BNFF11 REVIEW: The Beast Pageant [2010]

“Sometimes you gotta feed the serpent its own damn tail” The love child of David Lynch and Michel Gondry has been born in Rochester, NY and its name is The Beast Pageant. Screening at the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival, Albert Birney and Jon Moses’s film is obtuse, inventive, funny, and more than it appears on the surface. Well, at least I’d like to think it is. Despite Birney’s answer of “dreams, making a film, and shooting around his city” when asked what his inspiration was, there has to be so…

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BNFF11 REVIEW: La vérité du ciel [The Truth of the Sky] [2008]

“He didn’t say goodbye to his mother” Wanting to bring his film La vérité du ciel [The Truth of the Sky] to the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival was an action of catharsis for Jim McSherry. His documentary short was shot fifteen years after the plane crash that altered the lives of many—including him—it is centered on. Losing his brother, who was coming home to see his pregnant wife by getting on an earlier flight, when an Air Inter flight in France crashed an hour after takeoff changed McSherry in a…

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BNFF11 REVIEW: The Floating Shadow [2012]

“I’ll only bring you bad luck” Throw the preconceptions that China would be unwilling to fund a project with dark subject matter such as rape and murder in a contemporary, non-feudal way out the window. According to writer/director Jia Dong Shuo, as long as you have a unique idea to bring to artistic fruition, finances will be available. And with that comes The Floating Shadow, a psychological drama about a young woman incarcerated, shifting back and forth between past and present, dream and reality. Chock full of traumatic events repressed,…

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