Introduction

I can’t stop thinking about Palestine. How can a ceasefire be temporary? Doesn’t the word ‘cease’ mean to stop? Maybe language doesn’t mean anything anymore: every headline from every major Western news source is filled with propaganda and lies. But the pictures coming out of Palestine tell the truth. 

Still, the ‘big’ festivals didn’t focus on Palestine – and Berlinale positively not only avoided it, but prevented their guests from focussing on it, too. While I’m in favour of boycotts – sometimes they appear to work, even if the details are obfuscating: in the UK, Pret and Barclays have managed to quell further action against them through quashing plans to open in occupied Palestinian territories (Pret)¹ and through trying to explain their investments as a sort of divested funding of defence (Barclays)² – I’d already commissioned three writers to again cover Berlinale and, since we don’t even have the funds to pay our writers, I really didn’t want to punish them or silence their very necessary voices and thankfully critical coverage of said fest. 

Also: language still means something to me – and to our writers, whose voices are strong, thoughtful, critical and crucial in these honestly terrifying times for humanity. 

In this issue, festival-reports-wise, you will find three reports on Berlinale: Daniel Fairfax casts a critical eye over the fest, as does Cerise Howard, her focus on their queer offerings; and Marco Abel again focuses on the German films at the fest. All three are excellent pieces of writing and, despite the Berlinale’s appalling politics, I am proud to have the coverage in this issue. 

There are two reports from IFFR – Australian filmmaker Dirk de Bruyn reports on short films and the use of film materiality at the fest, while I’ve taken a look at the festival’s partnership with Eye Filmmuseum and its general vibe, which, this year, I found lacking. 

Vanessa Nyarko reports on Black Europe Film Festival, a new festival in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, which is a celebration of Afro-European cinema, and which takes curation instead of release dates as its impetus (a welcome change on an ever-overcrowded circuit). And finally, Zifei Wang takes a long look at the short form – something that is often overlooked in our industry, but where there’s plenty to discover – in her report from Beijing Short Film Festival.

We as a journal might not have money (we do have a Patreon, please consider contributing!), and film festivals might well be just as planet-destroying and humanity-lacking as many of our politicians, but I do believe in the writers we’ve published in this issue, who all report with integrity and humanity in their critical hearts. 

– Tara Judah, out-going Festival Reports editor

As we bid farewell to Tara – and thank her immensely for all the intense work, critical ingenuity and dedication she has brought to Senses over the years as both an editor and contributor – and César Albarrán-Torres – a key figure in the history of this journal, who in his eight years as an editor consciously expanded the scope of the discussion and the reach of the quarterly, with sheer impetus, depth in critical thought, kindness and great humour – we welcome Leonardo Goi on board as our new Festivals Editor. Leonardo brings with him a treasure trove of experience and knowledge from the global moving image circuit, which is why we are excited to work with him from the next Issue onward. Thank you for everything, César and Tara, and welcome to the team, Leo! As always, all of us editors are more than happy to hear from you, dear reader and writer, with proposals for articles, festival reports, interviews, book reviews, and more.

In this issue, our commitment to cinema as a medium and tool of worldbuilding, truth, and justice continues with a special ten-text dossier that has been in the making for months, but that speaks to our current disastrous sociopolitical predicament with urgency. Edited by the inimitable duo of Fadi AbuNe’meh and Sima M, “Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance” is a powerful, rich, and thoughtfully curated dossier on cinematic solidarities with global liberation movements, centring on historic and contemporary Palestine in particular. Our best guides to this subject are the guest editors themselves: “as we write these words, we make no pretence of offering answers, nor do we harbour delusions about the impact of our act. What we can, though, is add our voices to the chorus that has created what writer and urbanist Mahdi Sabbagh calls ‘the flows of liberatory ideas that come from under and in spite of settler-colonial geographies.’ Bringing together seven essays and two interviews, we foreground diverse ideas, practices, and – crucially – geographies that have underwritten solidarities shaped around Palestinian cinema. Ours is not necessarily a meaningful gesture, but one at our disposal: a rare act that is tangible and within our means.”

In our Feature articles, Arielle Friend writes a deep poetic reflection on Angela Schanelec’s visually poetic ‘Port of Dreams’. Malinalli López Arreguín studies fluidity in the muxe, a “third genre” of the Zapotec people of southern Mexico, rooted in their cosmovision and inspired by Netflix’s The Secret of the River. Alborz Mahboobkhah on Kiarostami and Salvador Carrasco on Lynch complete our heterogeneous Features lineup.

This issue’s Interviews section includes conversations with both emerging and established writer/directors, with a particular focus on filmmakers working in non-English-speaking contexts.  Beijing-based film programmer Shan Tong spoke to Miguel Gomes about a retrospective of his short films that played at the aforementioned 2024 Beijing International Short Film Festival. Gary Kramer interviewed Austrian writer/director, Florian Pochlatko, whose feature debut How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World premiered at Berlin; the film broaches several ‘big’ questions including how to cope as the world is falling apart. Kramer also spoke to American-Iranian director/writer Alireza Khatami about his film The Things You Kill, which won the Directing Award in the World Cinema Dramatic category at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Presenting their fifth Latin American women’s director interview for Senses of Cinema this issue, Silvia Spitta and Gerd Gemünden spoke to Brazilian filmmaker Anna Muylaert, whose latest film The Best Mother in the World premiered at Berlin. Furthermore, Hamed Sarrafi spoke to well-known but under-recognised Czech filmmaker Bohdan Sláma, whose films explore the darker side of the human condition. Nikola Radić queried Australian artist-documentarian Quenton Miller about Koki, Ciao, an experimental tribute to Marshal Tito’s speaking parrot, while Pakistani-British filmmaker Nasheed Qamar Faruqi caught up with Raoul Peck at the London Film Festival, speaking at length about Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, which Peck recently wrote, directed and produced – a testament to his commitment to remain an uncompromised voice.

Two non-Western Great Actors shine bright in Issue 113: Michelle Yeoh and Mikheil Gelovani, both evaluated in detail and with close attention to historical context by Tony Williams. Meanwhile, our Book Reviews section accidentally got centred on the US. Tony McKibbin reviews Nick de Semlyen’s provoking The Last Action Heroes, a study of muscular action film actors from the recent past. Troy Bordun assesses the most recent volume of reviews by Phillip Lopate, My Affair with Arthouse Cinema, while Scott Robinson takes a very critical look at Grégoire Halbout’s Hollywood Screwball Comedy.

Wherever around the globe you are and whichever ethnocentric authoritarianism you are confronting, we hope these texts jolt you in one way or another towards an unbound, liberated relationship with the cinema – and thus with the entire world. For our part, we can only promise to keep the discussion serious, eclectic, and unwaveringly independent.