Sven Pötting

Curator at Filmfest Dresden - International Short Film Festival, Co-director of LAFITA Munich
Germany

Voted for

FilmYearDirector
M1931Fritz Lang
Cléo from 5 to 71962Agnès Varda
Persona1966Ingmar Bergman
Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie1972Luis Buñuel
Sans Soleil1982Chris Marker
Blue Velvet1986David Lynch
Beau travail1998Claire Denis
In the Mood for Love2000Wong Kar Wai
La ciénaga2001Lucrecia Martel
Roma2018Alfonso Cuarón

Comments

M

1931 Germany

Fritz Lang's first talkie is a masterpiece of virtuosity with a precise focus on the social developments of the time it was made.

Cléo from 5 to 7

1962 France, Italy

One of the many masterpieces of the Nouvelle Vague. A masterfully crafted, sensitive study that is part prosaic observation of everyday life, part poetic condensation of reality.

Persona

1966 Sweden

Everything one says about Persona may be contradicted; the opposite will also be true.

Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie

1972 France, Italy, Spain

Also in his third to last film of his long career Luis Buñuel shows a pronounced taste for black humor and stays true to the surrealist principles with which he most identified: a spirit of revolt; the subversive power of eroticism; a belief in the creativity of the unconscious and dreams.

Sans Soleil

1982 France

Sans Soleil is an expedition report into memory, an ethnographic essay, the diary of an obsessive. The film must be seen - like Chris Marker's other masterpiece "La jetée" (1962) - over and over again.

Blue Velvet

1986 USA

With intense performances and hauntingly powerful sounds and images, Blue Velvet is an unforgettable vision of innocence lost.

Beau travail

1998 France

Claire Denis folds military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into terrific choreographed scenes and shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema.

In the Mood for Love

2000 Hong Kong, France

This sublime film about romantic longing has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career.

La ciénaga

2001 Argentina, USA, Japan, France, Switzerland, Spain, Brazil

"La Ciénaga" is a grand exercise in ellipsis, the use of sound and off-camera space. Martel's visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways that political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships is a drama of extraordinary tactility, is starting point and masterpiece of the Nouvelle Vague of Argentine cinema (Nuevo Cine Argentino).

Roma

2018 Mexico, USA

With his eighth and most personal film, Alfonso Cuarón recreated the early-1970s Mexico City of his childhood, narrating a tumultuous period in the life of a middle-class family. A memory film of unusual beauty... absolutely fresh, confident, surprising and rapturously beautiful.