Random Talking Points: The 63rd Cannes Film Festival 2010 Brandon Wee July 2010 Festival Reports Few would have missed the chorus of lament sung mostly by the American and British press about this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Now a standard response from the corporate and grassroots press who file regular ...
Film’s Struggle Through the Ages: The 8th Annual Nitrate Picture Show Joshua Bogatin August 2024 Festival Reports The only thing to discover at The Nitrate Picture Show is the past. With an entire slate of programming consisting of nothing besides rare nitrate prints, the festival is, by design, prohibited from showing any...
Forging Fiction from Reality: The Films of Alejo Moguillansky Jay Beck & Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo August 2024 22 Years of El Pampero Cine "We artists are irresponsible people." – Maxim Gorky to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, c. 1907-08 As a core member of El Pampero Cine, Alejo Moguillansky was initially known as the team’s editor who was sought-af...
Film and the Nonhuman Technology of Photography: Blowup and Godland David McCooey & Oscar Bloomfield May 2024 Film and the Nonhuman Filmmakers have long been fascinated with photography’s ability to thematise the productive, typically resistant, interplay between the human and the nonhuman, where the ‘nonhuman’ can refer to both technology ...
Images in Motion: The Currents Program at the 61st New York Film Festival Will DiGravio May 2024 Festival Reports There are two main sites of the New York Film Festival. On the northside of West 65th Street, in the Lincoln Square neighbourhood of Manhattan, is the 268-seat Walter Reade Theater, which sits above the street,...
The 5th Hainan Island International Film Festival: At the construction site Maja Korbecka May 2024 Festival Reports It is customary in China’s film festival environment for there to be is almost no information on the upcoming edition of a festival until the last two, three weeks before the event is scheduled to start. The ne...
Susie Dee, Trudy Hellier and Patricia Cornelius talk Shit with interviewer Cerise Howard Cerise Howard May 2024 Interviews Written by Patricia Cornelius, one of Australia’s most celebrated playwrights and a Windham-Campbell prize winner, the micro-budget Melbourne feature Shit began life as a play (2015), with its powerhouse cast o...
Ethics of Dissociation. The Films of Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor Reinhold Görling May 2024 Film and the Nonhuman At the end of the 19th century, the emerging field of psychology adopted the concept of dissociation to describe mental processes that run counter to the assumed endeavour of the subject and its ego to combine ...
Being Animal in Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar Zina Giannopoulou May 2024 Film and the Nonhuman would have us be concerned not with the psychology but with the physiology of existence. – André Bazin, “Le journal d’ un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson” I wanted to be raw material...
The 7th Pingyao International Film Festival: In the heat of the sun Maja Korbecka January 2024 Festival Reports After the zero-Covid policy lockdown pushed the previous edition of Pingyao International Film Festival to January 2023, Jia Zhangke and the festival team faced the challenge of organising two festivals in one ...
Tusk: Kevin Smith’s take on body horror Lachlan Campbell January 2024 Film Genre Now: RMIT University Student Dossier Often recognised for his catalogue of self-referential, comic-book-inspired films, director Kevin Smith is seldom acknowledged for his influence upon the body horror subgenre. Instead, this honour is oft attrib...
Steve Doughton and Jon Raymond On Earthlings Nolan Kelly January 2024 Interviews In the United States, regional filmmakers rarely get the same attention as their big-city counterparts, at least until they premiere in New York or L.A. This denial of certain geographic perspectives is bound u...
Frequently Illuminating, but Sometimes Misjudged: Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties by Foster Hirsch Tom Ryan January 2024 Book Reviews Across its 600-plus pages, Foster Hirsch’s ambitious account of Hollywood and the films made there during the 1950s covers the terrain with comprehensive purpose. As he puts it in his introduction, citing L.P. ...
History and Oblivion: Radu Jude tells a “new” story an old way with Aferim! Shari Kizirian December 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film From the opening moments of Romanian director Radu Jude’s Silver Bear-winning Aferim! (2015) we instantly recognize the cinematic terrain. In a low-contrast black-and-white palette against a cloud-strewn sky, t...
Amiko haunts the 23rd Nippon Connection Roger Macy November 2023 Festival Reports The stand-out film of the 2023 Nippon Connection – although the ‘Visions’ jury in Frankfurt didn’t agree with me – was Amiko, (Kochira Amiko, 2022), written and directed by Morii Yūsuke in his feature debut. No...
“Irritation Is the Most Important Tool Any Artist Has”: An Interview with Jessica Hausner Jaimey Fisher & Gerd Gemünden November 2023 Interviews In a review of Club Zero, Jessica Hausner’s latest feature, which premiered in Competition at Cannes this year, Charles Bramesco calls the director “Austria’s most fearless button-pusher.” Given that her compat...
Stanwyck, Barbara Eloise Ross August 2023 Great Actors Before beginning, I offer the disclaimer that I am not an unbiased writer of this Great Actors profile. I have a tattoo of Barbara Stanwyck. It’s an image of her as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (Bill...
In Dreams: Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (2017) Adrian Danks July 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Coming almost 30 years after Ildikó Enyedi’s extraordinary breakthrough feature, Az én XX. századom (My Twentieth Century, 1989), and 18 years since her last, Simon mágus (Simon, the Magician), Teströl és lélek...
