Interviews

As part of the retrospective dedicated to Tatiana Huezo at the 28th edition of the Santiago International Documentary Festival (FIDOCS), the Mexican-Salvadoran filmmaker shares with us her vision and trajectory...

Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev The timely and topical documentary, Porcelain War, chronicles the lives of a trio of artists in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Codirected by Brendan Bellomo and one of the subjects, Sl...

Armenian cinema, just like its history, is marked by the scars of displacement and war. The country’s most celebrated filmmaker, Sergei Parajanov, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Soviet regime. The Armenia...

The cinematic year 2024 can be defined as one of entrapment, a recurring theme where characters across a diverse spectrum of films find themselves ensnared in vicious cycles with seemingly no escape. From the o...

In the middle of last year, I travelled from Australia to the Western Highlands in Scotland, right to the edge of the Inner Hebrides archipelago, to work on the production of Greek director Athina Rachel Tsanga...

This year at the London Film Festival, Stranger Eyes emerged as a compelling embodiment of three prevalent themes – not just within the festival but across some of the most significant films of 2024. Like a cin...

Amidst the London Film Festival’s lineup of films steeped in despair and bleak visions of the future – like swamps pulling their characters deeper into hopelessness – Universal Language stood out as a clever, k...

Alejo Moguillansky is the kind of filmmaker who doesn’t just think outside the box – he tears it apart, reimagines it, and then dances around whatever remains. There’s something fearless about his approach to c...

South African writer/director Pia Marais travels deep into the Brazilian jungle for Transamazonia, her hypnotic fourth feature.  Rebecca (Helena Zengel) is a teenager who has been practicing faith healing wi...

This conversation took place at Kumar Shahani’s residence in Kolkata on a balmy afternoon in January 2024. Shahani was visibly ailing but the mind fecund as ever. The backdrop of the meeting was a chance encoun...

Director and cowriter Francesco Costabile’s Familia, which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival, is an intense drama inspired by true events.   Licia (Barbara Ronchi) lives with her two young sons, ...

In plain terms, AFSPA expands to Armed Forces Special Powers Act, an act of the Indian Parliament that grants special powers to the Indian army to maintain law and order in “disturbed areas”. But there is nothi...

Argentine writer/director Celina Murga has made a series of intriguing character studies over the course of her career starting with her debut feature, Ana and the Others in 2003. Five years later, her film A W...

Florence Delay (b. 1941), novelist and performer, is most well-known for playing Joan of Arc in Robert Bresson’s Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962). Delay also narrated the French versio...

For his feature film debut, Block Pass, which premiered at Cannes this year, director Antoine Chevrollier reteams with actor Sayyid El Alami who starred in his 2022 TV miniseries, Oussekine.  In this powerfu...

There could hardly be a less auspicious way to start a filmmaking career than as a producer on a Matías Piñeiro film, and it wasn’t long after producing Hermia and Helena (2016) that Graham Swon began to clearl...

Jonás Trueba won the Label Europa Cinemas prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his feature The Other Way Around, about a couple’s separation party. The film costars – and is cowritten with – Itsaso Ara...

Simón de la montaña (Simon of the Mountain, 2024) grabs viewers from its opening moments as the title character (Lorenzo Ferro), a 21-year-old, tries to help a group of disabled youths caught in a windstorm. Th...

Expanded from his 2020 short of the same name, The Moogai is writer/director Jon Bell’s allegorical horror film about the Stolen Generation – the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families betwee...

Matt and Mara (2024) was my first and last screening at this year’s Berlinale. I can’t remember the last time I saw the same film twice at a film festival. Very little could have prepared me for the beautifully...

Fernanda Valadez made a stunning feature directorial debut with Identifying Features (2020). For her sophomore effort, Sujo (2024), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year, where it won the Worl...

The following interview with Marie Craven originated from an online interview after a film class viewing of a program of her films as we moved out of Covid. The Zoom transcriptions of that event were trawled an...

“Yo no quería hacer una pelicula sobre víctimas” – with these words director Lola Arias described to us her approach to making a film about a dozen former inmates of various Buenos Aires women prisons. Reas, wh...

Meryam Joobeur earned an Oscar nomination for her 2018 short film, Brotherhood, about a Tunisian family grappling with the unexpected return of their son, Malek (Malek Mechergui). Malek, who has been gone for o...

The 74th Berlin International Film Festival could not have taken place on a more politicised stage. Not only did the festival reflect, as it typically does, the preoccupations of the world in the films selected...

Written by Patricia Cornelius, one of Australia’s most celebrated playwrights and a Windham-Campbell prize winner, the micro-budget Melbourne feature Shit began life as a play (2015), with its powerhouse cast o...

Leonor Teles’s mirror-surfaced, headily constructed Baan opens at a moment of contemplation. Against the backdrop of a lilac-infused blue cityscape of the King Power MahaNakhon, the legendary Bangkok skyscraper...

Despite Argentina's present socio-political and economic situation being shrouded in uncertainty and instability, its film industry is robust, consistently producing remarkable works. Contemporary Argentine cin...

I first talked with Wei Shujun back in 2020 when his debut film, Yema fenzhong (Striding into the Wind), had its US theatrical release. However, we met in person only three years later in Cannes after the premi...

When Last Summer (2023) premiered at the Cannes Main Competition earlier this year, everyone expected a scandalous film. A massive age gap, incestuous themes, and, boy, does the internet love such discourse! Bu...

Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and to thought.  - Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer The cinema of Martín Rejtman is a cinema...

Although he has written and directed only two features, Martín Shanly has developed a distinctive voice in Argentine cinema. His style is low-key, and his character studies showcase troubled heroes. His two fil...

In 2022 the National Film and Sound Archive acquired the hand-made filmmaking material Paul Winkler constructed to make his innovative films from the the 1960’s to the present. Winkler is packing up his practic...

In the United States, regional filmmakers rarely get the same attention as their big-city counterparts, at least until they premiere in New York or L.A. This denial of certain geographic perspectives is bound u...

A good short film uses time to support the story. Given the brief running time, a filmmaker must establish a setup, keep viewers in suspense, and deliver a satisfying payoff in, 15 minutes. Short films evoke an...

Paul Preciado is an aphorism machine, the David Bowie of contemporary philosophy. Like other contemporary thinkers (what used to be called “public intellectuals” – Andrea Long Chu, Hito Steyerl), he writes in e...