makeup and costume with only brief flashes of CGI. All of these elements serve the narrative rather than distract from it.

Shadow’s primary drawback may be that its skillful execution obfuscates any potential allegorical or thematic meaning from this potential world. Because of the film’s short running length and its tightly constructive narrative, the film doesn’t give us time to luxuriate over the traditional themes of science fiction or give us space to map the contemporary world onto this future apocalyptic scenario. Does the film concern itself with the slippery distinction between dream and reality? Does it see a future apocalypse? In my favorite moment, one alien notices that humans now have guns, which means that they’ve been keeping an eye on, distantly, for some time. Are we pets? Workers? A zoo? In the Shadow of Dara gestures towards a larger story, one in which humans are only bit players, but doesn’t linger long enough to flesh out that part of the story, and it may be the most interesting part.

If world building is one of the more challenging aspects of science fiction and future apocalyptic narratives, then Reconquista elegantly skips some of these challenges by setting its apocalyptic, religious-war narrative in 2064 Spain. The Iberian Peninsula has been the location of some of the world’s most detrimental religious conflicts, including the Spanish Inquisitions and the 1066 Grenada Massacre. In fact, the film’s title refers back the struggle between the Christian Kingdoms (most prominently Aragon and Castile) and the North African-Iberian and Islamic State between seventh and fifteenth centuries. In this conflict, the borders constantly shifted as the Muslim Caliphates and Catholic Monarchs vied for control over the area. These disputes lasted for centuries; a hot war was fought for a millennium for spiritual and physical dominance of the peninsula.

By placing future violent religious conflict in that region, the film already entrenches its audience in the future world’s major players in a way that makes sense, with almost no explanation needed. The background of tensions between Spanish Catholicism and North African Islam permeates European history and has been evoked in conflicts as diverse as the Crusades and WWII. Early in Reconquista, we find Carmen, a hardened, cynical Catholic soldier without much sympathy to the Islamic cause. It shows her priorities shift, however when her Catholic Priest Brother convinces her to take on a mission of peace: to safely take an Imam across enemy lines so that he can broker peace between the two sides. While the film’s scope and intent may be more ambitious than its final product, it nonetheless manages to convey the horrors of war, and the futility of religious warfare (as well as its permanence in human existence). The idea of religious soldiers is both profoundly ancient and uncomfortable contemporary. The technology is recent (perhaps even futuristic?), but the dialogues have a timeless sentiment. A child mourns the loss of her mother, soldiers are embittered and cynical, and people are predisposed to hate on sight. The film manages to convey the sensibilities of war without the technological spectacle or casts of (CGI) thousands in contemporary Hollywood war films.

And yet, whether intentionally ironic or not, the film’s title makes the piece inherently less optimistic than the final images seem to suggest. Although re-conquered by Christianity, Spain has never been able to calm its national and religious struggles. Still a country of several distinct peoples, national identities, and religious backgrounds, Spain has consistently proved unable to produce a coherent and peaceful multiethnic, multi-religious space. By naming the film after Spain’s archaic, fractured history, it extends the idea that this violence may continue its vicious cycles.

O Sole Mio, a South Korean short film that illuminates the relationship between sex and power in Korean media, maintain its funny, awkward, and horrific tension through its utter aesthetic sparseness. The camera barely moves, and the film only contains a handful of shots, but this only serves to make the film tenser and starker in its critique of business practices. In the film’s opening moments, women wait edgily outside an office door for an interview. After one woman angrily leaves the interview room, the film’s protagonist, Jisun, enters the office but admits quickly that she already knows the interview, with whom she had earlier traded a job for sexual favors. Despite insinuating that she’s there for another interview, she instead attempts to enact revenge against the potential employer that screwed her over.

The entire film plays on the absurd conventions of masculinity. The early tension in the waiting area is made even more awkward when an older man tells a younger man that he can hook him up with one of the women. The younger man’s even more awkward reply speaks to the cognitive dissonance that men seem to have when thinking about women as employees, friends, family, and, of course, sex objects.
In particular, the boss/interviewer—who we learn is stepping out on his heiress wife with the prospective employees—is gloriously smarmy with a half-grown mustache and a kind of ethereal greasiness. His small, troll-like physique and lecherous ogling produce a ridiculous image of male desire, one that is deftly contrasted by the female interviewee’s calm disgust. In a sense, the boss is an absurd stereotype of lecherous bosses, made even funnier by his youth contrasted with his old man clothing. He is a boy playing the role of a powerful, lascivious man, and failing terribly.

While film’s style is explicitly minimalistic, the small hallway, painful fluorescent lights, and negligible props only serve to emphasize this film’s image as a corporate sexual harassment film gone horribly one. What is explicitly significant here is that it is not only the film’s main protagonist that has been the recipient of masculine power—the interviewer’s wife and the other prospective interviewees are also enclosed within this particular power game. And, because the film is so short and has such little dialogue, the surfeit of power relations within such a brief window of time exposes their prevalence in the media/corporate sphere. Although very few words are spoken in the film, Jisun’s obvious disgust, the interviewer’s grotesque leering, the wife’s rage, and the other women’s horror speak to the constant, endemic sexual inequalities that forever frame women’s relationships to the professional world.

While Caposhi Pop may be a little bit lacking in originality (it’s what would happen if all of Spike Lee’s Inside Man was wedged inside the diner scene from Pulp Fiction), it nevertheless has an eye-catching, frenetic energy to it that propels it above an average crime film. The film’s inherent charm lies in its ability to successfully pack a host of different styles and modes of filmmaking–including animated credits, reverse imagery, voice-over, flashbacks, flash forwards, and point of view camerawork— and yet make it coherent and enjoyable.

Caposhi Pop opens with the robbery of a small, colorful diner, as seen from the point of view of someone in the back booth. Two masked assailants blow through the front entrance, wave their guns around, and insist that all the hostages get on the floor. After the film’s animated credits, the film flashes forward to the robbers eating diner food with police sirens blaring in the background, discussing how one designs a successful heist (Point one: don’t get caught. Point two: don’t get shot). We learn that this whole crime is, in fact, a cover-up for another, serious theft, and the point of the whole crime (and the film) is to extend the time before the cops arrive. Caposhi Pop vacillates back and forth between the trajectory of the crime and the dinner scene before events take an unexpected turn for the criminals.

Again, the film’s appeal lies in its ability to be fast-paced, fun, and entirely unserious, and the frenetic camera and wild shifts between filmmaking techniques only serve to underscore the film’s sense of fun. In no way is this a serious crime film, and as such, the violence and morals are appropriately garish. Freddy, the group’s leader, who is hilariously self-congratulatory and snide to his fellow conspirators, highlights the movie’s smarminess. However, any attempt at serious characterization fall’s flat, such as the moment in which the film attempts to characterize the other conspirator’s (Suzy’s) need for violence as a result of familial trauma. Clearly, Suzy loves to beat people with a mallet. The movie loves that she loves it; there’s no reason required.

That’s one of few moments that fall flat, though, in what is a generally coherent good time. The setting and color palette mimic the energy of the film: the reds and oranges of the animated credits dovetail with the garish, late-night diner colors. The effect is lively and invigorating without being entirely overwhelming. The movement of the camera likewise emphasizes the film’s screwy magnetism. The point of view work, reverse imagery, and slow motion are hyper-stylized but nonetheless appropriate for a film that has no expectations that crime, violence, or death should be taken seriously. Although this is a bit derivative, harkening back to the indie film movement days of the early 1990s, Caposhi Pop returns to these techniques with enough energy and delightedness that it makes it a pleasure to revisit such modes of filmmaking.

