Séamus Malekafzali

Séamus Malekafzali Patron

Favorite films

  • La Roue
  • There's Always Tomorrow
  • Under the Bridges
  • Gloria!

Recent activity

All
  • Leila and the Wolves

    ★½

  • The Congress

  • Black Bag

    ★★★½

  • The Statue of Liberty

    ★★★

Pinned reviews

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  • Cruel Images

    Cruel Images

    This is my sophomore short film.

    I wanted to detail a piece of now-forgotten German cinema, Uncle Krüger, a sweeping epic about the Boer War that depicts in its finale a British concentration camp, shot while an actual Nazi concentration camp operated only 30-some kilometers from the set.

    I tried to examine the depths of its cynicism and how that cynicism has echoed after the fall of the Third Reich, as present-day fascist regimes too see not only victimhood in the crimes of the past, but also an example of what to inflict on others.

    The film can be found here: vimeo.com/1033352755

  • Shiloh

    Shiloh

    I can't rate this objectively, as I directed it. This is my first short film.

    I was inspired by Marxist filmmaker Masao Adachi's landscape theory and its examination of how landscapes express the dominant political power, and I sought to apply it to the power of romantic memory, melancholy, and nostalgia. I wanted to craft a piece of slow cinema about a universal experience and I hope I succeeded.

    The film can be found here: vimeo.com/684727715

Recent reviews

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  • Leila and the Wolves

    Leila and the Wolves

    ★½

    Heiny Srour gave a short speech before the screening I was at in which she squarely focused on the crime of Jolani not shaking hands with the German foreign minister three months ago as evidence of the evils of religion. Felt like a bad omen for a movie I was initially very excited for.

    Leila and the Wolves is consistently well-shot, and there are theoretically lots of good ingredients here with the premise of recognizing the forgotten role of Arab…

  • The Congress

    The Congress

    There is nothing that has aged worse than this faux-complex, over-simplified hagiography about the wonders of compromise, the unique beauty of the Congress as a symbol of democracy, how Congress will never fail because its institutions are so strong, and about how unfair it is that we common idiots have the gall to hate it, hypocrites we are. Give me a fucking break. A continuously infuriating, myopic piece of shit.

Popular reviews

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  • The Substance

    The Substance

    ★½

    Have never had my high expectations dashed like this before with a movie. Literally from the first minute I felt an immediate sense of dread as I realized what this was and that the marketing had portrayed a much more patient, competently directed film than actually existed.

    There are downright show-stopping, highly committed performances here from Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid, but it is in service of a half-baked vision, offering surface-level feminist critiques, and ultimately containing the…

  • Enter the Void

    Enter the Void

    ★½

    more like enter my ass