Mark Fenemore

Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles [Official US Trailer, GKIDS] - In Select Theaters August 16 In Select Theaters August 16For more info: www.bunuelmovie.comParis, 1930. The infamous surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel is left penniless after the scandalo...

I enjoyed Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles. It addresses the violence and the cynicism while still presenting Buñuel’s complexity, intellectual depths and ambivalence.

The dance is called ‘Radioactive flesh’. Land without Bread is presented as documentary/propaganda parody, but seems to bristle between the lines with scabrous surreal humour. The violence towards animals - shooting the goats and killing the donkey using bees - seems perverse.

The devil who tempts Simon resembles a character from Un chien andalou. The miracle of restoring a thief’s hands makes no dent on his outlook, using them thoughtlessly to cuff his daughter. At the end, Simon finds himself transported to pop-cultural hell/purgatory, a club of writhing teen dancers.

Have recently been spurred to watch the Luis Buñuel films available on youtube. Simon of the Desert must have strongly influenced Life of Brian. It is a film about human moral frailty / perversity. It begins with Simon being encouraged to move to a more auspicious pedestal.

You scheduled that precisely for ‘Defender of the Fatherland Day’

They had the idea that a folk song could carry a message far and wide. This one was taken up by the 1983 March for Equality. youtu.be/JEazocvsLL4?...

Asked when the barbed wire separating her (mostly immigrant) community from the neighbouring French area disappeared, the daughter of Algerian immigrants said ‘It’s still there.’

Part whodunnit, part memory recreation. How a song emerged and the community/ethos it represented. Mehdi was a kid who sang briefly for musicians at an event in 1970s France that was preserved on vinyl. All they remember is that he had a yellow tshirt. www.radiofrance.fr/francecultur...