Introduction the editors July 2025 Editorial Welcome, dear readers, cinephiles, and co-conspirators, to Issue 114 of the Internet’s most serious and eclectic discussion of cinema! As the world continues on a downward spiral of violence and authoritaria...
Feeling the Child’s Voice: Sobs, Sniffs and Snuffles in Anatomy of a Fall Elvira Berzins July 2025 Feature Articles At the release of Justine Triet’s acclaimed film Anatomy of a Fall (2023), child actor Milo Machado-Graner was praised for an exceptionally emotive pe...
State of Play: Francis Alÿs’s Children’s Games Matilde Nardelli July 2025 Feature Articles When the urge to play overcomes an adult, this is not simply a regression to childhood. To be sure, play is always liberating. – Walter Benjamin ...
Vinothraj’s Pebbles: A Meditation on Solastalgia Adithya Kamesh July 2025 Feature Articles Set in the sun-scorched interiors of rural Tamil Nadu, Pebbles (P.S. Vinothraj, 2021) explores the emotional and psychological toll of surviving in an...
A Death of Despair in Wisborg Mark T. Kettler July 2025 Feature Articles Film is a sequence of photographs. Any two individual cells in a reel may resemble each other. But when shown in rapid sequence, they reveal movement....
Beat Film: Jack Kerouac’s Writing and Reading for Pull My Daisy Sérgio Dias Branco July 2025 Feature Articles Directed by photographer Robert Frank – author of the book The Americans (1958) – and painter Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy (1959) gathers some of the ...
“I Will Be Your Preacher Teacher”: Babygirl Peter Verstraten July 2025 Feature Articles Halina Reijn is the first Dutch filmmaker to have a breakthrough in Hollywood since Paul Verhoeven, who made six feature films in America between 1987...
Multitudinous Filmmakers: Political Resistance in Yol and The Seed of the Sacred Fig Carwan Dourandich July 2025 Feature Articles Cinema has long served as a battleground for political resistance, particularly in the works of filmmakers who have faced persecution, censorship, and...
Seeing In; With, and Through: James Baldwin in Paris, on Film Sarv Gersten July 2025 Feature Articles I. Portraits of Baldwin in Paris Two portraits of James Baldwin hang to face each other across Gallery 1 of Paris’ Centre Pompidou. Part of Paris Noi...
“You’ve been a problem ever since you were born”: The Growing Pains of New Austrian Film Production through Ulrike Kofler’s Gina Jamie Steele July 2025 Feature Articles Child neglect has long been a staple of European cinema. The lost boys of post-war Italian neo-realism saw the pressures of adulthood placed on them f...
Building a Home: Sofia Bohdanowicz’s openness to an inquisitive world Susana Bessa July 2025 Feature Articles It is mesmerizing to watch someone so absorbed in their work. (…) Her hands seem almost transparent as she touches the letters, moves them across the...
There Is Love Here: Long Takes in Danielle Arbid’s Passion Simple and Celine Song’s Past Lives Henrique Brazão July 2025 Feature Articles 1. Throughout the history of film and film theory, the long take has found and maintained a distinctive place for its knowledge production potential,...
The Many Delphine Seyrigs in the Room of Chantal Akerman Philip Brophy July 2025 Feature Articles Woman Sitting After Killing (2001) in “Travelling”, Jeu de Palme, Paris, September 2024 – January 2025 The Chantal Akerman exhibition at Jeu de Pal...
Folding different temporalities: An Interview with Neo Sora Maja Korbecka July 2025 Interviews 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 Fes...
Interview with Péter Kerekes Olek Młyński July 2025 Interviews “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 th...
An Interview with Pedro Pinho Gary M. Kramer July 2025 Interviews Portuguese writer/director Pedro Pinho’s extraordinary drama, I Only Rest in the Storm (2025), set in Guinea-Bissau, is hypnotising throughout its 217...
Documenting War: An Interview with Alina Maksimenko Isabel Jacobs July 2025 Interviews 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...
“The repressive machine began to operate”: An Interview with Beata Bubenets Botagoz Koilybayeva July 2025 Interviews 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: Vlad...
Sembène, Ousmane Benjamin Rider July 2025 Great Directors b. 1 January 1923, Ziguinchor, Senegal d. 9 June 2007, Yoff, Dakar, Senegal Ousmane Sembène is primarily remembered for his milestone contribution t...
Wolf, Konrad Angelos Koutsourakis July 2025 Great Directors b. 20 October 1925, Hechingen, Weimar Republic. d. 7 March 1982, Berlin, German Democratic Republic. 2025 marks the centennial of Konrad Wolf, one ...
Sen, Mrinal Tushar Gidwani July 2025 Great Directors b. 14 May 1923, Faridpur, (present day) Bangladesh d. 30 December 2018, Calcutta, India If you cannot bear these stories then it is society that is ...
Swinton, Tilda Colette de Castro July 2025 Great Actors The Singular Impermanences of Tilda Swinton “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space” – Hamlet, Shakespeare ...
The Trip to Nitrate: The 9th Annual Nitrate Picture Show Joshua Bogatin July 2025 Festival Reports A combustible medium is perfect for a combustible world. Nitrate celluloid was discontinued as the de facto base for film stock in the early 1950s bec...
Unexpected Collisions: Māoriland 2025 Duncan Caillard July 2025 Festival Reports On the back wall of the Māoriland Hub, in the Toi Matarau Gallery on the main street of Ōtaki on the Kāpiti Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island o...
