43.3km Transylvanian Timber
My second review for the London International Documentary Festival website is of Georg Tiller and Claudio Pfeifer’s almost wordless Austrian meditation about two very diverse professions - logging and border patrolling - operating in the same remote valley in Romania, inaccessible except by narrow-gauge railway. Much of it played out to me like an extended version of the celebrated trolley-car scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Сталкер, 1979), in that much of the running time is taken up with a slow rail journey through a wintry forest, the only sound a constant clanking whose rhythms become strangely hypnotic.
My full review is here, and its British premiere is at the British Museum on Saturday 4 April.