Introduction the editors May 2025 Editorial 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 ...
Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance Fadi AbuNe’meh & Sima M May 2025 Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance While writing these words, we are struck by the inadequacy of language in the face of annihilation. In spite of this, we approach this dossier as an a...
Navigating the Film Cultural Ecosystem in the Face of Genocide with Members of Palestine Film Institute Fadi AbuNe’meh & Sima M May 2025 Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance Established in 2019, the Palestine Film Institute (PFI) is a voluntary, independent non-profit organisation founded by Palestinian film professionals ...
“After Gaza, You Are Someone Else.” A Conversation with Ola Salama from Filmlab Palestine Fadi AbuNe’meh & Sima M May 2025 Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance Founded in 2014 in Ramallah, Filmlab Palestine has grown from a personal initiative into a vital cultural hub, empowering Palestinian voices by suppor...
How to Watch Films in Times of Despair? ALFILM’s take on Palestine, Solidarity and the Power of Imagination Iskandar Abdalla May 2025 Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance Amidst the preparations for the 15th edition of ALFILM (The Arab Film Festival Berlin), the attacks of October 7, 2023, took place. The aftermath was ...
Translating Knights of Cinema Nadine Fattaleh May 2025 Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance John Berger once wrote, “If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.” Surely, many people who have awoken ...
Insurgent Archives: Palestinian Cinema and Solidarity Rana Anani May 2025 Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance Since the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, we, as Palestinians, have found ourselves grappling with difficult questions posed by artists ...
The Tokyo Reels: Fragments of Resistance and Solidarity in Palestinian Cinema Fadi AbuNe’meh May 2025 Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance “Everything in this world can be robbed and stolen, except one thing; this one thing is the love that emanates from a human being towards a solid comm...
From Buenos Aires to Beirut: Circuits of Cinematic Solidarities and Palestina, Otro Vietnam AK Latif May 2025 Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance In January, I went to see Carmen Amengual’s A Non-Coincidental Mirror at Smack Mellon Gallery in DUMBO. The exhibition centred on Argentine Amengual’s...
Countering Cultural Genocide: A Tribute to Qais al-Zubaidi’s Palestine Solidarity Cinema Claire Begbie May 2025 Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance The past 18 months have seen unprecedented losses in Palestine. The Western-backed Israeli genocide on Gaza, along with the coordinated and rapidly in...
The Impossible Temporality of Revolution and Cinema in Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Ici et Ailleurs Suja Sawafta & Emma Ben Ayoun May 2025 Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance Introduction Jean-Luc Godard once famously declared that his “soul (was) Palestinian.” This affinity was not the result of some misplaced kinship but...
Port of Dreams, Portals of Displacement: Angela Schanelec’s Marseille and the Narrative Cinema of Exile Arielle Friend May 2025 Feature Articles The film Marseille (Angela Schanelec, 2004) begins in the street. More precisely, in a car, the camera pointed to show exactly the back of the driver’...
The Straight Shooter: Reassessing David Lynch’s The Straight Story Salvador Carrasco May 2025 Feature Articles In its obituary for the sui generis director David Lynch (1946-2025), who recently gave up the ghost, The New York Times barely mentioned The Straight...
The Fluidity of Muxe Identity in El secreto del río Malinalli López Arreguín May 2025 Feature Articles The producer and directors of the Netflix series El secreto del río (The Secret of the River, Alberto Barrera, 2024) have delivered a sensitive and la...
Kiarostami’s Way: The Art of Return Alborz Mahboobkhah May 2025 Feature Articles Abbas Kiarostami was not the first Iranian filmmaker to gain global recognition, but he was the first internationally renowned Iranian auteur. The rea...
Changing the narrative, with Naser Shakhtour Amanda Barbour May 2025 Interviews 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 Austra...
An Interview with Alireza Khatami Gary M. Kramer May 2025 Interviews The slippery, slow-burn drama, The Things You Kill, is an intense psychological thriller set in Turkey and written and directed by American Iranian fi...
