Doc Films series
The Miracle Years: City and Country in Mexican Cinema's Golden Age This series highlights the prodigious achievements of Mexican cinema during the post-revolutionary era, with a focus on films from the mid '30's through the end of the 50's. It aims to shine a light on the various manners in which the booming Mexican studio system attempted to create a distinctly Mexican film industry. I decided to illustrate this by focusing on films which centered around both the troubles of rural life and the problems associated with rapid urbanization.
Trompe-L'Oeil: Painting on the Big Screen Painting and film have long been considered somewhat opposed media. One achieves its effect through stillness, the other by motion. Here, I brought together several films which attempt to bridge this gap, often to visually stunning results. The films here all confine themselves in somewhat unbelievable ways to approach a more "painterly" aesthetic. Whether it is Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, filmed entirely at sunset and sunrise or Lech Majewski's The Mill and the Cross which uses a novel form of mixing animation and live action shooting to recreate a Renaissance painting, these movies all represent formal experiments designed to push film in novel directions.