The 3rd annual Winnipeg Underground Film Festival is a three-day showcase on of experimental short films from all over the globe, plus a screening of a locally produced feature film. The fest runs on June 5-7 at the Frame Arts Warehouse.
The sole feature film of the fest is FM Youth by Stéphane Oystryk, which captures the lives of three young Franco-Manitoban friends as two of them about to embark on a journey outside of their tight knit French community. FM Youth will screen at 11:30 p.m. on the opening night of June 5.
The rest of the fest is crammed full of short films, including two by the amazing analog experimentalist Christine Lucy Latimer; plus work by local filmmaking star Guy Maddin, prolific Winnipeg expat Clint Enns, Underground Film Journal fave Neil Ira Needleman, killer animator Leslie Supnet, Josh Weissbach’s Model Fifty-One Fifty-Six, which garnered an Honorable Mention...
The sole feature film of the fest is FM Youth by Stéphane Oystryk, which captures the lives of three young Franco-Manitoban friends as two of them about to embark on a journey outside of their tight knit French community. FM Youth will screen at 11:30 p.m. on the opening night of June 5.
The rest of the fest is crammed full of short films, including two by the amazing analog experimentalist Christine Lucy Latimer; plus work by local filmmaking star Guy Maddin, prolific Winnipeg expat Clint Enns, Underground Film Journal fave Neil Ira Needleman, killer animator Leslie Supnet, Josh Weissbach’s Model Fifty-One Fifty-Six, which garnered an Honorable Mention...
- 6/3/2015
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
A documentary feel gives this thriller about a dealer trying to pay off a debt to a crime boss an added sense of authenticity
In the Reboleira slums of Lisbon, dealer and jailbird Sombra (Pedro Ferreira) struggles to pay off an outstanding debt to a local gang boss, his increasingly desperate situation leading him through the nocturnal streets in search of cash before being forced into armed robbery. Writer/director Basil da Cunha describes After the Night as "a genre movie in a realist context", mixing a neo-noir crime narrative with an observational strand of quasi-documentary film-making to create a vérité thriller rich with a sense of location and cultural authenticity.
While the story plays out in fairly formulaic fashion, it's the incidental detail that brings this world to life: Sombra's relationship with his pet iguana; a shamefaced encounter with a scolding but maternal auntie; the exorcism rituals of a...
In the Reboleira slums of Lisbon, dealer and jailbird Sombra (Pedro Ferreira) struggles to pay off an outstanding debt to a local gang boss, his increasingly desperate situation leading him through the nocturnal streets in search of cash before being forced into armed robbery. Writer/director Basil da Cunha describes After the Night as "a genre movie in a realist context", mixing a neo-noir crime narrative with an observational strand of quasi-documentary film-making to create a vérité thriller rich with a sense of location and cultural authenticity.
While the story plays out in fairly formulaic fashion, it's the incidental detail that brings this world to life: Sombra's relationship with his pet iguana; a shamefaced encounter with a scolding but maternal auntie; the exorcism rituals of a...
- 4/26/2014
- by Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
- The Guardian - Film News
It's not clear why Basil de Cunha's drama about a moody Lisbon ghetto dweller did so well on the festival circuit
After the Night, by the young Portuguese director Basil de Cunha, has won golden opinions on the festival circuit. I have to confess it defeated me. The action seems laboured, opaque and inaccessible, and based on an improv-style way of acting and devising story that does not make the proceedings any more real. In fact, it only seems to highlight how disconcertingly implausible they sometimes are. The story takes place in the grimmest ghettos of Lisbon; at its centre is Sombra (Pedro Ferreira), a moody loner who owes a drug dealer a lot of money, so finds himself having to help at a violent robbery to make it up; an arresting idea but one weirdly drained of suspense or tension, and that points up a nagging question: is it...
After the Night, by the young Portuguese director Basil de Cunha, has won golden opinions on the festival circuit. I have to confess it defeated me. The action seems laboured, opaque and inaccessible, and based on an improv-style way of acting and devising story that does not make the proceedings any more real. In fact, it only seems to highlight how disconcertingly implausible they sometimes are. The story takes place in the grimmest ghettos of Lisbon; at its centre is Sombra (Pedro Ferreira), a moody loner who owes a drug dealer a lot of money, so finds himself having to help at a violent robbery to make it up; an arresting idea but one weirdly drained of suspense or tension, and that points up a nagging question: is it...
- 4/24/2014
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
At first glance what would appear to be a story framed within the teeming favelas of Rio de Janeiro, is actually a gangland yarn set in the similarly rundown (if previously unexplored cinematically) Creola slums of Lisbon, Portugal. With After the Night, young Swiss-born filmmaker Basil da Cunha has sculpted a dark, moody and satisfyingly grim tale of an outsider who seems to exist in the shadows of the night.
Sombra (Pedro Ferreira) is a dishevelled and mysterious figure who lives a solitary life with ‘Dragon’, his pet iguana. He is forever crawling around the rooftops next to the threadbare room he calls home, and his only friend appears to be a young girl who lives with her family next door, and whom Sombra is fiercely protective of. He is also in some kind of mysterious debt to the local drug dealer and crime boss, who he has been an associate of in the past.
Sombra (Pedro Ferreira) is a dishevelled and mysterious figure who lives a solitary life with ‘Dragon’, his pet iguana. He is forever crawling around the rooftops next to the threadbare room he calls home, and his only friend appears to be a young girl who lives with her family next door, and whom Sombra is fiercely protective of. He is also in some kind of mysterious debt to the local drug dealer and crime boss, who he has been an associate of in the past.
- 4/24/2014
- by Adam Lowes
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
★★☆☆☆Selected as part of the Directors' Fortnight strand at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Basil da Cunha's feature debut After the Night (2013) paints an initially intriguing picture of nocturnal life in Lisbon's crime-ridden suburbs, but ultimately fails to match its style with the substance needed to genuinely grip. Our guide through the halflight is the dreadlocked Sombra (Pedro Ferreira), a destitute ex-con on the run after a local crime lord decides to collects his debts in full. With only a pet bearded dragon (da Cunha here recalling Werner Herzog's similar fascination with reptiles in 2009's Bad Lieutenant) and a rusty machete as allies, Sombra leads us across the rooftops as he attempts to avoid the gun-toting gang.
- 4/23/2014
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
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