28 Mar 2009 0
It’s traditional to administer a spoonful of sugar with otherwise unpleasant medicine, and the saving grace of John Webster’s film Recipes for Disaster chronicling his family’s year-long “oil diet” is that while it trots out the usual, by now extremely familiar apocalyptic statistics about the long-term unsustainability of typical Western lifestyles, it’s often very funny indeed.
24 Mar 2009 1
43.3km Transylvanian Timber is a portrait of two professions operating independently in the same remote valley in northern Transylvania near the Ukrainian border: the loggers who chop down trees and load the logs onto fragile-looking rail wagons, and the patrolmen policing what is currently the outer border of the European Union, established at the start of 2007 when Romania joined the club.
23 Mar 2009 0
Karosta is a small town in western Latvia, effectively a suburb of the city of Liepaja, and it’s clear from the opening shots of Peter King’s film that it’s unlikely to top a quality-of-life index. Most of its buildings are crumbling concrete boxes, originally assembled cheaply and quickly, and now boarded up and covered in graffiti (their dilapidation emphasised by the faintly admonishing presence of St Nicholas’ Orthodox Naval Cathedral in the distance). Fresh bloodstains can be seen on a bench, rubbish flaps in long-abandoned rooms through which icy winds howl, and the seafront is far from picturesque, being studded with decaying naval bunkers. Meanwhile, the residents of Liepaja express their fear of the place: its reputation as a good place to dump bodies without getting caught speaks volumes in itself.
