Sabzian is an international film journal, hailing from Belgium.
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The River 1951
“Recounting The River is nearly impossible; ‘so little’ is happening. Somewhere along the banks of the Ganges, two English families and three girls: two white girls and one of mixed race. A young American appears, a wounded war hero. Of course, all three adolescents will love him in their own way. Renoir is telling us the story of the birth of love in the hearts of three future women, destined for very different futures due to their education and race,…
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Trás-os-Montes 1976
“Cinema’s biggest mistake is simplifying reality. You need to decide on how to clean up the visual field, how to perform a rigorous reorganization of the real. The reality filmed by us is not simplified, it is complexified – so much so that the film has not one reality, it has many. Our image is not dry. The most common cinema uses dialogue, in a shot/reverse shot system. We never did that. We even had characters with their back turned…
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Getting to Know the Big Wide World 1978
“Of course there are directors who establish everything in advance. They see the preconceived plan as a hallmark of their personality and style as a director. Obviously, one can work like that, but I don’t believe in it. I embrace every coincidence. I don’t want to suppress coincidences; I want to investigate what they have to offer. Before shooting begins, you have a concept of each image: one frame looks like this, another like that. But everything changes. There’s too…
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The Wind Will Carry Us 1999
“What is a true auteur? It’s not a filmmaker who imposes his obsessions on his work, but someone who finally encounters his haunting images in the world without even looking for them, like a gift from reality.“ – Alain Bergala
On the occasion of Milestones: Early Short Work by Abbas Kiarostami, Sabzian recently republished two texts by French critic and director Alain Bergala. You can read them here!
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