João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata Portugal, 2014
In half an hour it manages to be sensational, hilarious, haunting, earnest, and surreal. Any longer and it might have been too blunt, too academic, too legible. Instead there's only time for fire, smoke, and mystery.
While lec Long may on the surface be a straightforward documentary, it's hard not to notice the [directing] duo's quintessential flourishes: an incongruent blue wig amid the ruins hinting at mystery, or the way our attention is drawn to the framing... As a portrait, lec Long is impressionistic and multilayered. It's both personal and epic in scope, and, most of all, deeply affecting.
Matt Porterfield's Take What You Can Carry, for example, may ultimately stand as a transitional work between features, but in its carefully disclosed detailing of a young woman's existential reckoning in Berlin and Antonioni-esque interest in the psychological/environmental divide which claims her ambition, it may in fact portend something more ambitious.
Structured in such a way that the film changes gears several times, engaging the viewer and asking of him or her to re-evaluate what they're watching, IEC LONG is moving, immersive, and surprising in a way that few films at this year's Berlinale were, and represents a new artistic direction for these directors, who prove they have much more to find in this singular setting.