What makes a great WWII film?

For as long as I know I’ve always been fascinated with the Second World War. It is, for a lack of a better word, my favorite war. And I can’t see how this could have been any different; growing up the war seemed to have been everywhere. It was something the whole world had to live through at the time.

Is nostalgia a disease?

But even if ‘retro’ has replaced ‘renaissance’ and, like Hugo put it rather eloquently, mainstream filmmaking can sometimes feel like a calzone of familiar ideas being folded on top of each other over and over again, we shouldn’t condemn our personal sense of nostalgia for the films that we remember so longingly, and in some cases rather naively, helped shape who we are as grown ups.

Ethics in documentary filmmaking, how far is too far?

The duty of a documentary filmmaker is to show, how master of reality Werner Herzog likes to call it, the ‘ecstatic truth’: a truth that is not necessarily fact-related, but more so a story that is an intensification of the world as we know it. In search of this truth, the documentarian is on an everlasting quest for the secret stories, the hidden pain that has not yet seen the daylight, or the – often troublesome – characters whose voices are yet to be heard. And mankind is vain. If a documentarian asks you to make a film about your life, you will most likely say yes. We like to believe we are special, that we have a story to tell. 

Is cinema a lie?

In our first episode we’ve established our love for cinema in all its facets and intricacies, of which there are so many that it prompted this quote from Jean Luc-Godard.
He said: “Film is truth twenty-four times a second, and every cut is a lie.” The Austrian auteur Michael Haneke boiled this statement down to its natural conclusion: “films is 24 lies per second.”