Agenda

EN

“Scene to scene, the obscure rules of its world and surrealistic logic of its narrative, images, and cuts can feel so obtuse, so intimately tied to Oshii’s personal subconscious, that the only substantive thing to grab onto can seem to be the inky, wispy beauty of Amano’s artwork. There is, however, a point. Like many Oshii stories, Angel’s Egg centers around a dialectic: a female persona (associated with light and water, defiant of gravity) who pursues a dream of transcendence; and a male (associated with earth and metal, who moves with all the weight of the material world he inhabits) arguing for cynical realism yet haunted by the female’s image. As the man and the girl meet and travel together, Angel’s Egg builds toward a single, pivotal dialogue that reveals the significance of the egg and telegraphs the film’s thesis via warped Biblical allusion: a poetic treatise on faith, salvation, and the silence of God.”

Eli Friedberg1

“Oshii and Amano’s vision of a dying world is rendered through a masterfully limited use of color. The landscape itself is near monochrome: a sea of grays, deep blues, and heavy blacks are populated by impenetrable shadows and silhouetted figures. This deliberate desaturation makes Amano’s sparing use of color quite impactful. The nameless boy and girl provide nearly the only points of warmth in the film’s palette, punctuating space with their pale complexions, soft pinks, and bright reds. They appear as fragile sparks of life in a world both eternal and on the verge of dissipating completely. This atmosphere is complimented by Yoshihiro Kanno’s melancholic score, floating through the ruins like a forgotten memory.”

Cat Beckstrand2

• 1Eli Friedberg, “Mamoru Oshii’s Radical, Ethereal Angel’s Egg is an Anime Like No Other
  Eli Friedberg,” The Film Stage, 12 November 2025.
• 2Cat Beckstrand, “Angel’s Egg,” Screen Slate, 15 November 2025.

EN

“The film's concern with identity, system, and order verges on the obsessive. This concern is most obviously displayed in the quotations of paintings, which manifest Greenaway's interest in Renaissance perspective, framed space, and composition. William F. Van Wert, who identifies a number of these citations, argues that they indicate ‘a serious attempt on Greenaway's part to use cinema to discuss problems of perspective and depth in painting’.”

Ruth D. Johnston1

• 1Ruth D. Johnston, "The Staging of the Bourgeois Imaginary in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover," Cinema Journal (2002).

EN

“Film, even before entering into the gallery space in the 1970s – with projector performances and film installations – sparked  interest within the art world: Andy Warhol, for example, turned filmmaker. In India, notable painters, Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta, M.F. Husain and Nalini Malani took an active interest in the possibilities of film. Velu Viswanadhan ought to be included in this list: his pentalogy, The Five Elements, combines a documentary interest in labour with a painterly interest in the landscape.”

Arindam Sen1

• 1Arindam Sen, "Delicate Viewing: The Films of Velu Viswanadhan," Marg, A Magazine of the Arts, vol. 72, no. 1, 2020.

EN

“Rather than accepting a governmentally sanctioned metanarrative of Japanese identity proven through hyperconsumerism of foreign products, Tampopo does not allow its audience complacency in the act of consumption: with the increasing presence of foreign goods in Japan, the very identity of Japan becomes open to commodification as well, and to scepticism. In Tampopo, this commodification is not at all negative; rather, it recreates Japan as relative to the rest of the world, a margin able to revel in its own marginality.”

Timothy Iles1

• 1Timothy Iles, “Tampopo: Food and the Postmodern in the Work of Itami Jûzô,” Japanstudien 12, no. 1 (2001).

EN

“Don’t open the gate to past sorrows.”

Hiam Abbass

“Lina’s research thus appears also one of a cinematic self-awakening, the realization that the ‘treasure that you don’t want to fade’ has already been reimagined and reworked, and the act of filming can help make sense of these ‘hazy bits of information,” a ‘way to find ourselves fully in a world we invented.’

What does remain, then? At a time in history when the need for reflection on identity seems evident, Bye Bye Tiberias unravels both like a personal diary, an intimate and troubled journey of the rich tapestry of Palestinian history and the personal stories embedded within it, and an examination of time and space through images. ‘I have never known happier times than those lived in Tiberias’ seems a sentence each and every one of these women and all Palestinians could have voiced at least once. Soualem’s work is able to reconvene all these stories lost between borders, enforced limitations, separated families, and generational divides into one single place, embracing a universal dimension of nostalgia and hope and paying homage to the history of the women who came before her as much as that of a country on the terrifying verge of losing its.”

Massimo Iannetti1

• 1Massimo Iannetti, “Reverberations through time and space,” Modern Times Review, 13 February 2024.

EN

“One of the reasons that Khleifi’s films resound, I believe, with so many people, and myself included, is that they are so human. He aims to make visible l’invisible, trauma, memory, the human experience, and give that or they who cannot be seen the same level of drama and complexity as the universe, with equal importance and weight, and with all of the emotions we are capable of: despair, hope, joy, sadness... ”

Rebecca Jane Arthur1

“While editing Fertile Memories, Khleifi discovered that part of the footage he had accumulated from the destroyed village of Ma’aloul was not connected to the plot of the two women. It belonged, in fact, in another film. This film, Ma’aloul Celebrates its Destruction, was consequently made in 1984. It con­tinues the efforts previously [made] in Adnan Mdanat’s film Palestinian Visions (1977), to resurrect Palestinian memory using different kinds of media. In Ma’aloul Celebrates its Destruction, these means include a mural of Ma’aloul village on the wall of a refugee’s house, documentary and semi­documentary footage, and testimonies of the refugees themselves as well as a historical delineation of the conflict narrated by a schoolteacher. In addition, a stroll among the village ruins and the time spent there on Israeli Independence Day, when Arab families were allowed to leave the areas under the rule of the military government and wander around Israel, add another layer. 

As in Mdanat’s films, the combination of these means enables both the preservation and the destruction of the harmonious image of the idyllic past. Khleifi’s film, however, takes this a step further, anticipating trends that would only take root several years later. Alongside the static preservation of an enchanted past image, it also excavates the layers of memory. Thus it transforms the static narrative of the past resurrected in the present into a story of the remembrance of the past, its recognition and processing, as a working through, as a stage toward a return to life in the present and its continued progression to the future.

[...]

While bringing the past alive in the present, the film also indicates the gap between these two periods of time. It is the length of time passed by the walker in the village, who is searching for the remains of his home and finds them whilst walking the distance between the ruins among which Palestinian children play during the course of Independence Day, and the village, which they do not know. It is the gap between history, as the village teacher recounts it to his students, in compliance with Israeli Ministry of Education requirements, and the subjective destiny of those defeated by it, including that same teacher, who is a Ma’aloul refugee. Above all, it is the distance between the two histories: the history of the Jews as quoted by the teacher and reenacted by the director, and Arab history as documented through individual reminiscences. Ma’aloul Celebrates its Destruction thus indicates the differences necessary for the recounting of a full historical narrative. These are the differ­ences between time and time, between memory and memory, between the place that was and the one that is, between the two peoples. The film integrates the traumatic story and the story of the attempt to overcome it. Thus it offers a history of trauma as well as another history - that comprised of the double image: present/past, two representations simultaneously illuminating and obscuring each other.”

Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi2

• 1Rebecca Jane Arthur, “Nearby”, Sabzian, 25 april 2018
• 2Nurith Gertz & George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema. Landscape, Trauma and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 80-82.