Limbo @ Film Forum
Tonight I'm seeing Limbo at the Film Form at 8:40pm! I apologize for the EXTREMELY late notice - my partner Marty and I went to the Strand on Sunday and came home with a big stack of books, and I've been so busy reading since I forgot to schedule a movie!
Limbo is a film by Indigenous filmmaker Ivan Sen who himself writes, directs, scores, shoots, and edits. The film features a troubled detective investigating the cold case murder of an Indigenous girl 20 years earlier. It looks like it'll contain both beautiful shots and a deep look at racism at the hands of Australian police.
The last few times I was at the Film Forum, I saw ads for it, and each time I thought to myself that I absolutely must see it. Now I am! I am very excited :)
Last week's viewing of PULSE as part of the Film Forum's series on Japanese horror was excellent. In an almost violent reduction of the film's plot, it dealt with ghosts manifesting themselves on the internet. It had a lot of very interesting camera shots reminiscent of the Blaire Witch Project, and some real moments of emotion.
It hit me especially hard because for the past month or so we've been working on training neural networks using massive uncurated datasets of images pulled straight from the internet. I've had to look through the images in these datasets, and seeing some of them I had an intense emotional realization that pictures of me and my friends - likely photos I don't even know about - must exist in these datasets. I of course had known that intellectually for years, but it wasn't until I saw a candid photo of a classroom full of children did I really understand what that meant on an emotional level. The film's particular treatment of death and the internet really hit hard in that context.