Author Cerise Howard

In 1970, a Swedish filmmaker in his mid-twenties became an instant critical darling with his debut feature: a lyrical, Czechoslovak New Wave-inflected, romantic drama matter-of-factly titled En kärlekshistoria ...

A funny thing has often happened to me on the way to the Berlinale. I’ve attended each of the last three years’ festivals; you’d think I’d know my way around well enough by now. And yet this year there were sti...

February 2026 marked the 40th anniversary of the Berlinale’s venerable queer film prize, the Teddy Award. With this milestone in mind, I was invited by the prize’s organisers, the Teddy Foundation, to interview...

In my write-up in Senses of last year’s 58th KVIFF, I led with commentary on the ubiquity of celebration of Jiří Bartoška’s 30 years as festival President. Just shy of two months out from the opening of the 59t...

Author’s note: in order to transmit something of the experiential, pseudo-audience-participatory dimensions of this piece’s two public airings to date, I’ve retained in the text that follows frequent moments of...

Long his most widely disseminated work, František Vláčil’s baroque Middle Ages masterpiece Marketa Lazarová (1967) often serves as a discombobulating introduction to his oeuvre. For a long time, it was the only...

People often ask us if we are a political festival. And yes, while I’d say we are a social festival, politics is in our DNA. We are the only major A-list festival that is in a capital city, and Berlin is a city...

Somewhere at home I’ve squirreled away Melbourne Cinémathèque calendars dating back to 1999 – though this was not my sporadic first year of attendance, which was, I think, in 1997. Rather, 1999 was the first ye...

I always say that the 20th Century brought two unfortunate events: the invention of the atom bomb and the invention of the sound film. - Jiří Menzel For many, the cinema of Jiří Menzel foremost carries asso...

Whether local or visiting festival-goers, distinguished or emerging filmmakers, industry professionals or members of the press, few attendees would have been unaware that 2024’s edition of KVIFF marked 30 years...

Launched in 1987, the queer film-celebrating, multiple-category Teddy Award has existed for more than half the nigh-on three-quarters of a century lifetime of its host, the Berlin International Film Festival. ...

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...

The “Czechoslovak film miracle” of the 1960s has long been synonymous with the Czechoslovak New Wave, a term principally applied to works produced by a storied cluster of filmmakers who emerged that decade thro...

“Well, to be completely honest, the award’s very nice and all, but I’m only here for the gig. I was ignorant to this whole thing until just a while ago. I’m just amazed by this place, man. It’s so beautiful an...

Dualities and parallels abound in Ildikó Enyedi’s remarkable Az én XX. századom (My Twentieth Century, 1989), a singularly playful, magical realist, retro-futuristic, richly allusive, erotically charged, and wi...

Prolific activist-filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim was born Holger Radtke in Nazi-occupied Latvia in 1942. He rebranded himself “Rosa”, to serve as a constant reminder to others of the pink triangle that gay prison...

For all that it contains resonances of queer musical elders – The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), the Sandra Bernhard vehicle Without You I'm Nothing (John Boskovich, 1990) and, perhaps most of a...

While there was a KVIFF last year (held uncharacteristically in August, from the 20th to the 28th) and a 16-film-strong roaming festival-in-miniature (“KVIFF at Your Cinema”) staged in 2020, I could attend neit...

It’s not news that the 1960s were an extraordinarily fecund time for cinema in Czechoslovakia; the output of the filmmakers connected to the FAMU-centred Czechoslovak New Wave has been celebrated unstintingly, ...

Jakubisko is kin to Brazil's Glauber Rocha, America's Robert Downey, Mexico's Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of Armenia, Miklós Jancsó of Hungary, and in a way to Poland's...

Oftentimes reports of mine on the venerable Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) have looked a mite askance at its gender politics. But along comes 2019 and, shut the front door – the 54th KVIFF’s t...

The work of Czech director Gustav Machatý (1901–1963) is enjoying a surprise renaissance. The 76th Venice Film Festival had as its pre-opening event a screening of a new digital restoration of Extase (Ecstasy),...

"One sensation of mind, one fabric in recollection of touch." - Saleswoman Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed), waxing typically gnomic, in In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018). Peter Strickland's latest hyper-styli...

This year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) was always going to have a lot to address. For Czechs (and Slovaks), 2018 is a year overladen with anniversaries, with two in particular impossible t...

A common misconception in the West is that Věra Chytilová directed only a few significant, narratively and aesthetically adventurous films, and all in the 1960s – O něčem jiném (Something Different, 1963), 1966...

The First FIPRESCI Colloquium Dedicated to Russian Cinema 13-15 November 2017 Lenfilm Studio, St. Petersburg Colloquium website: https://new.culturalforum.ru/event/2017-11-12-pervyj-kollokvium-fipressi-posvy...

The 1960s' Czechoslovak New Wave was lightning in a bottle, a glorious film miracle born of an unrepeatable collision of societal and political factors. An extraordinary pool of talented young filmmakers came t...

Ah, anniversaries. How readily a landmark – and a sense of obligation towards its acknowledgment being given a due sense of occasion – might become more millstone than milestone. And so the challenge presented ...

Few more controversial figures have enlivened cinema than the Polish polymath Walerian Borowczyk; far fewer still experienced so massive a fall from critical grace. At the epicentre of this fall lay La Bête (Th...

“When it came to Fassbinder, ... one was made to feel that the real drama in film after film wasn't so much in the makeshift characters or the fruit-salad images but in the offscreen intrigues of a baby Caligul...

Feature image: Eva Zaoralová holding aloft her book, The Story of a Festival 2015 found the summertime festivals in Karlovy Vary and Odessa in introspective but nonetheless celebratory moods. In Karlovy Vary, ...

Of all the takes on the oft-filmed debonair teller of outlandish heroic tales introduced to the literary world in Rudolf Erich Raspe's Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Rus...

After three feature length triumphs mixing live-action with animation, Karel Zeman took a departure from sci-fi and fantasy missions implausible and instead engaged mockingly with terrible historical fact. With...

This July just past I attended my second Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, my second in succession, as a member of a five critic-strong FIPRESCI jury. Accordingly, my main focus at the KVIFF this year w...

“Tactile wooden spoons, pot lids, rolling pins and boards are alchemistic tools and our bodies are the crucible for the Magnum Opus of tactilism.” - Jan Švankmajer (1) Jan Švankmajer’s third feature film, S...

I've written three times previously in Senses of Cinema on the Fribourg International Film Festival, covering the festivals in 2010, '11 and '12. While I missed last year's FIFF, it is very clear that each succ...