Interviews

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...

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...

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...

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...

Mapping Global Horror: Australia, Japan and Beyond brought world-leading scholars and filmmakers to Wurundjeri country for a two-day conference to navigate how the titular genre moves through time, space and cu...

At the intersection of theory and practice, Mapping Global Horror: Australia, Japan and Beyond put horror scholars in dialogue with filmmakers and festival producers. This enabled audiences to understand new di...

This year's Berlinale was marked by Nicolas Philibert's surprising victory with his modest and intimate documentary about a Parisian psychiatric institution, which prompted us to question the established bounda...

In a review of Club Zero, Jessica Hausner’s latest feature, which premiered in Competition at Cannes this year, Charles Bramesco calls the director “Austria’s most fearless button-pusher.” Given that her compat...

Shame on Dry Land, by Swedish writer/director Axel Petersén, is a flinty noir set in sunny Malta. The film, which had its World Premiere at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, is as slippery as its protagonist, ...

With a gaze that radiates a dreamy but determined freshness, the beautiful Leonor Silveira in Manoel de Oliveira's Abraham's Valley (Vale Abraão, 1993) graces the poster of this 55th edition of the Directors’ F...

Christoph Hochhäusler’s noirish Bis ans Ende der Nacht (Till the End of the Night) premiered on the final day of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, capping a Competition that showcased an unusually hi...

In the maze of a major festival event such as the Berlinale, The Klezmer Project, a debut feature by Argentinian filmmakers Paloma Schachmann and Leandro Koch, which premiered in the Encounters section, emerged...

Few concert films have stood the test of time in the way that Chunky Shrapnel (John Angus Stewart, 2020) has. Originally set to premiere at the Astor Theatre in Melbourne on 3 April 2020, the film was instead g...

In the enigmatic realm of Trenque Lauquen, Laura Citarella brings to fruition the very essence of El Pampero Cine's bold cinematic vision. This latest opus stands as the epitome of everything the Argentinian pr...

With Here, his fourth feature film and winner of the Encounters and the Fipresci Award at the 73rd Berlinale, the Belgian director Bas Devos creates a luminous, delicate, and subtle film that inspires awe. Thro...