It’s a forgotten detail of that forgotten war: the fact that hundreds of ethnic Estonians who had lived in Abkhazia since the 19 th century were forced to flee to a ‘motherland’ they had never known. His subject is not just a now almost forgotten Caucasian war – the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict that flared up in the summer of 1992 (and continues to simmer). But writer director Urushadze has found a way into the material that extracts universal lessons from a microscopically local flashpoint. It would be wrong to overstate Tangerines’ feelgood factor this is on one level at least a war film with a high body count and an unromantic view of man’s seemingly unlimited appetite for tribal conflict. It’s just a premise, allowing Urushadze to hone the drama down to the lean and hungry shape of a humane, philosophical Spaghetti Western What might seem like a challenging ethno-historic background melts away almost immediately. Released theatrically on 17 April in New York and 24 April in Los Angeles, Tangerines could add a few more territories in the wake of the attention, despite its long shelf life. The icing on the cake came with Samuel Goldwyn’s acquisition of the film for US distribution on the eve of the Oscars. It may not have lifted the big prize, but its inclusion in the shortlist – the first ever for a film from either country – was the culmination of a wave of goodwill that had been building since its debut at the 2013 Warsaw Film Festival. A creepy tale about a group of teens who are terrorised online by an anonymous individual (billie227) claiming to be their deceased friend, Laura, the film has pocketed more than $US54 million at the box-office on a budget of $US1 million.The surprise nomination in the best foreign film category at the 2015 Academy Awards, Estonian-Georgian co-production Tangerines is a tense, moving, nuanced anti-war drama. The Skype/Facebook/YouTube/Instagram movieĪmerican indie horror Unfriended (2014) was shot on GoPro cameras used to mimic standard laptop webcams and was the first movie to play out entirely in the form of a screencast, featuring Facebook, Skype and YouTube. The movie, co-directed by Hooman Khalili and Patrick Gilles, came and went fairly quietly, though it did spend at least a little time on a longlist for Oscar consideration, for what it's worth. The movie is Olive (2012), a drama about a girl with magical powers and her interaction with three lonely souls. Preceding any known iPhone feature film and starring a downright screen goddess in Gena Rowlands, one of the first-ever smartphone feature films was actually shot on a Nokia N8, albeit using actual cinema lenses. The films that emerge from this mindset may not always be among the best of their respective years (let alone of all time), but for the sheer fact of having been made at all they'll always be worth more than a passing mention. It's not about the technology, they seem to say, it's simply about getting out there and doing it. These filmmakers are willing and able to make a movie using whatever gear they can get their hands on. Moviemaking is increasingly a digital business, though there are some filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan among them, who have gone to bat for making, and screening, film the traditional way – that is, using film.Īt the other end of the spectrum are the crazy-brave few who have opted to go full gonzo. People were allegedly heard to gasp on hearing this. This owed something to the film's subject matter, but it had a lot to do with the fact that writer-director Sean Baker had photographed it using only three 5s iPhones. One of the hottest tickets on the film festival circuit this year (MIFF included), Tangerine was the talk of Park City, Utah, when it premiered at Sundance in January.
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