Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.


April 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 73

Total Comments: 32


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My Grandmother’s House / La Casa de mi abuela / Spain / 2006

Opening Night film at the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival.

Adán Aliaga’s feature documentary follows the lives of Marita, a 75-year old widow, and Marina, the 6-year old granddaughter in her charge, in the weeks before they must move out of Marita’s cozy, plaster-built home of 50-odd years. Shot in lurid, acrobatic DV, Aliaga’s film is surprisingly, sometimes aggressively intimate, capturing Marina’s hilarious juvenile flailings and Marita’s wearying attempts to rein them in.

In portraying these two people, Aliaga ventures some bold editing strategies and artful camerawork, but the result is emotionally effective without being maudlin. Especially in the portrayal of Marita, the film might well have played up the pathos of her situation — being coaxed from the house her husband built a half-century ago, in order to make way for some luxury flats. But Aliaga instead opts for a perspective closer to that of Marina’s: dreamy, hyperactive, easily distracted, but always affectionate. And even if the instrumental indie rock that scores the film is of questionable relevance, it nonetheless evokes the dusty, sun-dazed qualities of Marita and Marina’s Spanish town and the ambling, repetitive, but pleasant life they lead there.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Digital projection
20 Apr 2006 12:58 PM | Submit Comment


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