IFFR Pirjo Honkasalo’s Orenda, which premiered at the 2025 International Rotterdam Film Festival, invites viewers into a world both intimate and wide in thematical scope. It’s a meditation on grief, guilt, faith, and identity, wrapped in a narrative that unfolds with deliberate pacing and quiet intensity. While it may not appeal to those seeking immediateContinue reading “Rotterdam 2025 Review: “Orenda””
Tag Archives: Finland
TIFF 2024 Review: “Mr. K”
Mr. K”, the English-language debut of Norwegian-Dutch director Tallulah H. Schwab, is a surreal and disorienting experience set in the confines of a seemingly inescapable hotel. Starring Crispin Glover as the titular Mr. K, a traveling magician who checks in for a single night, Schwab creates a Kafkaesque nightmare comedy where the ordinary is warped beyond recognition, and every attempt to find an exit leads deeper into the bizarre.
Venice 2024 Review: “Quiet Life”
“Quiet Life” by Alexandros Avranas, who won the Silver Lion award at the 2013 Venice Film Festival for his film “Miss Violence” is a gripping and oftentimes bitingly satirical exploration of a family’s struggle for asylum in 2018 in Sweden. The film follows Sergei (Grigoriy Dobrygin), his wife Natalia (Chulpan Khamatova), and their two daughters, who have fled Russia claiming persecution due to Sergei’s promotion of banned political texts at his school. The family’s hopes for a new beginning are crushed by the cold and harsh system of Swedish bureaucracy, which doubts the credibility of their story and dismisses their application for asylum, leading to a sudden medical emergency. Avranas presents a narrative where the family’s life is reduced to a series of inspections, interrogations, and regulations, all captured through a meticulously controlled and sterile lens.
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