"Elena" unfolds like a cinematic dream whose central image is water, which symbolizes the washing away of grief.
Unfolds a story of grief and thwarted promise with expressive urgency and thoughtful restraint.
This haunting and dreamlike cinematic essay is filmmaking at its most personal.
Costa may not be detail-oriented when it comes to the minutiae of her sister's biography, but when it comes to creating emotional portraiture, she's exhaustive.
A pained and gorgeous summoning, Petra Costa's haunted doc Elena dances with death, memory, and family, seducing viewers and then breaking their hearts.
A type of cinematic performance art, with all the self-consciousness that suggests - a sibling love story that's no less heartfelt for being in the form of a first-person poem.
Mysterious and hermetic, this memoir is a collage of home movies, photographs, audio recordings and lyrical narration that reframes a troubled family history through a heartbroken lens.
The journey of a young and talented director toward the catharsis that will require so much pain to occur
LifeRaft: Q&A with ELENA – Petra Costa, Tim Robbins and Dennis Baker
Los Angeles – 11/21/2014
Watch Elena -the film director Petra Costa talk about the impacts the work had on her mother and other issues in this clip provided by the Screen Actors Guild. It was filmed last week during a Q&A moderated by Dennis Baker in LA.
“Today what my mother says is that it’s wonderful that this film can relieve her of that pain.”
