“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. And so are films.” This statement, which opens “Addicted to Solitude”, indicates its direction: there is none.
The last preparations for the season at a small hotel on the North Sea coast. Managed by an elderly lady and maintained by her only employee, who’s not quite so young either, this house is stuck in some early 1960s style.
Once the most fashionable spot in the heart of Hollywood, in 1980 the Montecito Hotel on Franklin Avenue is only a shadow of its former heyday. The stars have moved on to fancier palaces.
At one point in this essay about documentary staging someone says: “You move into a film like you move into a house.” Whether you feel comfortable there, however, depends on many small, sometimes unnoticeable things.
In “It’s Now or Never”, the rough west coast of Ireland forms the backdrop of a documentary comedy about love, or rather about the search for a woman in a fairly depopulated area.
The very first shot of the film is testimony to the director’s joy of storytelling: a flock of birds in front of a mountain range, backlighted by the rising hot Arizona sun.
No story, no development, no film without doubt. Jon Bang Carlsen’s whole oeuvre is based on this idea – doubting reality, himself, the objectivity of the camera.
A highly original and bold examination of the Holocaust. On the one hand there are two survivors who found a new home in South Africa after the end of the war – in a country that practiced racial segregation even then.
