Quote: Emerson

"The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent"

Quote: Rosa Luxemburg

'The first revolutionary act is to call things by their true names'

'Balanced Individual' by Michael McConnell

more from this local artist at www.poopingrabbit.com

SFIFF54: 'Another Earth'

Another Earth: I loved this film.  It's basically a character drama exploring themes of loss, guilt, and atonement, but the presence of a second, identical earth on the horizon, with all its quantum implications, gives the film a brooding, crepuscular feel, an ambiguous atmosphere that hovers between menace and possibility.  Its a brilliant debut, intimate and powerful, and possessed of the sort of integrity that can characterize indie productions when they are conceived and developed from the ground up by ensembles as intelligent as this.

SFIFF54: 'Nostalgia for the Light'

Nostalgia for the Light:  This brilliant film from Chilean director Patricio Guzman succeeds on so many levels it is hard to summarize.  It creates its own level, it's a miracle that exceeds the sum of its parts.  Elegant commentary and dazzling images (of deserts, bones, moons, stars) attain a sort of harmonic convergence in which history, astronomy, and ethics align.  In revealing the ecstatic relationships between human and celestial bodies, light, time, space and memory, Guzman manages as well to bring reason and compassion to bear upon his country's darkest and most secret crimes.  It's a documentary - but it's also an astonishing work of art.

SFIFF54: 'Aurora'

Aurora: An unforgivably bleak and tedious attempt to render the texture of one man's despicable mind, this 3-hour exercise in testing the limits of audience endurance fails to justify itself psychologically, philosophically, artistically, or in any other ways relevant to sentient life.  Director (and star!) Cristi Puiu must be satanically depressed, or worse.  Avoid at all costs.

SFIFF54: 'The Mill and the Cross'

The Mill and the Cross:  Lech Majewski's intriguing study of Bruegel's painting (the Way to Calvary) zooms in on vignettes within the canvas and then develops mini-episodes from there, sliding backwards and forwards in time and in and out of the picture as a whole, until all are unified under the by now greatly expanded 'sign' of the painting.  With a dramatized Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) explaining his political, social, and aesthetic motives, the painting is transformed into a miraculous freeze-frame of a convulsion in history and society.  You have to see it to know how artfully this effect is achieved.