Known as the Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (not their real names) have carved out a place for themselves with comedic stunts and public hoaxes designed to bring attention to global problems. They havemade a career out of embarassing corporations and government organisations.Their latest documentary (the third) The Yes Men Are Revolting chronicles the last five years in the pair’s lives as they take on the challenge of climate change. This time, there is a personal focus to their story too – no longer in their 20s, both men now have teaching jobs to maintain as well as more domestic concerns. Mike has a family, while Andy has found a boyfriend who might be a life partner. We watch as the men question their relationship, the effectiveness of what they do and ultimately find new inspiration in the Occupy movement.
Life Itself is a 2014 American biographical documentary film about film critic Roger Ebert, directed by Steve James and produced by Zak Piper, Steve James and Garrett Basch. The film is based on Ebert's 2011 memoir of the same name.The movie's first release for Turkey will be at !f İstanbul.
If Iñárritu’s films have one thing in common, it is intensity - emotional, intellectual or satirical – though thankfully not all at once. In the case of Birdman, it’s hard to decide whether to focus on its acting, theatrical script or real-life camerawork in a short review. Micheal Keaton, of Batman, plays Riggman, best known for his role as Birdman, who is looking for a way out of his emotional, financial and identity crisis through the acknowledgement he hopes to get from a short play that he directs and acts in. Birdman will be shown in !f 2015 for the first time for Turkey.
This is an invitation to a guided tour to witness magic - at Studio Ghibli, founded by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, the greatest animators of our time. This documentary, filmed over a year that encompassed two major releases by the two masters, goes far beyond a tribute, showing the naked truth behind the mesmerizing magic. It reveals the complicated relationship, partnership and friendship between Takahata and Miyazaki, and their approach to work, life and filmmaking. We learn about Miyazaki’s philosophy through his everyday routines, sometimes in a very blunt, even depressed manner. There is no Santa -like grandfather behind the magic, but an intriguing old man who you’d like to know better. Here we see him saying farewell after his final work, The Wind Rises (!f 2014). Sad as it is, it makes you want to watch all his works all over again.
Advertised as the first Iranian vampire western, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night takes us to the dark corners of the imaginary Iranian underworld town, Bad City. A lonely vampire, named The Girl, is enjoying the pleasures of immortality in the gloomy streets of the semi-abandoned and unpopulated Bad City. Her encounter with the Dracula costumed Arash paves the way to an immediate romantic click and chemistry. With gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and a psychedelic soundtrack, this brilliant debut feature blends together a world of midnight delirium and atmospheric dystopia. Ana Lily Amirpour’s fresh take on the genre displays an otherworldly virtuosity in rendering the uncanny.
A collaboration between the exiled Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed and Kurdish activist Wiam Simav Bedirxan, Silvered Water brings us heart-wrenching moments of the civil war in Syria. Mohammed has been collecting footage from YouTube – a daily stream of atrocities he tries to make sense of, in pain and far away. The footage lays bare most harrowing human stories. Then, Simav, still in Homs under heavy shelling and bombardment, finds him. She has a camera and needs advice on what to shoot. But Simav, a woman of courage and a poetic understanding of life, instinctively knows what to shoot. While wandering in a city under siege, she keeps asking wise questions on how to live, how to endure, how to create. This is doubtless one of the most hurtful films to watch this year, but between the lines you will discover some antitheses of war: love, children, creativity, poetry, and flowers that still grow on broken pavements.
Margaret Keane’s paintings of “big-eyed waifs” were a sensation in the 60s and allegedly inspired Andy Warhol. Their artistic value and influence on pop art have been much debated; but they paved the way for cheap copies of art for mass consumption, thanks to her enterprising husband, who went to great lengths to sell her work, including putting his own name under it. It was one of the biggest art scams of the last century, and one that can’t be separated from the broader problem of exploitation of women. Amy Adams superbly portrays an artistic but totally unassuming, independent-spirited but duly submissive product of the times. Director Tim Burton seems to have wanted to reward an artist he loved, as with Ed Wood in 1994. Both are a tribute to the art of kitsch, and both imitate the subject’s style. Just as we watch Ed Wood as if through his own camera, this film has a cute, modest realism - with enormous eyes pleading behind.
The Look Of Silence will get its Turkish premiere at the 14th !f Istanbul International Independent Film Festival. Following the heart-breaking, surreal yet all-too-real Act of Killing (!f 2013) in which Joshua Oppenheimer closely introduced us to the killers who participated in the mass murder of communists in the 1960s in Indonesia, in The Look of Silence, we meet Adi, whose older brother was murdered five decades ago during the bloodletting, and who discovered how his brother was murdered through Oppenheimer’s work with the perpetrators.
