Little Jaffna: The Tigers of Tamil Revolution

Rating: 3 out of 5.

In Tamil Jaffna is a phonetic combination that expresses the words harp and town. If we do a translation, we could say that Jaffna is the City of Harps. Located in the north of Sri Lanka, it is the second most important city in the country and during the Sri Lankan civil war, it was the command base of the Tamil Tigers, the separatist military group that faced the government for more than 20 years. In Little Jaffna (2024), the debut feature by director and actor Lawrence Valin, we delve into this conflict from the perspective of the Sri Lankan diaspora embodied in a suburb of Paris.

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Exploring the Profound Depths of Au Hasard Balthazar

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Legend has it that the inspiration came from The Idiot. But not just any idiot but the one that Dostoevsky gave birth to. Bresson found his muse reviewing the pages of the classic novel and especially that moment in which Prince Myshkin reflects on the braying of a donkey lying on the ground. From there was born what is today considered one of the masterpieces of cinema, Au Hasard Balthazar. For Robert Bresson, this would be his seventh feature film, as if fate had wanted to wink at the perfection of seven. Movies like A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959) had already put his name in the spotlight.

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The Baker’s Wife (1938)

Rating: 5 out of 5.

I remember as if it were yesterday the day that my friend Pablo Mustonen gave me that book. It was the first Christmas after Cineasta Radio was born and at a Christmas gathering he gave me “The 1,001 films you have to see before you die.” Obligatory reference would from that moment be Steven Schneider’s book. Days later, among its pages, I came across Marcel Pagnol’s The Baker’s Wife. Always revered, Pagnol is one of those authors who I could not find, much less could I get any of his films. The moment had come, and I could finally see the film and cross it off the long list that has become a kind of obsession.

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