Karolina (Magdalena Berus), a hedonistic young writer, celebrates the success of her new novel. Drifting between lovers, her life is a dizzying blur of casual sex and hard partying, fueled by cocaine and booze. But beneath her carefree image, Karolina struggles with addiction, eating disorders, and loneliness. Kasia Roslaniec's striking character study is composed of 54 short vignettes, from which a fragmented narrative unfolds like a sideways scroll through a stranger's Instagram stories. Deploying the 1:1 aspect ratio used on social media sites, Roslaniec keeps Berus' gutsy performance tightly in the frame, while suggesting the limits of a life lived in the public eye. Fusing smartphone aesthetics with cinematic form, Satan Said Dance is both a bold storytelling experiment and a canny critique of the selfie generation.
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In Italian, “Monticchiello” sounds like the name given by a child to a tiny hill, or a small mountain. For this reason, the small town of Monticchiello might be reduced to the image of a postcard Tuscan village with little cultural life. But Monticchiello has always been much more than a quaint collection of pastel-colored houses. For decades, the citizens have cast themselves as the actors in a large, community-wide theatrical production dramatizing the town’s present and past challenges, starting with the Nazi occupation of the town during World War II.
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Through archival footage, interviews and animation, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin follows the late author’s journey in developing her own style, while examining the feminist, anti-capitalist and environmental themes in the societies she imagined for her books. Arwen Curry’s directorial debut is a careful reflection on LeGuin’s legacy as a world-builder and the result of an almost decade long conversation with contemporary authors such as Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville, as well as the author herself.
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