What We Lose Without a Moral Compass: An Interview with Bohdan Sláma about Shadow Country and his recent movies Hamed Sarrafi May 2025 Interviews In an era saturated with a seemingly endless stream of films released across festivals, platforms, and regions, it has become increasingly easy – even...
An Interview Miguel Gomes about his short films Shan Tong May 2025 Interviews “Tales in Tales: A Retrospective Glimpse of Miguel Gomes’ Short Films” is a curatorial programme dedicated to the celebrated Portuguese filmmaker ...
An Interview with Florian Pochlatko about his debut How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World Gary M. Kramer May 2025 Interviews 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,...
“In the End, There is No Black Body On the Floor:” An Interview with Anna Muylaert Gerd Gemünden & Silvia Spitta May 2025 Interviews “No final, não há nenhum corpo negro no chão” – thus director Anna Muylaert sums up the thrust behind her latest film, A Melhor Mãe Do Mundo/The Best ...
“If a Lion Could Speak, It Would Tell Wittgenstein to Stop with Human Exceptionalism”: An Interview with Quenton Miller Nikola Radić May 2025 Interviews The credits of Quenton Miller’s Koki, Ciao (2025, 11’), which list a cockatoo as a narrator and co-writer, bear no trace of irony. Centred on the cock...
An Interview with Raoul Peck about Ernest Cole: Lost and Found Nasheed Qamar Faruqi May 2025 Interviews I met Raoul Peck in London when he was in town for the 2024 London Film Festival to promote his latest, searing documentary, Ernest Cole: Lost and Fou...
Abstracted and Emotional Architectures – IFFR 2025 Dirk de Bruyn May 2025 Festival Reports This review considers analogue 16mm films in the Rotterdam International Film Festival; shorter, marginal works experimenting with form; Tiger Award w...
A Long Look at Shorts: Beijing International Short Film Festival 2024 Zifei Wang May 2025 Festival Reports The eighth edition of Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF) rounded off my 2024 cinematic voyage with a fine smorgasbord of moving images....
Not Shy… But a Little Coy, All the Same: A Panoramic View of the 75th Berlinale and 39th Teddies Cerise Howard May 2025 Festival Reports People often ask us if we are a political festival. And yes, while I’d say we are a social festival, politics is in our DNA. We are the only major A-l...
Identity, Displacement and Perspective: The Black Europe Film Festival of Minneapolis/Saint Paul Vanessa Nyarko May 2025 Festival Reports The inaugural Black Europe Film Festival (BEFF) took place in Minneapolis/Saint Paul during the early winter days of Black History Month in America. T...
A Changing of the Guard? Some Thoughts on New German Films at the 75th International Berlin Film Festival Marco Abel May 2025 Festival Reports Once a not-to-be-missed fixture on the calendar of anyone with a keen interest in contemporary German cinema, the Berlinale continued this year with i...
Dreams and Nightmares: The 2025 Berlinale Daniel Fairfax May 2025 Festival Reports A mid-February night in Berlin. The air was icily cold, as temperatures plummeted below minus 10 degrees. The red carpet sprawled out in front of the ...
#VALUE! =SUM –(programming + audience development) + (partnerships + AI) Maths at the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam Tara Judah May 2025 Festival Reports This year, IFFR partnered with Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam to draw a link between the festival’s focus on artists’ moving image work and the Filmmuseum’s...
Yeoh, Michelle Tony Williams May 2025 Great Actors b. 6 August 1962, Ipoh, Perak, Federation of Malaya The Soong Sisters Aspects of Sisterhood in The Heroic Trio Films and The Soong Sisters The con...
Gelovani, Mikheil Tony Williams May 2025 Great Actors b. 6 January 1893, Lechkhumi, Kutais Governorate, Russian Empire d. 21 December 1956, Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union “In the same vein, let us t...
Stepping on the Laugh: Grégoire Halbout’s Hollywood Screwball Comedy Scott Robinson May 2025 Book Reviews Good writing about cinema emerges from the critic’s particular experience of viewing a film that they seek to sustain and preserve, writing so as to e...
More Perspiration than Aspiration: The Last Action Heroes, by Nick de Semlyen Tony McKibbin May 2025 Book Reviews While the cinema of the ‘70s often focused on the ambivalent status of its characters, with anti-heroes common, and outright heroism a sign of naivety...
