Cool concept - a whole bunch of basically most of the most famous mainstream arthouse contemporary directors going around today (Wenders, Polanski, Egoyan, Campion, Kiarostami, the Dardenne brothers, Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, Lars von Trier, Wong Kar-Wai, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, to name just a few), each doing a very short (~ 3 minutes) piece on the subject of the cinema. As one would expect, it's pretty hit and miss, the narrative-oriented ones just as likely to be successful as the more impressionistic pieces, and a few reasonably predictable themes emerge, most notably the transformative, immersive, participatory and (of course) magical nature of the cinematic experience, but the good ones are strikingly good, and there are plenty of minor pleasures in amidst the real highlights, too.
My fave was the Inarittu piece, "Anna", which is simply one of the most lushly Romantic things that one will ever see in a cinema. It's beautiful - three minutes of holding your breath and feeling opened up to something that's at once completely familiar and utterly foreign. The David Lynch one was extremely David Lynch, and a nice snippet of his unique brand of craziness (ware the giant scissors!); the Atom Egoyan contribution also marvellous - a miniature existential meditation, inscrutable and poetic. Jane Campion's odd lady bug piece also stood out...
(w/ Ruth and Bec P)
