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Entries in Malgorzata Szumowska (3)

Tuesday
Aug312021

Interview: "Never Gonna Snow Again"s enigmatic Alec Utgoff. What will he do for an encore?

by Nathaniel R

from the actor's instragram

One of the most unusual and affecting movies of the past year or so in cinema is finally making the rounds. Poland’s 2020 Oscar submission, Never Gonna Snow Again is in theaters and will presumably hit VOD shortly. The mysterious  film is about a man named Zhenia, a Ukrainian massage therapist, who becomes the fixation of a small Polish town. The residents  all begin to employ him and each of them project their own feelings and fantasies onto him. Still, Zhenia's own desires and identity remain an enigma, even to the audience who are  invited to fixate and project, much like the townsfolk. But even the town is not entirely grounded in reality, but arguably an homogenous purgatory of a suburban fantasy. All in all it makes for an unusual and riveting film experience. 

At the center of it all is the 35 year-old actor Alec Utgoff of Stranger Things fame. The Ukraine born actor has been working in film and television for a decade now but this is his biggest film role to date, and a major breakthrough in terms of the ways in which filmmakers might imagine casting him. We recently talked with him about his career as well as this particular role...

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Thursday
Aug272020

Poland's Oscar stats and the first 2020 news of the International Feature Race

If you've been reading TFE for any length of time, you already know we're obsessive about Oscar's Foreign Language Film race, last year retitled to Best International Feature Film. Normally we've long since begun talking about the submission list, but 2020 remains an unruly unusual beast. But we do have two pieces of news to share regarding our favourite non-actress based category.

First, we've neglected to mention that Oscar's longer-than-usual release eligibility period has also affected Best International Film...

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Friday
Apr032020

Review: The Other Lamb

by Chris Feil

Fueled by a fevered intensity, Małgorzata Szumowska's The Other Lamb follows the stoic Selah (Raffey Cassidy) as she comes of age in a cult hidden within the American mountainside. Her fellow believers are all women, suggestively separated by uniforms of blue and red, and under the charms of the faux-Jesus man they refer to only as Shepherd (Michiel Huisman). Selah was born into the flock without experience of the outside world or any of its modernity, instead knowing a normalcy of blood ritual and ominous polygamy.

But as the arrival of puberty brings the threat of becoming one of the Shepherd’s many wives, Selah experiences visions that enlighten her to the sinister nature that belies her deceptively peaceful existence, setting into motion her rebellion...

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