We are proud to present our first Special Discovery—bringing you gems direct from the world’s best film festivals—the second film by emerging French director Damien Manivel. A minimalist romance charting an entire teenage relationship over the course of a day, by night things turn phantasmagoric.

“Lupe started as a documentary that transformed into a love-letter for my grandfather. The film’s metamorphosis was surprising and difficult because it forced me to confront a painful and unresolved story that lies of my family.”

“An anxiety follows immigrants arriving from war zones, partially caused by the violent separation from their home country. This was something I experienced, as did many other émigrés from former Yugoslavia who fled the wars in the 1990s. In order to cope with this anxiety, some of us create and nurture fictions as we attempt to protect ourselves from either one’s active role in the war, one’s apathy towards it, or simply one’s helplessness.”

“The vast majority of forgotten films are, for the most part, uninteresting—neither excellent nor awful enough to really merit re-consideration. Far rarer are the obscurities that are practically bursting from the seams with imagination. And as its title might suggest (though not for the reasons you may think), Full Frontal is unmistakably the latter.”

“Herzog’s cinema is typified by its resourcefulness and openness. Each of his films, especially his best ones, reject narrowness of ideas and half-gestures. They are committed full-stop. Wherever that kind of energy can be found, there those films will be made, and they will work to replicate the energy the world provides.”

“The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky wrote that an image becomes authentically cinematic when “not only does it live within time, but also time lives within it, even within each separate frame.”   In many ways, this statement explains a lot about what I was trying to do with this film.  It presents the viewer with a series of organizing instruments (a calendar, a video diary, a letter, a series of curious dates…) that record the passage of time. These ideas are then used to describe the time of a relationship, the time of finding and losing love, and the time of healing.”

“As with Josef von Sternberg or Pedro Costa, light in José María de Orbe’s Aitá (Father) is a crucial character—suffusing rooms and corridors, throwing ornate patterns on panels, encircling people and then leaving them stranded amid darkness. Delicate yet tangible presences abound in the vaguely haunted setting, a large, crumbling house in the pastoral Spanish town of Astigarraga, a mansion replete with several centuries’ worth of dust and splendor.”

“Herzog does indeed blur the line between fact and fiction across his entire body of work, though the blending tends to manifest itself differently depending on which classically categorized mode he is operating in.  His traditionally designated fiction films often gain as much drama from their plots and performances as they do from the palpably bristling reality of the conditions under which they were filmed.” –Ben Simington at Notebook.