In the loose narrative of the short film Alchemy, a man suffers through what appears to be the world’s least pleasant job application and interview, which ends up transforming him into a being that can exist within two worlds simultaneously. In its initial sequence, a man is led into a banal conference room and told to “fill out the application in its entirety.” However, as he begins to fill out the forms (which appear numerous, even from the beginning), time elongates and the room seems to turn against him. The door locks, the lights go out, and his forms catch on fire. Alone, in the dark, he begins to be interviewed by a voice from above and suffer from visual and auditory hallucinations.

The film’s greatest strength is its ability to slip between the seeming banality of modern life and the myths of humanity’s pre-Enlightenment past. At first, the film only subtly connects the film’s corporate setting to the elemental symbols so prominent in the concept of alchemy; lights and colors change, papers catch on fire, snow covers the window and leaves the interviewee sightless to the outside world. By making these slow but sure connections, however, the film ruminates on the fine line between the prosaic and magical that undergirds everyday life. The monotonous dim of fluorescent overhead lights and the red glow of an average exit sign transform into more unearthly and disturbing sensory experiences. Everyday objects of modern capitalism, such as paper or a window, are rapidly changed without warning.

The film’s camera work mimics these elemental experiences. At first, the still camera references the modern setting, its immobility mimicking security cameras or the disembodied presence of a CEO portrait. However, as the film’s tensions rise and the protagonist’s sanity is questioned, the camera becomes a saturnalia of movement, highlighting the unreal experience and the terror (as opposed to the wonder) of transformative magic. As such, the film seems to reference older modes of experimental filmmakers, such as Antonin Artaud or Kenneth Anger, who emphasized the mythic body experience of cinema. While the film may not quite reach the rawness of those early experimenters, it nevertheless takes risks by shedding contemporary verisimilitude for past psychedelics.

And, while sometimes the protagonist’s actions appear extreme or overwrought, the bacchanalia makes sense when the interviewee aces the interview and the job is finally revealed. The film’s end deftly connects an ordinary (perhaps even infantile) present to an older, deeper mythology that lurks beneath the everyday world.

The Light Thief had me wondering how demons take their coffee. I don’t mean this as a comment against the film, in that it was dull or that it lost me. Far from it, the film’s foray into the world of beings that are far more power than us is most interesting when it imagines how supernatural characters interact with our mundane world. The film introduces us to Adham, a beautiful, charming ladies’ man who falls into bed with women and, in doing so, steals some essential element from them. He stores the essence, which is the film shows as a pure, blue light trapped in a bottle, in a hidden room that looks like a shrine, and he has collected dozens of these bottles. When one of his old conquests, Soleen, comes looking for hers, she finds much more than her own in his hidden room.

Although this story has been told before (that the essence, the soul, love itself can be stolen through seduction), there are several aspects of The Light Thief that make it stand out as unique. First, the main characters Adham and Soleen—whose names are darkness and the sun, respectively—are more mythic than human, which underscores the eerie, fantastical nature of the film. They are more than real, and the actors seem to take pleasure in perfecting their allegorical roles. In particular, Ángel de Miguel (Adham) delights in the wonderfully caddish nature of his sticky-fingered antagonist. In seducing his latest prey, Sara, he pretends to be interested in public service, flatters her boyishly, sleeps with her, and leaves her with a slapdash, smirking grin as he walks out the door. Adham is a vessel of selfish glee, even as Soleen is the epitome of emptiness and despair.

In a similar way, the fact that this desperate man and his female light-stealing counterpart are named Adham and Eva (Adam and Eve) cement the characters not as real people but as figures of myth, which make the lavish mise-en-scène delightful and fascinating. Eva, in particular, is pure id; the fact that she keeps her victim’s lights in a wine cellar in the basement of her home is a wonderful little touch. Adham’s luxurious apartment, his and Eva’s beauty, and their absolute romantic power over the other characters makes them seem to be in a battle that humans can only helplessly watch. While the film’s end does illustrate that all may not be as it appears, The Light Thief nonetheless allows for its audience to pause and ponder its elaborate, menacing, elegant details, a rarity in a short film. In this way, the film opens myth out into the objects of the real world, without sacrificing its strangeness and magic.

