The aesthetics and politics of melodrama, reconsidered: Delitto d’amore / Crime of Love Thomas Austin August 2023 Feature Articles This article has been peer reviewed Two lovers walk in silence along a riverbank. They are framed in a long shot, on a path bordered by green grasses. Behind them are misty fields and distant trees. But in the...
Horse-People and White Voices: Neoliberalism and Race in Sorry to Bother You Thomas Austin May 2023 Feature Articles The comedy drama Sorry to Bother You (2018), written and directed by Boots Riley, follows the trials and tribulations of Cassius, aka “Cash”, Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield), a new employee at RegalView, a ...
Bigger than life, or stranger: Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela: Part III Thomas Austin July 2022 Feature Articles Vitalina Varela (2019) is the seventh feature film by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. It tells the true story of a woman from Cape Verde who travels to Lisbon to attend the funeral of her estranged husband...
Bigger than life, or stranger: Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela: Part II Thomas Austin May 2022 Feature Articles Vitalina Varela (2019) is the seventh feature film by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. It tells the true story of a woman from Cape Verde who travels to Lisbon to attend the funeral of her estranged husband...
Bigger than life, or stranger: Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela: Part I Thomas Austin January 2022 Feature Articles Vitalina Varela (2019) is the seventh feature film by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. It tells the true story of a woman from Cape Verde who travels to Lisbon to attend the funeral of her estranged husband...
Boy with Flag and Black British experience in Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs and McQueen’s Red, White and Blue Thomas Austin May 2021 Feature Articles Vanley Burke’s photograph Boy with Flag, Winford in Handsworth Park, 1970 appears in films by two of the most important figures in British cinema of the past 35 years. Handsworth Songs, directed by John Akomfra...
“A Democracy of Images” John Gianvito in Conversation Thomas Austin March 2018 Feature Articles Slow-paced but urgent, John Gianvito’s incendiary nine-hour diptych For Example, The Philippines is a stunning feat of political filmmaking. Emotionally gripping, historically revelatory, and at times vividly b...
In the Cells of Fortress Europe: An Interview with Marianna Economou, director of The Longest Run Thomas Austin June 2017 Feature Articles Marianna Economou’s observational documentary The Longest Run (2015) tells the story of two teenage refugees, Kurds from Syria and Iraq, who meet in a Greek juvenile prison awaiting trial for people trafficking...
Temporal Vertigo: An Interview with John Akomfrah Thomas Austin July 2016 Feature Articles The pioneering British filmmaker John Akomfrah is co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective and director of The Nine Muses (2010) and The Stuart Hall Project (2013). The following interview focuses on four ...
