All the leaves are brown (2017) directed by Daniel Robin
“In an intriguing way, the filmmaker takes us into his personal universe of family ties and is willing to go deep into the core of fear, the confrontation with loss but also the longing to go on. We can feel a melancholic acceptance that life is in a permanent state of transition, and sometimes these changes can be very painful. But another layer of deeply touching beauty lies beneath this very intimate story: the fading of memory not only in the lives of our loved ones, but the fading of a whole universe of experimental avant-garde cinema. You find hints to this layer hidden in the images. - exquisitely shot on Super 8 - that refer in a subtle way to classical experimental films with simply quoting them. We barely get to glimpse the references that underline the melancholy and the nostalgic mood. The viewer that doesn’t perceive them at a first glance might be encouraged to dig deeper into our artistic cinematic heritage and gradually gets lost in a similar ways as the fathers loses his memory.
The way the filmmaker unfolds in the overlapping of two narratives - the self and family on the one hand and the cinema on the other - a touching gracefulness to life makes him an auteur in his own right.
In other words you could describe this film in its tone and emotional implications with titles of three very important experimental films : All My Life (Bruce Baillie), As I Was Moving Ahead I Occasionally Saw Brief Glimpses Of Beauty (Jonas Mekas) in Meshes in The Afternoon (Maya Deren). But you might know nothing of these films or you might have forgotten - life goes on. But still it often is essential to remember and to be Remembered.” Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, winner best filmmaker 2018
Daniel Robin makes personal experimental documentary films that often incorporate fictional devices to mythologize his family history. His film my olympic summer won the Sundance Film Festival Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking, the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Short at the Florida Film Festival, Best Documentary Short at the Nashville Film Festival, Director’s Choice Award at the Black Maria Film Festival, and the Onda Curta Award at IndieLisboa Film Festival. The film was also selected to screen at New Directors/New Films Festival in New York, Aspen, and True/False. His experimental documentary film All The Leaves Are Brown screened at over 30 film festivals and won the Best Director Award at the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Best Short Documentary at Sidewalk Film Festival, and Jury Award for Personal Vision at the Oxford Film Festival. The film also screened at: Curtas Vila Do Conde (Portugal), Minimalen Film Festival (Norway), EDOC (Ecuador), Analogica 7(Italy). Two of his previous films screened at Sundance, a feature narrative in competition at SXSW Film Festival, and several films at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His film Petting Zoo has screened at 23 film festivals, many of those International, including: Ji.hlava IDFF and Analogica 9, Cork FF. Daniel’s work is widely seen in festivals throughout Europe and the U.S.
In 2000 Daniel pioneered documentary web video series creating the website neighborhoodfilms.com http://neighborhoodfilms.com/ver05/nf_main.html where he’s produced six documentary web series.
