Rodrigo Garcia Saiz directed this :40 in which a fear-stricken woman flees an unseen pursuer out to do her harm. But while her terror is real, a break out of the blue brings us back to reality, as we realize that her harrowing adventure has sprung from her reading a book.
“Woods” opens on the woman racing barefoot through a spooky forest: silhouetted trees, mist, penetrating moonlight. She pants and trips; an unseen threat nearing. She makes it to a tree and is about to be caught, if not killed, when a small hand reaches up with a jar. A child’s voice asks, “Mom, can you open the jar for me please?” The woman replies sweetly as if sitting in a comfortable kitchen, “Sure thing, honey.”
Then the action continues, accompanied by the super “Keep reading” and the Gandhi Bookstores logo.
“Woods” was one of two spots in the campaign directed by Garcia Saiz through his Mexico City company Central Films for Ogilvy Mexico. (Garcia Saiz is repped in the U.S. by Boxer Films.)
Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.
Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.
But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.
"Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."
"Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More