Still writing. #kiarostami #film

Okay yes, I know I'm late to the mandatory end-of-year "Films I Watched and Recommend" list. I watched a grand total of 100 films last year and probably more (not counting cuts of films in post-production like DEMONS and films I forgot to list down). This list doesn't mean these films were released in 2017, just that I watched them then and they truly stood out for me. Top 10 (not in any order of adoration): 師父 The Final Master (Xu Haofeng; 2015; China Golden Slumbers (Davy C

People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose by John Torres (Philippines) is one of the most phenomenal films I've seen this year. Even as I told John Torres I had no damn clue what was going on (and had absolutely no background knowledge of the film's conceit(s) nor of Celso Ad Castillo's unreleased film, I was stunned in my seat for the first 30 minutes - at the scratchy images, at the almost senseless compatibility of recorded dialogue and images, and even at my own i

Facebook tells me we met seven years ago but "a little bird told me" we really met more than that and at the back of an Orchard Road building and several years later, again on a film set. To paraphrase Nabokov, you are one of the few "I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought — and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds." (Added this photo to post in 2017, post-DEMON

RIP Abbas Kiarostami. With every viewing of your films, your love letters to Iran and to Life itself - all of its happenings and miracles however minute, the narrowest of streams trickling through vast fields of gold, then the wind, life and everything else -, the sense of humanity and the beauty in everyday things they affirm, shook something within me. As you unearthed in Life and Nothing More, "Well, to continue being alive is also an art. I suppose it's the most sublime a