Whether through design or coincidence, June was a harmonious month between us here at Fandor and our friends at Ebert Presents At the Movies.
Last week, the show singled out our recent online premiere of Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary as a Hot and Now Pick of the Week. Co-host Ignatiy Visnevetsky hailed the film as “an underseen classic,” “a witty exploration of how cinema distorts reality… to my mind it’s still the finest mockumentary ever made.” You can watch his recommenation at the Ebert Presents site.
WATCH DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY ON FANDOR:
It turns out that the week before, Ignatiy had coincidentally picked another Fandor film as his Hot and Now recommendation. Ignatiy praises In the City of Sylvia, directed by Jose Luis Geurin, as “one of my favorite films of the last few years.” He goes on to describe it effusively:
“[It’s] a film that manages to lucidly touch on longing, city life, desire, imagination, voyeurism, youth, memory, and ultimately the act of looking itself… At once understated and romantic, In the City of Sylvia is a symphony of glances, faces, alleyways and city breezes. It manages to convey something intangible with poetic clarity.”
Ignatiy mentions that the film is finally available on DVD through Cinema Guild – and it is also available here on Fandor in a high quality online stream. You can watch his recommendation, and catch more than a few glimpses of gorgeous this movie looks, at Ebert Presents – and then come back here to…
WATCH IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA ON FANDOR:
The week before, yours truly made his debut as one of the show’s contributing critics, filing a report on South Korean cinema, using the wonderful Jeonju International Film Festival as a backdrop. You can watch my takes on some recent landmark South Korean films OldBoy, The Host, Poetry and Woman on the Beach – and we hope to have these films up on Fandor sometime in the future. In the meantime, you can watch the juicy potboiler Tell Me Something, and read up on what went down at Jeonju this year with my reports on the festival highlights and its centerpiece, the Cinema Digital Shorts Project – which, incidentally, featured two directors whose films are newly available on Fandor: Claire Denis (35 Shots of Rum) and the aforementioned Jose Luis Guerin (In the City of Sylvia). Will serendipity ever cease?
WATCH TELL ME SOMETHING ON FANDOR:
WATCH 35 SHOTS OF RUM ON FANDOR:
