Trailer: The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012) by Felix Van Groeningen

Another one from Tribeca Film Festival 2013 that looks really good. Dutch/Belgian.

Trailer: The Rocket (2013) by Kim Mordaunt

Winner @ Tribeca Film Festival 2013

Starring Hushpuppy’s boyfriend?

Olafur Eliasson’s “Model for a Timeless Garden”, Light Show exhibit @ Hayward Gallery, Southbank, London, 25 April 2013 

Olafur Eliasson’s work involves experimentation, primarily with light, colour and perception. He is theartist who created The Weather Project at Tate Modern in 2003,and his art often gives rise optically disorienting phenomena, such as flashing stroboscopic lamps, which have the effect of appearing to reverse or immobilise movement. Since 1996, he has made a series of works featuring strobe lights and moving water in which each flash of light momentarily ‘freezes’ the falling liquid. In Model for a timeless garden (2011), which consists of a succession of 27 different fountains, the strobe effect produces an ever-changing landscape of apparently icy festoons and garlands.

Light Show is a rather fun and immersive exhibit about artificial lighting. Olafur Eliasson’s water fountains room, a major highlight of the show, is an installation that is both mesmerizing and dizzying.

Trailer: Frances Ha (2012) by Noah Baumbach

I really want to see this when it’s out. Looks like a celebration of the very cute Greta Gerwig.

Sunken Garden @ Barbican, London, 16 April 2013

Multi-media opera scored by score Dutch composer Michel van der Aa, and with libretto by author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas). 

3 opera singers on stage + 3 speaking parts & 2 singers on screen + a live orchestra scoring and intricately syncing pre-recorded on-screen action with the live performances + halfway through the opera we’re asked to put on our 3D glasses just as we’re about to go through the door under the flyover and enter the “Sunken Garden”… So high points for originality and tech eye candy. It also doesn’t hurt that the music and the singing are really good too — I was mesmerised by the beauty and fragility of Kate Miller-Heidke’s voice (Kate is one of the two on-screen singing parts). 

Critics are rather divided but here’s a good review in The New York Times that I agree with wholeheartedly:

Staged by the English National Opera, and described as “an occult-mystery film opera” by its Dutch composer, stage director and filmmaker Michel van der Aa, it is a provocative combination of live performance and cinema, fused in subtle and arresting ways.

Dig beneath its modern trappings and eye-popping 3-D film effects, though, and you find a remarkably conventional core. Based on an original libretto by the novelist David Mitchell, whose critically acclaimed “Cloud Atlas” was made into a big-budget Hollywood film last year, “Sunken Garden” is positively old-fashioned in its idiosyncratic depiction of a flawed hero seeking to rescue a fair maiden imprisoned in a fairy-tale land by a mysterious sorceress.

Ambitious collusions of live performers and interactive video are not intrinsically a great leap forward for opera, as anyone who was disappointed by Robert Lepage’s troublesome rendition of Wagner’s “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera can confirm. But the fusion worked here because of the rigor with which Mr. van der Aa assembled all of its parts; the brilliance demonstrated by dozens of collaborators and technical colleagues; and the excellence the singers and actors brought to their tasks, onstage and on screen.

[…]

Mr. van der Aa, who recently won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for his multimedia cello concerto, “Up-close,” and the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize for his interdisciplinary oeuvre, links the musical and cinematic components of “Sunken Garden” deftly and intricately. Subtle hints advancing the mysterious plot are quietly strewn throughout the filmed sequences. Elements in the score link up precisely with details on screen, as when Sadaqat’s nervous tapping on a business card becomes a percussive tattoo in the music.

Mr. Mitchell’s chatty dialogue unspools naturally, flowing in lyrical strands over bruised harmonies, fidgeting rhythms and patches of haunted stasis, played by a 26-piece orchestra augmented with subtle electronic effects. A filmed scene depicting Amber in a nightclub is set to convincingly kinetic dance music. André de Ridder, conducting with a click track and using a score that incorporated images from the films, held all of the elements together with impressive precision.

The opera’s three live singers, unobtrusively amplified to match their on-screen counterparts, were superb. Roderick Williams, a mellifluous baritone with a sweet, secure top end, handily conveyed Toby’s determination and perplexity. The soprano Katherine Manley was a vivid Zenna; another soprano, Claron McFadden, did sterling work in the inconclusively drawn role of Marinus.

Two singers on film, Jonathan McGovern and Kate Miller-Heidke, were equally compelling. Mr. McGovern, a lyrical baritone, was a heartbreaking Simon, and Ms. Miller-Heidke, a classically trained Australian pop star, was a luminous, mysterious Amber. Standouts among the non-singing characters on film included Stephen Henry as Sadaqat and Caroline Jay as Portia. (It was pleasantly discombobulating to see the cinematic characters appear in costume during the final curtain calls.)

[…]

“Sunken Garden,” despite its contorted revelations and desultory conclusion, is unquestionably a bold, rewarding venture that demands consideration.

Sidenote: David Mitchell & Michel van der Aa being interviewed by Mark Lawson for BBC Radio 4’s Front Row Programme => HERE