Pollution of the Heart is a suspenseful film that mixes archaic, claustrophobic interior spaces with the overwhelming suffocation (and perhaps horrific nature) of the love between parent and child. The film’s protagonist David is not quite an average young man. In our first glimpse of him, he’s playing dead in a coffin in a mortuary storage room, while his girlfriend takes pictures of his reposed body. This isn’t the last time we see him play dead, but the fact that he is being photographed does immediately introduce the idea of the double, of David’s mirror image, a thread that runs throughout the film. While David is supposed to meet his girlfriend later that evening, we learn that he must first see his long-suffering, manipulative mother, who relies on him for groceries and doesn’t seem to leave her sumptuous, stuffy apartment. While David attempts to go out, his mother tries to envelop him in the world of her past. Over the course of an evening, she seems to fall apart mentally, and at first it seems to be a ploy to separate David from his girlfriend. However, as secrets about David’s and his mother’s pasts are revealed, the film vacillates between two premises: is she slipping into insanity, or is there something more sinister afoot?

Drawing from Roman Polanski and David Lynch, the film’s most impressive features are its gorgeous, highly saturated color palate and its oppressively ornate mise-en-scène. The film has a painterly quality, if that painting was eerily garish and slightly unnerving. Far from being distracting or overly decorative, the setting mirrors the emotional interior of the mother herself. Once considered opulent and beautiful, the apartment has fallen into disrepair, and is dusty and seedy. The sophisticated camerawork also highlights the aged beauty of the film’s milieu, and it also helps create intimacy with our protagonist. As the camera follows David with increasing intimacy throughout the film, showing him first being photographed, then in a series of close ups and mirrored shots, it allows to suspect that David may not be a singular entity.

Hanna Sleszynska, who plays the mother, is particularly striking in her role as the manipulative, yet legitimately suffering mother. Her tension, her inability to separate dream from reality, and her shrill, clingy love illustrate the sufferings of woman torn between love for her child(ren) and fear of her own death. Damian Kret, who plays David, is also good as the young man obsessed with death, in what first appears to a trivial and then later a more legitimate way.

While the film’s closure arrives quickly and is a bit too obvious, the film nevertheless manages to maintain its eerie tension. Whether showing a baroque, deteriorating apartment or the banality of modern public transportation, the film contains a sinister undercurrent and maintains the idea that something profoundly not right is lurking behind every corner, or more terrifyingly, in the bodies of our most treasured loved ones.

No matter which language it is in, and no matter which languages you can understand as an audience, there are some films that you can easily understand the scenario with just jests, mimics, and manners. However, the language is sometimes a barrier in films. It is a barrier in Confessional as well. The provided subtitles are not talking to the audience. In a complex script as this film has, the dialogues become the essence of the film. When the translations are not done well, the spectators become completely deaf to motion pictures.

The movie Confession is set in Hong Kong in part. From the looks of the sets and costumes and the movie’s title, one can piece together that the main theme is the suicide of the girl we meet at the beginning of the movie. Suicide is a big sin according to the Catholic Church, and one can presume by the look of Father Ma’s clothing that he is a part of the Catholic clergy. What seems further puzzling is the character of the photographer, who witnesses the death of the girl in the church and starts following her sister by deciphering a message he intercepted. What is his agenda? What is the list he is talking about? What is the imaginary war Father Ma and the sister talk about? The director’s choices for the plot come across as too loose and without a good framework, because the movie is very hard to follow and understand.

Taking into consideration the problems with the bad translation, it is hard to form an opinion on motifs and script. The overall atmosphere has an interesting and drawing mystic, especially for the audience who enjoys a good mystery.

The translation is definitely one thing which decreases the quality of this film. It had way too many plot holes that were impossible to fill in from the context or the sets or non-verbal cues from the actors; not to mention the cultural barrier. But then again the translation might not be the only thing to blame. The editing and photography weren’t really top notch, and one can’t help but think that maybe if the directing were better it would be easier to understand more of this short film – bad translation not-with-standing.