Istanbul FakeFest: Some Thoughts on Queer Cinema Through Censorship and Security Concerns Pelin Çılgın July 2025 Festival Reports “Hi there, this is the open address of our venue for today’s screenings.” I scroll through the email. There’s a Google Maps link followed by more inst...
Autoethnographic Encounters: The 56th Visions du Réel Olivia Popp July 2025 Festival Reports Unspooling every spring in Nyon, Visions du Réel is known as the largest documentary film festival in Switzerland, as well as one of Europe’s most ren...
Cinema on the Border: The 20th Annual Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival Libertad Gills July 2025 Festival Reports Berwick-upon-Tweed is a seaside town located on the border between England and Scotland. Such porous identity is reflected in the town’s only film fes...
“While editing, I stopped the missiles from falling on Gaza”: Notes from the 11th Reel Palestine Film Festival Miriam Ellen July 2025 Festival Reports In Dubai’s warm winter sunshine, throngs of cinema goers queued up outside Cinema Akil. Many sported keffiyehs and some held cups of bright yellow bar...
It’s uncomfortable; the uncanny ebb and flow of a cine-plex by the sea: The 24th Las Palmas International Film Festival Tara Judah July 2025 Festival Reports It’s uncomfortable; sitting next to someone in an otherwise sparsely populated cinema, me gutturally affected by the film, them gasping and gripping t...
On Resistance: The 15th Open City Documentary Festival Xiang Fan & Shaghayegh Raoufi July 2025 Festival Reports Since its launch in 2014, Open City Documentary Festival – based within University College London’s (UCL) Public Anthropology program – has been dedic...
Getting a Grip on Scottish Film Tony McKibbin July 2025 Book Reviews “To put it bluntly, Scotland is, on the filmmaking front, a third world country, but this is tragically misrecognised by those holding the purse strin...
Rules of the (Narrative) Game Arindam Sen July 2025 Book Reviews On the one hand there was the Sattelzeit, a progressionist view of temporal unravelling, cumulative and linear in character, where history asserted it...
Spectacles of Difference: Exotic Cinema by Daniela Berghahn Duncan Caillard July 2025 Book Reviews It is rarely a compliment to be described as “exotic.” Exoticism is rarely a question of self-identification. To be exotic implies isolation from the ...
The Sleeping Beast Within Darragh O’Donoghue July 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film If Suzuki Seijun had retired from filmmaking in the winter of 1962, he would be remembered – if at all – as an imaginative specialist who stretched th...
Underworld Beauty Martyn Bamber July 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film For many cineastes – especially outside of Japan – director Seijun Suzuki is the reluctant master of the yakuza genre. His international fame and noto...
Our Blood Will Not Forgive Harrison Ervin July 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film The theme of revenge coursing through Suzuki Seijun’s Oretachi no chi ga yurusanai (Our Blood Will Not Forgive, 1964) deconstructs the common violence...
Gate of Flesh Faith Everard July 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film It's not that I've let my heart turn to stone, but I no longer have any tears to shed. Who was it that turned me into this kind of woman… When the war...
Branded to Kill Peter A. Yacavone July 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Is Koroshi no rakuin (Branded to Kill, 1967) Suzuki Seijun's revenge on the ten black-and-white "hard boiled" (hādo-boirudo) crime films he had been f...
Telescope Sean Redmond June 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film There is nothing here In cinema, the suburban milieu is an often-repeated symbolic environment. It can be framed as utopian where belonging and succe...
Homecomings Mike Hoolboom June 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Homecomings (Dirk De Bruyn, 1988) is a deeply hybrid work, drawing on every part of the artist’s expansive repertoire of film encounters. It blends di...
Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig: A Story Grace Boschetti June 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1977 actress-activist Delphine Seyrig was interviewed by German director Katja Raganelli for a documentary portrait. Reflecting on her screen caree...
Women Talking: Delphine Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! Isabella Gullifer-Laurie June 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Anne Sinclair: “So, at the heart of it, your feminism consists of what precisely?” Delphine Seyrig: “In my communication with other women, this is th...
Chamber Music for Solo Voices and Distant Party: Baxter, Vera Baxter Rolland Man June 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film it's the voice that acts, that produces desire and emotion. The voice is stronger than physical presence. It's as important as the face, the eyes, th...
The Same Others: Close Your Eyes Salvador Carrasco June 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film The opening sequence of Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice, 2023) made me feel like I was immersed in a Jorge Luis Borges story. Although ...
Víctor Erice-Abbas Kiarostami: Correspondences Jonathan Mackris June 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film The release of Víctor Erice-Abbas Kiarostami Correspondences (2007) arrived at a key juncture in the lives of both filmmakers. It represents the exact...
“A country that doesn’t figure on the maps”: Víctor Erice’s La Morte Rouge Adrian Danks June 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Made as part of an extraordinary collaborative exhibition between Víctor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami that was staged in Barcelona, Paris, and Melbourne...
Passing Light: Víctor Erice’s The Quince Tree Sun David Heslin May 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Of all the artforms that represent or evoke reality in various ways, film is the one that speaks the language of memories and dreams: much like those ...
The Spirit of the Beehive Angelo Koulouris May 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Víctor Erice’s debut feature El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) begins with a series of children’s drawings accompanied by a ...
