film link: Venice 2017: College days

In an unusually poetic review, film academic David Bordwell talks about Martyr, a film presented via the Biennale College Cinema at this year’s Venice Film Festival, and directed by Mazen Khaled:

Martyr is an excellent example of how film form and style reshape the physical realm to create a visual poetry. Thematically, Khaled explains that he wanted to treat this seemingly sorrowful event is a kind of liberation from a life of hopelessness and strife: suspended in water, Hamad seems finally free. At the same time, I saw the film as joining the tradition of Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks, Willard Maas’s Geography of the Body, and Stan Brakhage’s Flesh of Morning–a cinematic exploration of the human body as a landscape, bearing traces of how humans live in and through it.

Source: Venice 2017: College days

Sounds like something I’d like, and I hope I’m able to catch up with it. What Bordwell doesn’t mention is that Khaled’s film is up for the Queer Lion at Venice, as well.