Phillip Lopate’s Second Affair with Art House Cinema Troy Michael Bordun May 2025 Book Reviews Phillip Lopate is an American author of essays, fiction, and film criticism. He is a former Professor in the Writing Program at Columbia University Sc...
Iron and Steele – The Pit and the Pendulum David Melville May 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing left to see. – Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit ...
Corpse Bride: The Horrible Dr. Hichcock Ian Olney May 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Nowhere is the essence of Barbara Steele’s cult appeal as the “Queen of Horror” clearer than in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (Riccardo Freda, 1962). An o...
Lemmings: Tale 1: Arcadia John Hill April 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Individuals without love for life can be born; others may lose it for a short or long time, perhaps for all the life they have left; and finally . . ...
The Cruelty of Time: Amour Alex Williams April 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film In Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), death is smelt before it is seen. The film opens with a shocking discovery: emergency services breach a sealed Paris...
Cinema of Reflexivity: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Logic of Terror in Haneke’s The White Ribbon Sandra E. Lim March 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Das Weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon, A German Children’s Tale, Michael Haneke, 2009) is set in the fictional village of...
The Honeymoon Killers Martyn Bamber March 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Reporting on the Pesaro Film Festival in Italy, 1970, Dan Georgakas proclaimed: The Pesaro films tended to fall into two easy categories, the typica...
Chinatown Alexia Kannas March 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film In an essay about the many ways Hollywood cinema has imagined California, Dana Polan tries to remember the cartoon that shaped his childhood vision of...
Just Good Friends, or “It’s OK with me”: Robert Altman and The Long Goodbye Adrian Danks March 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Made in the middle of the extraordinary run of eight features Robert Altman completed between 1970 and 1975, The Long Goodbye (1973) is the first of b...
India: Matri Bhumi Darragh O’Donoghue March 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1980, the iconic actress-turned-politician Nargis stood up in the Indian parliament and denounced the films of Satyajit Ray for exploiting poverty ...
Viva l’Italia! Jeremy Carr March 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Although it is rarely ranked among the most acclaimed or influential of Roberto Rossellini’s films, Viva l’Italia! (1961) was a particularly important...
Early Rossellini: Un pilota ritorna Joseph Sgammato March 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Consider the unique case of Roberto Rossellini. Despite his giant reputation as a founder of Italian neorealism, he is still the subject of divided cr...
Overturning the heresy: Joan of Arc at the Stake Grant Bromley March 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film “It’s beautiful to be the daughter of God.” – Joan of Arc, in Joan of Arc at the Stake Picking up where Victor Fleming’s final film, the independent...
Il Generale Della Rovere Jonathan Mackris March 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film It’s worth mentioning, as a place to begin, that Il Generale Della Rovere (Roberto Rossellini, 1959) is based a true story. There was indeed a jailed ...
The Fate of Lee Khan Shea Gallagher February 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film King Hu’s Yingchun ge zhi fengbo (The Fate of Lee Khan, 1973) marks the director’s return to Hong Kong after seven years in Taiwan – a period that yie...
Come Drink with Me Dana Polan February 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film Just about half-way through King Hu’s 1966 Da Zui Xia (Come Drink with Me), the heroine, Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-Pei) has been wounded by bandits bu...
Raining in the Mountain Darragh O’Donoghue February 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film “There is more to this than meets the eye,” observes police officer Lieutenant Chang Cheng (Chen Hui-Lou), one of the slippery protagonists of Kongsha...
Glimpses of Grace: A Dialogue on King Hu’s Dragon Inn Austin Lancaster & Alex Williams February 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film The following article is structured as a dialogue between its authors. One of the main ways that the two of us engage with film is through conversatio...
A Couch in New York Eloise Ross February 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film A Couch in New York (Chantal Akerman, 1996) is most well-known, it seems, for being not very well received. Upon its release in its titular city, Jane...
Rolling Down That Hill: Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer David Heslin February 2025 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Oh, if only you knew how often I have been in love … with no one, with an ideal, with the one I dream of in my sleep.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Ni...
