State of the Festival

Dispatching for Cahiers du Cinéma from the 10th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, André Bazin compared being on the Croisette as “being provisionally admitted to convent life.” With its intricate rituals obsequiously followed by thousands of guests, the festival approximated a “religious Order” – if one that was curiously bereft of faith. For all its liturgical trappings, Cannes had no spiritual core: critics flocked to the French Riviera to celebrate the seventh art only to drown in a glitzy feast which had very little to do with cinema, and a great deal with the fanfare of the parties and receptions humming all around them. 

If you’re familiar with our Journal, none of this will ring as particularly novel. The glamourification of the circuit Bazin was mocking in 1955 has since metastasised into its raison d’être, and countless reports we’ve published over the years have taken aim at the friction between the festivals’ substance (the films!) and the flashy atmosphere that chokes them. The truth is the circuit remains as mysterious and contradictory as it must have looked to 37-year-old Bazin, and this issue’s dossier wants to probe some of those tensions. Can cinema – and festivals – ever be apolitical? Such was the dilemma triggered by Berlinale jury president Wim Wenders just a couple of months ago, and his statements prompted Dina Iordanova to reflect on the nexus between festivals and our troubled zeitgeist. Michelle Carey, co-founder of the Red Balloon Alliance (a program that’s helped set up creches and family-friendly solutions at European fests) chats with critic, producer, and fellow mother of one Catherine Bray about the difficulties of navigating the circuit with a small child. Chloe Lizotte, Savina Petkova, and our own Leonardo Goi discuss their experiences attending and running film criticism workshops around Europe, problematising these initiatives’ scope, potential, and tricky relationships with the festivals that host them. In a candid and rejuvenating chat, Pordenone Silent Film Days artistic director Jay Weissberg discusses his attempts to open up the world’s biggest silent film fest to younger audiences. Regular Senses contributor Cerise Howard, in turn, sits with Berlinale Co-Director of Film Programming, head of Panorama, and Teddy board member Michael Stütz to trace an oral history of the festival and its ongoing efforts to champion queer cinema. Last but by no means least, Duncan Caillard reflects on the disruptive role Indigenous film festivals can play within a global circuit that’s still bound by colonial aesthetics and power relations.  

Dossier aside, we’re proud to publish several thought-provoking features shedding light on timeless classics and new experiments. Iris Chen reviews Sun Hong’s Yānhuǒ Rénjiān (This is Life, 2020), a feature-length documentary shot entirely in portrait mode and stitched together from several hundred clips from a prominent Chinese social media platform. The first “vertical” documentary to receive a theatrical release in the country, it raises interesting and urgent questions around the relationship between similar documentaries and the Chinese government, which might well use them to strengthen its cultural legitimacy. Unaddressed (or unspoken) national histories are at the core of Grace Brooks’s ‘The Talkies Cure’, one of three Australia-centred features in this issue. Interrogating crises in Australian sound cinema post-1930, Brooks provocatively (and productively) enlists Freud and Lacan, arguing that “Australia’s inability to transition from silent cinema to talkies was not a necessity, but historically contingent on the structural silences and negations required for the Australian settlement to function smoothly as intended.” Revisiting The Surfer (2025), Greg Dolgopolov meanwhile sees Lorcan Finnegan’s film as a singular heir to the 1970s Australian “Outback Noir” tradition: as far as hallucinations go, Nic Cage’s titular drifter bears more than a passing resemblance to the young schoolteacher losing his grip on reality in Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971), though The Surfer seems much more concerned with Indigenous life than its distant cousin. Sticking with the Oz outback theme, Tom Boniface-Webb examines how Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel (2023) revises the “colonial gothic” genre using a feminist framework. A related concern is also featured in Lucrecia Martel’s Nuestra tierra (Landmarks, 2025), only with the everyday painfully vivid Latin American power struggle confronting Indigenous peoples with the “Western” sectors of society, a problem carefully addressed by Jens Andermann. Changing topics radically yet with empathy, Gemma King analyses Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2020), a gateway to feeling with people experiencing hearing loss and redefining themselves through it in enriching manners. Two more classically cinephile essays, by Sean Zou and Arta Barzanji respectively: the first explores Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Przypadek (Blind Chance, 1981) and Bez końca (No End, 1985) through Gilles Deleuze’s film philosophy, while the second traverses Jean-Luc Godard’s Notebooks exposition, digressing on his multimedia work. We end with another treat: Tilman Baumgärtel describes in pleasurable detail film culture in Phnom Penh across the ’60s and ’70s when Cambodia, just independent, tried to find its own identity, just prior to the Khmer Rouge horrors.

