Interviews

Giulio Bertelli’s remarkable feature debut, Agon, depicts three women competing in a fictional Olympics at Ludoj in 2024. But this is not an inspirational sports film. Bertelli is probing the physical and menta...

On what should have been an inconspicuous and inconsequential morning in Tehran, Mahboobeh Kalaee boarded a flight bound for Vienna on February 28, 2026. She was headed to the 25th edition of the Tricky Women/T...

Filial piety is a key moral virtue in China. This Confucian doctrine urges children to show respect to parents, obey their wishes, and care for them in old age. Compounded by patriarchal ideals, filial piety of...

In the last 20 years, across four feature-length and a handful of short films, US filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt has presented a critical portrait of American history that grapples with the complex implications of ...

“What does it mean if I blow up this tiny image and make it three metres long?” says Iranian filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi, when talking about the politics of images. Who does the looking? Who is being looked at? Wha...

Pierre le Gall makes an auspicious directorial debut with Flesh and Fuel, the winner of this year’s Queer Palm Revelation prize at Cannes. A character study of gay truck driver, Étienne (Alexis Manenti, of Les ...

For a film named after a solo piano suite, Miroirs No.3 is surprisingly silent. The rare moments of music and sound in Christian Petzold's latest film emerge naturally from within the world he has constructed, ...

Several months ago, as Israel and the United States launched military strikes against Iran, I found myself searching for a way to escape the relentless cycle of anxiety, grief, and uncertainty that had come to ...

The cogent documentary, Who Killed Alex Odeh?, codirected by Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans, investigates the unsolved 1985 assassination of a Palestinian living in Santa Ana, California. Alex Odeh was wo...

The stylish, atmospheric, and engrossing police procedural, Special Unit: The First Murder, cowritten and directed by Christoffer Boe (working under the moniker Hr. Boe), recounts a 100-year-old murder case in ...

Between doing the right thing and the wrong thing there is “an immensity of grey tones” – this is how Chilean director Juan Pablo Sallato describes the moral dilemma faced by the protagonist of his feature debu...

Yuki Aditya Husandy is dead. From 2013-2023, he was the director of ARKIPEL International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival in Indonesia. He was also a keynote member of Forum Lenteng, a cine collectiv...

Happy Holidays (2024) is Palestinian Scandar Copti’s first solo feature as writer/director, following his Oscar-nominated Ajami (2009), cowritten and codirected with Yaron Shani. (Between films Copti helmed a s...

During his visit to the Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago (FIDOCS) 2025, film critic and programmer Antoine Thirion offered a masterclass to film students in which he recounted the experiences ...

For over a decade, the films of Argentine experimental filmmaker, Jessica Sarah Rinland, have unfolded as spaces of discovery where touch performs a kind of thinking that reveals more intuitive ways of knowing....

The river as a mode of expression and perception has long been a source of inspiration for many filmmakers. From Jean Renoir to Ritwik Ghatak, Christian Petzold to Jia Zhangke, going upstream has meant giving a...

There are audiovisual artists for whom cinema is a medium of historical reanimation. In the works of Taiwanese filmmaker and artist Su Hui-Yu, the camera does precisely that: it documents bodies that resurrect ...

Michael Douglas is well known as an era-defining actor of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a resumé of, among others, Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987); Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987, for which Douglas...

For an in-depth analysis of Mariano Llinás’ evolving cinematic approach, read Terence W. Yang’s critical essay, also published in this issue.  As a guest editor of Senses of Cinema for the dossier on El Pamp...

Many worlds are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us The world we want is a world where many worlds fit. – Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, Zapatista Army of National L...

What happens when artists abandon the reflex to control – when they trade meticulous planning for an openness to chance, or when they prioritise direct experience in the living world over rational deductions? A...

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life ...

“Cinema is death at work.” – Jean Cocteau Around about the time I first saw Christian’s Byer’s new film, Death of an Undertaker (2025), I happened across this quote by Cocteau. Happened across again, I should ...

South Korean writer/director Syeyoung Park’s sophomore feature film, The Fin (2025), establishes him as a director to watch. His beguiling dystopian thriller is incredibly atmospheric, with distinctive visuals ...

Claire Denis returns to Africa, the setting for several of her films (Chocolat, White Material, and Beau Travail among them), for her latest feature, The Fence. The film, adapted from the play Black Battles wit...

Christoph Hochhäusler’s densely layered seventh feature, La mort viendra (Death Will Come, 2024), is a French-language neo-noir unfolding primarily in Brussels – the capital of Belgium and location of the Europ...

I met Neo Sora on a sunny morning in March in Amsterdam. His first fiction feature film, Happyend, was the opening film of the 17th CinemAsia Film Festival, the event dedicated to introducing Asian films to loc...

“My belief is that people love to play”. It’s hard to find a neater quote summarising the essence of Péter Kerekes’ cinema than the one coming from the man himself. The Slovakian documentary filmmaker balances ...

Portuguese writer/director Pedro Pinho’s extraordinary drama, I Only Rest in the Storm (2025), set in Guinea-Bissau, is hypnotising throughout its 217-minutes running time. The film introduces Sérgio (Sérgio...

Once a quiet town at the outskirts of Kyiv, Irpin became one of the first front lines of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In February 2022, visual artist and filmmaker Alina Maksimenko found herself there, with a ...

In 2019, a middle-aged man from the Republic of Sakha sets out on foot from its capital, Yakutsk, to Moscow to exorcise a demon from the Kremlin: Vladimir Putin. Pushing a makeshift cart loaded with wooden pole...

Senses of Cinema was founded on stolen land, on Wurundjeri country in the Kulin nations. This is on the south east coast of what's now known as Australia. In this context, there's a counter-colonial angle in a ...

The slippery, slow-burn drama, The Things You Kill, is an intense psychological thriller set in Turkey and written and directed by American Iranian filmmaker, Alireza Khatami (Terrestrial Verses ). The story...

In an era saturated with a seemingly endless stream of films released across festivals, platforms, and regions, it has become increasingly easy – even inevitable – to overlook some truly remarkable, challenging...

“Tales in Tales: A Retrospective Glimpse of Miguel Gomes’ Short Films” is a curatorial programme dedicated to the celebrated Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes as part of the Astro Filmmaker in Focus section...

Writer/Director Florian Pochlatko makes an auspicious feature film debut with How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World. This topical drama, which premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, has vi...