Culture Digest - Film

Andrew Bujalski: Computer Chess (2013)

A comedy about the beginnings of the digital age, and the point at which computers outsmart humans – shot in a kind of Nam June Paik/Vito Acconci look, keeping innovation close and fakes closer.

Želimir Žilnik: Kenedi Trilogy (2003-07)

I discovered these half-documentary films about the Kosovo Romani Kenedi Hasani in the exemplary series Cineromani at Berlin’s Zeughaus Cinema. Serbian film director Želimir Žilnik, one of the great ‘marginals’ of World Cinema, tackles a tough issue: the existence of a people who have been excluded amidst so-called European integration.

Jonathan Glazer: Under the Skin (2013)

This film based on Michel Faber’s eponymous novel about an extraterrestrial sent to the Scottish Highlands to harvest human hitchhiker flesh (considered a delicacy on her planet) is great, extravagant cinema, projecting male desire for submission onto the body of Scarlett Johansson.

A pro-European Union protest in Ukraine, 2013 (photograph: Archiwum Wasyla Łopucha)

Euromajdan

In 2012 I visited Ukraine for the first time for the European football Championships, Euro 2012. Since then I have been there numerous times. Personally I don’t know any other place where the tip-over from a supposed new democratic state, post-1989, into a neo-feudal domain for oligarchs is more glaringly visible. Not that the European Union is actually that far removed from such conditions, but it’s certainly still better than a KGB-style tariff union.