By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)
The documentary, A Story of Children and Film might be better off named The Role of Children in Cinema, and it can easily become a textbook for the next cinema studies course at a university campus if Mark Cousins, Irish director and occasional critic, wanted it. He shares to the world his excellent knowledge of this subgenre.
In Cousins’ video essay, he delves into a nearly complete history starting from Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012), and wraps it around his own little video shoot of his visiting neice and nephew playing with a marble toy set. The juxtapositions he makes are interesting. When he delves into actual cinema, a few movies, like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) is missed for good reason – it’s an adaption of a book. But with more than a century’s worth of movies to sift through, this narrator successfully finds the movies from many countries (25 in fact) and representative of different eras to make his point with. He also uses it in a compelling juxtaposition when he includes footage of his neice and nephew visiting his flat and playing with a marble run.
Continue reading “[Victoria Film Festival ’14] A Story of Children and Film, a Documentary Review”
Plot: Watase Aoba is like many high schoolers in the present day; he is good at basketball and he has exceptional friends. But a returning student named Yumihara reveals he is destined for greater things in a future where the world is locked in war.
Plot: Two planets (East and West) were once connected by a civilization long since past. Now both these worlds have developed their own cultures. Jeanne Kaguya D’Arc, a girl from the peaceful Western Planet, is prophesized to be the Savior of the World. With the help of Leonardo Da Vinci, she travels to the Eastern planet, a place still locked in war. Nobunaga the Fool wants to change his world and a chance meeting with Jeanne may give him the power he needs to achieve his goal.
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