Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa is a journey of hearts as they first struggle to get over their homes, and later, fall in love with their adopted home - an alien country of semi-clad men and women, mystifying customs, different languages and personal conflicts…A country that they seek refuge in, driven away from their home land to hold on their most valuable possessions – their lives. A vicarious experience for someone like me, who practically got transported to a land called Africa, and into the minds of three characters struggling…

Werner Herzog takes us through the journey, both physical and mental, of Aguirre - a man dominated and eaten up by his own ambitions, objectives and self-glorification. Striking meditation on impact of greed on human minds and the consequences of the same. Aguirre: the Wrath of God is more of a psychological study of progressive insanity than an event oriented film. Its measured pace and direction induce a kind of trance into the involved viewer that one finds difficult to detach from.

When cinema was in its infancy during the teens and the twenties, many pioneers sought to provide it a definite shape and even assemble various tools and benchmarks for the decades of filmmakers to come. This led to the formation of various cinematic and narrative techniques, characteristic to their country of origin, which were later used by tens of directors from that country. One such trait, expressionism, was extensively used by the filmmakers of Germany such as F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.

Wings of Desire (1987) takes off with a dedication to cinema’s three great stalwarts – Truffaut, Ozu and Tarkovsky. Indeed, elements of all the three directors’ works are present in the film. However, Wim Wender’s decidedly mood piece, released months after the Tarkovsky’s demise, is a film that is to be felt and not seen, much like the latter’s films. To quote Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) – “Your eyes, your ears, your senses, will be overwhelmed”. The movie also inspired Brad Silberling to make “City of Angels”…

Director: Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck
If you have watched Equilibrium, V for Vendetta, or read 1984 by George Orwell, you may have a good idea already of where I am going with this. But only an idea, mind you! There are similarities in theme, (we still haven’t stopped making movies on authoritarian societies, especially those built [...]

The edge of heaven is about people on the edge of relationships, the edge of breakdowns, the edge of happiness, the edge of misery, the edge of conflicts…walking on the edge of the road less traveled, where hoards of people walk down, oblivious to the those right next to them – disconnected, yet inexplicably related. [...]