In our interviews section, Berlin regulars Silvia Spitta and Gerd Gemünden speak in-depth with Chilean director Juan Pablo Sallato whose feature debut Hangar rojo (The Red Hangar), set on the eve of President Salvador Allende’s overthrow, premiered at this year’s Berlinale. Regular Senses contributor Gary Kramer speaks with co-directors Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans about their Sundance documentary Who Killed Alex Odeh?, which investigates the unsolved 1985 assassination of a Palestinian living in California. Kramer also interviews Danish film director Christoffer Boe about his police procedural Special Unit: The First Murder. Finally, rounding off the section is a tribute to Yuki Aditya Husandy, long-time director of the ARKIPEL International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival in Indonesia and an integral member of Jakarta’s radical ‘cine collective’ movement. True to the spirit of this movement, this interview is a collection of voices reflecting on and paying tribute to Yuki’s unique contribution to Indonesian film culture.

As is usual for our second issue of the year, the festivals section is Berlinale-heavy: in a sobering and illuminating report, Marco Abel grapples with the controversy surrounding Wim Wenders’ pronouncements before surveying the German films from the edition, with ample praise for what was arguably the one standout, Angela Schanelec’s Meine Frau weint (My Wife Cries). Cerise Howard’s dispatch – a companion piece to her interview with Michael Stütz – surveys the 40th edition of the Teddy Awards, “the longest-standing and most prestigious queer film prize in the world.” Elsewhere in Europe, Olivia Popp travelled to Reykjavik’s Stockfish Film & Industry Festival and wrestled with what the programmers referred to as “North Atlantic Cinema.” Finally, Botagoz Koilybayeva writes about her journey through Sundance’s virtual festival, and a handful of gems she caught while “attending” the online edition. 

Enthroning spaghetti western maestro Sergio Corbucci as a Great Director, Sherry Johnson assesses Corbucci as more than merely and dismissively ‘the other Sergio’. While the two Rome-born directors are often compared to each other, Johnson insists that “at heart Corbucci’s films are far more political and subversive than Leone’s.” Just two weeks before publication, we were devastated to learn of the passing of Senses friend and frequent writer Tony Williams, whose customarily eye-opening, encyclopaedic, and detailed Great Actors article on Soviet star Elena Kuz’mina appears in this issue posthumously, in memory and celebration of Tony’s 30+ contributions to the journal since Issue 23 in 2003. For outstandingly generous help with editing, we are thankful to Kathleen Ensor, Tony’s partner of 36 years.

It is always a pleasure (even if, for moments, a shocking one) to read Akira Kurosawa, and Tony McKibbin guides us through it in his critique of the Japanese master’s Long Take. Other reviews in this issue dissect Duncan Reekie’s BOOM! The Exploding Cinema and the New London Underground (appraised by Wheeler Winston Dixon), Stephen Gundle’s Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the Age of Neorealism (by Ashish Dwivedi), and Simon R. Troon’s Cinematic Encounters with Disaster (by Scott Robinson).

As Cannes and its intoxicating festival fever rapidly approach, we offer this issue in hope it sparks sober and critical reflection on the infrastructures, systems, and discourses shaping the ecosystem (or religious order) we call cinema. Atheists, devotees, and everyone in between is invited, openness to difference being the only precondition; we hope you enjoy reading.