Sharing is Transgressing: Piracy, Film Societies and Independent Filmmaking in Dhaka Imran Firdaus May 2023 Cinema and Piracy Pirated films found a place in the social and cultural sphere of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh during the 1980s. State controlling the access to and the viewing of films is nothing new. As Amos Vogel stat...
All that is Solid Melts into Air: IFFR 2023 Madeleine Collier May 2023 Festival Reports In early December, I received an unexpected email. After participating virtually in the IFFR Young Critics Program in 2019, I was invited to take part in a second round of workshops–this time in person, as the ...
“I Needed to See Light”: An Interview with Tatiana Huezo Silvia Spitta & Gerd Gemünden May 2023 Interviews “Quería ver luz” – these are the words director Tatiana Huezo used to describe to us the impetus behind El Eco (The Echo), her latest documentary, which premiered in February at the 73rd Berlin Film Festival. T...
Values of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis: A Carnival Ride Laleen Jayamanne January 2023 Feature Articles “It was the greatest Carnival Attraction I’d ever seen… His Super Power was Music.” - Colonel Tom Parker An Australian Film Brand With just six films over thirty years (1992-2022), Baz Luhrmann and his crea...
Piaffe: Interview with Ann Oren Maria Giovanna Vagenas January 2023 Interviews Piaffe, Ann Oren's astonishing first feature film presented in competition at Locarno Film Festival 2022, bestows us with that same enchantment that early cinema viewers must have experienced going to the movie...
About Time: Interview with Cyril Schäublin Hamed Sarrafi January 2023 Interviews In his latest film, Unrest (2022), Swiss director Cyril Schäublin has created something new and unique. Together with his feature debut, Those Who Are Fine (2017), he has developed his own aesthetic style and n...
DOC NYC 2022: Fringe No More Will DiGravio January 2023 Festival Reports Since 2010, DOC NYC, the largest documentary festival in the United States, has put forth programs that showcase a wide range of works that rally under the banner of non-fiction. This year’s edition took place ...
Threshold Aesthetics: Marianna Christofides’ Film Essayistic Encounters with ‘The Balkans’ Brenda Hollweg with Marianna Christofides October 2022 After Yugoslavia What is the pertinence of past events for the present moment and how can one open up history’s trajectory into the future? – We were sitting in Orșova, a small town in Romania opposite Serbia, where the Cerna R...
Landscapes of Resistance: Time and Temporality of Feminist Storytelling Ana Vujanović October 2022 After Yugoslavia Post-Yugoslav Documentary Films: Powered by Concerns At the time of a long, uneven, and still unfinished transition from socialism to capitalism in post-Yugoslav states, in the period of untreated post-war tra...
Homelands, We Have a Problem Sanjin Pejković October 2022 After Yugoslavia The fall of Yugoslavia was a historical event of huge importance for the Balkans, but also for the rest of Europe and the world. Different accounts and explanations of how and why the former Yugoslavia collapse...
Sorrentino, Paolo Jeremy Carr October 2022 Great Directors b. 31 May, 1970, Naples, Campania, Italy The comparisons to Federico Fellini may be seen as both a blessing and a curse for Paolo Sorrentino. On one hand, the lofty likening to one of world cinema’s grand mast...
The 75th Locarno Film Festival: Happy Birthday and Many Happy Returns Jaimey Fisher October 2022 Festival Reports This year marked the 75th edition of the Locarno (Film) Festival, which started in 1946 and technically before the more famous Cannes festival – Cannes had had its opening planned for 1939 but, understandably, ...
Love Dog: Conversation with Bianca Lucas Maria Giovanna Vagenas October 2022 Interviews Intimate, sensitive and poetic, Love Dog, Bianca Lucas' surprising first feature film, shot in Natchez, Mississippi, portrays John, a young man mourning the sudden loss of his partner; a personal grief meaningf...
More than a Wink: The Nature of Reality in Blow-Up and Las Babas del Diablo Will Hair July 2022 Feature Articles Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) contains obvious differences from its source material, Julio Cortázar’s short story Las Babas del Diablo (1959), yet the ambiguous treatment of reality is an important si...
“Resistance is the driving force of the film”: An Interview with Davy Chou Maja Korbecka July 2022 Interviews Cambodian-French writer-director Davy Chou’s third full-length film, Return to Seoul, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, focuses on a French Korean adoptee during her recurri...
Fire Machines: Titane and the Pyrotechnics of Love Emmalea Russo May 2022 Feature Articles “…it shall be revealed by fire.” - Corinthians 3:13 “If our aim is to explore the farthest potentialities of being, we may well opt for the disorderliness and randomness of love.” - Georges Bataille Fire (T...
Information as a music video, comedy as a diagram: Beny Wagner & Sasha Litvintseva in conversation Madeleine Collier May 2022 Interviews Beny Wagner and Sasha Litvintseva are fascinated by perception’s role in shaping history. Their last film, A Demonstration (2020), used the bifurcated Latin root monstrare (which is at the root of both the word...
Caine, Michael Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 Great Actors b. March, 18, 1933, London “I'll always be around because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.” – Michael Caine Sir Michael Caine, one of the most durable act...