The Illusion(2009)
Susana Barriga’s documentary, the illusion, begins with violence. A long shot reveals a man standing on a street corner, his features indiscernible in the night. He moves out of the camera’s line of vision, but the filmmaker, persistent, moves with him as the jostling of the camera marks her steps. As we learn moments later, the man in the distance is Susana’s father – and this is the clearest image of him we will have. Suddenly, an angry British man demands that Susana cease filming. Susana protests in heavily accented English, “He is my father!” Glimpses of a man’s torso are followed by blurred images as the camera spins rapidly over surfaces. The image cuts to black. A new male voice asks in carefully spaced out words if Susana would like him to call the police. When she doesn’t respond immediately, he speaks louder, as though volume would compensate for the language difference. She gives her name; she refuses the offer of an ambulance.
Movie: The Illusion
HomePage
Overview
Susana Barriga’s documentary, the illusion, begins with violence. A long shot reveals a man standing on a street corner, his features indiscernible in the night. He moves out of the camera’s line of vision, but the filmmaker, persistent, moves with him as the jostling of the camera marks her steps. As we learn moments later, the man in the distance is Susana’s father – and this is the clearest image of him we will have. Suddenly, an angry British man demands that Susana cease filming. Susana protests in heavily accented English, “He is my father!” Glimpses of a man’s torso are followed by blurred images as the camera spins rapidly over surfaces. The image cuts to black. A new male voice asks in carefully spaced out words if Susana would like him to call the police. When she doesn’t respond immediately, he speaks louder, as though volume would compensate for the language difference. She gives her name; she refuses the offer of an ambulance.
Release Date
2009-02-06
Average
8
Rating:
4.0 startsTagline
Genres
Languages:
EspañolKeywords
Recommendations Movies
Hello(en)
Hello explores changes in two people’s working lives: a Mexican trash picker who separates and collects recyclable materials from landfills to sell by the kilo, and a German freelance computer-animation designer working for the advertising industry in Berlin. The double interview is controlled and manipulated by a computer-generated severed hand which Maria describes as an object once discovered in the trash while working in the violent northern town of Mexicali. This CGI hand was in turn produced by Max, who was born with no arms, and sought refuge in computer-imaging as a means to operate and manipulate a digital reality.
GCW Fight Club(en)
GCW presents Fight Club straight from the Showboat Hotel in Atlantic City, NJ! The event features the GCW World Championship match where Mox defends against Gage in a match that we have been waiting for during the last decade. Who will be the new GCW World Champion?
Strange Object(en)
An archival investigation into the imperial image-making of the RAF ‘Z Unit’, which determined the destruction of human, animal and cultural life across Somaliland, as well as Africa and Asia.
Musangwe: Fight Club(en)
The first rule is that there are no rules. For the bare-knuckle combatants competing in Musangwe fights, anything goes - you can even put a curse on him. The sport, which dates back centuries, has become a South African institution. Any male from the age of nine to ninety can compete. We follow a group of fighters as they slug it out in the ring. Who will be this year's champion?
Painting for the main bedroom(el)
A man is painting a landscape. A woman is holding two cups. What can go wrong? A nightmare in pink.
Home(en)
The ostensibly calm and courteous Gerald Ballantyne lives in and embodies modern suburbia. But he is haunted by the memory of a recent car crash and hounded by his estranged wife and her demands for divorce. Slowly, a festering insanity takes over and unwilling to face the outside world he embarks on a lunatic experiment. Confining himself to his middle-class home, he eschews contact with others and survives entirely off 'food' which he can find in his house. Based on JG Ballard's The Enormous Space.
Warsaw Main Station(pl)
Warsaw Central Station, 1958. A place of greetings and farewells, an intersection of people from different parts of Poland and Europe. A girl waits in vain, she goes away. Soon the station would belong to the past too.
Crossing Iceland(sl)
Jerome Josserand is a professional snow kiter. In 2007 he set the world record for the highest kite flight. It was 450 m above the ground. Jerome is in love with wind and its power to use it to mount high mountains. His home is a place called Col du Lautaret which is also his playground. On his way he found Iceland. He noticed that there is snow and wind all the time. And he thought:” What if I would cross Iceland from southern to northern Iceland in just one day, with just power of wind?” And so he did. Crossing Iceland in such winter conditions was extremely tough and demanding. He needed to be in great physical and psychical preparation. There was wind exceeding 80km/h, there was equipment failure at -25C while shooting the movie, there was snow and freezing Icelandic nature everywhere. Even though Jerome prepared himself well for this journey, in the end everything depends of the power of wind… The question is – did he succeed? Did he make his wish come true?
Similar Movies
Hold on Tight(en)
A short documentary exploring the ways LGBT couples show affection, and how small interactions like holding hands in public can carry, not only huge personal significance, but also the power to create social change.
Men Counting Their Beads(tr)
An experimental documentary based on photographs of the director's grandfathers whom he never had the chance to meet, his grandmothers, and the stories they told.
A Slice of Lynch(en)
David Lynch, Mädchen Amick, Kyle MacLachlan and John Wentworth reminisce about "Twin Peaks" while seated at a diner counter.
Doctors, Liars, and Women: AIDS Activists Say No to Cosmo(en)
Outraged by the controversial January, 1988 article in Cosmopolitan magazine, the women in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, (Act Up, New York), organized the first AIDS demonstration focused on women. Doctors, Liars and Women:AIDS Activists Say No To Cosmo not only documents the efforts of the Women's Committee to organize this protest, it also serves as a how-to-guide for direct action.
History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige(en)
This film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And like so many who were in the camps, Tajiri’s family wrapped their memories of that experience in a shroud of silence and forgetting. This film raises questions about collective history – questions that prompt Tajiri to daringly re-imagine and re-create what has been stolen and what has been lost.
To Thine Own Self Be True(en)
An experimental study of nature through three stories and how we have destroyed it.
Land Without Bread(es)
An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.
Earth: The Power of the Planet(en)
Dr Iain Stewart tells the story of how Earth works and how, over the course of 4.6 billion years, it came to be the remarkable place it is today.
A Suitable Girl(en)
A Suitable Girl follows three young women in India struggling to maintain their identities and follow their dreams amid intense pressure to get married. The film examines the women's complex relationship with marriage, family, and society.
Crónica de un galgódromo(es)
Gardeners, veterinarians and breeders. And some imposing mammals capable of running at seventy kilometers per hour: the baths in the sun, the runway before the confrontation. And the money, the bets and the runners speed around a dizzying track.
Prosa y verso de una identidad(es)
A group of writers from Hidalgo get together to generate their works and create a community around literature.
Life May Be(en)
An epistolary feature film: a cinematic discourse between a British director Mark Cousins, and an Iranian actress and director Mania Akbari which extends the concept of "essay film" with startling confrontations in the arenas of cultural issues, gender politics and differing artistic sensibilities. A unique journey into the minds of two exceptional filmmakers which becomes a love affair on film.