Call for Contributions

Open Call: The Senses of Cinema 2024 World Poll

We invite our readers and authors to reflect on their past cinematic year.

Like every year, we invite all our accomplices, subscribers, and contributors – indeed anyone and everyone reading this – to submit your entry to the Senses of Cinema World Poll. Your reflections can include films released in 2024 (at festivals, in cinemas, on streaming services, or in other theatrical and non-theatrical contexts), older films encountered for the first time this year (seen during retrospectives, in cinematheques, as re-releases or on home entertainment channels), and any in-person, online or hybrid events that you felt presented a high-quality program and experience – and why.

What are end-of-the-year best-of polls good for? What (or whose) interests and ideological ends do they serve? In a world  super-speeding toward environmental cataclysm and ethnonationalist tyranny, why spend precious time rating and ranking film titles when one could instead be scheming, conspiring, and tacticising toward a future worth living? (Which is to say – reading and writing about the films that deserve a future.) At worst, retrospective lists abandon critique in favour of violent metricization, commodity fetishism, and turbo-patriarchal posturing. At best, curating a compilation of favourites opens up a rare opportunity for reflection not just on the world that was, but also on the one that could have been and that might still be. At Senses of Cinema, our annual World Poll makes us wary but also hopeful: wary that the project might reproduce the world’s oppressive pathologies, but also hopeful that it might upend them. There is danger, joy, and subversive potential in the exercise; or, as Serge Daney put it in 1980 to preface his top-of-the-decade selection for Cahiers du Cinéma: “The childish pleasure of lists … let’s give in to it.”

 This year, our maximum is 10 films per submission. All submissions featuring more than 10 films will be rejected.

 Our word limit is strict: 1000 words per submission. Entries longer than 1000 words will be returned; if you fail to adequately abridge your text upon request, the contribution will be rejected. Lists can include short annotations, and they can be organised however you see fit: alphabetically, ranked, grouped, etc.

 Submissions that do not adhere to our Style Guide will be returned for revision and the revised version expected within two days. Film titles should be in italics, followed by the director’s name and year of release in parentheses. Example: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey, 1999). For non-English language films, list the original title first, followed by the English title in parentheses. Example: Tri istorii (Three Stories, Kira Muratova, 1997). Thereafter use the English title. The only exception to this is if the film is commonly known in English by its foreign title, such as La Jetée.

 Please email your submission to worldpoll@sensesofcinema.com and remember to include your author by-line. This should be no more than a short sentence. The deadline for contributions is Friday, December 27, 2024. However, Senses would greatly appreciate submissions as soon as possible. Late submissions will not be published. Entries will be published at the editors’ discretion. All submissions will receive an acknowledgement of receipt.

 The World Poll will be published in Issue 112 in early 2025. If you wish to review previous World Polls, they can be accessed here.

 Thank you, and we look forward to your contributions.

The Editors,
Senses of Cinema