State of the Festival the editors May 2026 Editorial Dispatching for Cahiers du Cinéma from the 10th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, André Bazin compared being on the Croisette as “being provisionally admitted to convent life.” With its intricate rituals obs...
Festivals ashore: Visual sovereignty and the urgency of Indigenous film festivals Duncan Caillard May 2026 State of the Festival In a lecture at the University of Auckland Film and Media Studies Department on 17 September 2002, Ngāti Apa filmmaker Barry Barclay proposed Indigeno...
Invisible Work: A Conversation about Kids and Festivals with Catherine Bray Michelle Carey May 2026 State of the Festival Being at a film festival can be a strange experience. Take Cannes. As an attendee, you have first access to the year’s biggest films and a chance to s...
Life Lessons and Self-Discoveries: Rethinking Film Criticism Workshops Chloe Lizotte, Savina Petkova & Leonardo Goi May 2026 State of the Festival My journey through criticism began at a workshop. In August 2017, I was accepted into the Locarno Critics Academy, an annual initiative held at the Sw...
Where Past and Present collide: Pordenone’s Silent Film Festival Jay Weissberg in conversation with Leonardo Goi May 2026 State of the Festival A town of around 50,000 sitting somewhere between the Alps and the Adriatic, every October Pordenone becomes a mecca for discerning cinephiles around ...
Film Festivals in 2026: Battlegrounds of a Divided World/Contact Zones of a New World Order Dina Iordanova May 2026 State of the Festival The 76th Berlin IFF: Observations from afar I was not at Berlinale this year. Looking at the list of awards and the reports of the award ceremony, ho...
Of Teddy Bears, Oral Histories and Warm and Welcoming Spaces: A Panoramic Interview with Michael Stütz during the 76th Berlinale Cerise Howard May 2026 State of the Festival February 2026 marked the 40th anniversary of the Berlinale’s venerable queer film prize, the Teddy Award. With this milestone in mind, I was invited b...
A Cinema of Survivances: On Lucrecia Martel’s Nuestra tierra Jens Andermann May 2026 Feature Articles The camera soaring through the air, mimicking the gaze of a bird taking flight or even boarding a satellite orbiting the Earth, in Lisandro Alonso’s E...
Empathic Sound in Film: The Deaf Soundscape of Sound of Metal Gemma King May 2026 Feature Articles An expanded version of this article was originally published in French in the peer-reviewed journal Images Secondes. Film can control not only what...
Going to the Movies in Phnom Penh, circa 1967: Film Exhibition in Cambodia’s Sangkum Era (1955-1970) Tilman Baumgärtel May 2026 Feature Articles Introduction: A Night at the Movies Imagine it's February 1958. You're in Phnom Penh and you want to go to the movies. Which film would you choose? ...
From Paper to Paper: Jean-Luc Godard’s Final Notebooks Arta Barzanji May 2026 Feature Articles I first encountered Jean-Luc Godard’s Scénario notebooks not in a reading room or a book but at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), my eyes...
Outback Noir, Localism, and the Limits of Belonging: Indigenous Presence in The Surfer Greg Dolgopolov May 2026 Feature Articles Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer (2024) is not really a surf film. It is a psychedelic horror that transposes the 1970s Australian “Outback Noir” traditio...
The Talkies Cure: A New Theory of Australian Silent Cinema Grace Brooks May 2026 Feature Articles The Shock of the New In Melbourne 1906, a practically new type of film premiered to Australian audiences: The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, ...
Documentaries Go Vertical: This is Life, a Social-Media Portrait of China Iris Chen May 2026 Feature Articles In China, over half of all internet-users watch vertical dramas: that is an audience of over 576 million people. Sun Hong’s Yānhuǒ Rénjiān (This Is Li...
Waiting in the Dark: Kieślowski and the Time-Image Sean Zou May 2026 Feature Articles 1. Introduction In Krzysztof Kieślowski’s cinema, action is often postponed, suspended, or rendered ethically impossible. Characters wait, for a tra...
Outsiders in the Outback – Australia’s Cinematic Tradition of the Colonial Gothic and the Representation of the Outsider in Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel Tom Boniface-Webb May 2026 Feature Articles Introduction Alison Rudd states in her provocatively titled essay Australian Gothic: The Uncanny and Abject Hauntings of Lost Innocence and Guilt, “F...
An Interview with co-directors Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans Gary M. Kramer May 2026 Interviews The cogent documentary, Who Killed Alex Odeh?, codirected by Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans, investigates the unsolved 1985 assassination of a P...
An Interview with Christoffer Boe Gary M. Kramer May 2026 Interviews The stylish, atmospheric, and engrossing police procedural, Special Unit: The First Murder, cowritten and directed by Christoffer Boe (working under t...
‘Esa inmensa cantidad de grises:’ An Interview with Juan Pablo Sallato Silvia Spitta and Gerd Gemunden May 2026 Interviews Between doing the right thing and the wrong thing there is “an immensity of grey tones” – this is how Chilean director Juan Pablo Sallato describes th...
Yuki Aditya and the Dream of Collective Cinema (1980-2026) Mike Hoolboom May 2026 Interviews Yuki Aditya Husandy is dead. From 2013-2023, he was the director of ARKIPEL International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival in Indonesia. He ...
Corbucci, Sergio Sherry Johnson May 2026 Great Directors b. December 6, 1926, Rome, Italy d. December 1, 1990, Rome, Italy After studying economics at university, which would loan a political nature to his...
Kuz’mina, Elena Tony Williams May 2026 Great Actors b. 17 February 1909, Tbilisi, Georgia, Russian Empire d. 15 October 1979, Moscow From FEKScentric Actress to Bolshevik Heroine Elena Kuz’mina (1909...
Sundance 2026: Watching on the go Botagoz Koilybayeva May 2026 Festival Reports After the COVID-19 pandemic led some major festivals to turn digital, Sundance has continued to unfold as a hybrid event: at once a physical festival ...
A Press Conference Gone Awry: Controversy at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival Marco Abel May 2026 Festival Reports At this year’s Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), the first film I saw – at its Thursday evening press screening – was Gelbe Briefe (Yell...
Meeting the Call for Radical, Queer Joy Within a Festival on the Brink: The 40th Teddy Award at the 76th Berlinale Cerise Howard May 2026 Festival Reports A funny thing has often happened to me on the way to the Berlinale. I’ve attended each of the last three years’ festivals; you’d think I’d know my way...
Where Else to Look but Around: The Making of North Atlantic Cinema at Stockfish 2026 Olivia Popp May 2026 Festival Reports It was Reykjavík’s heaviest snowstorm since last October that initially delayed my arrival to the world’s northernmost capital for the 12th edition of...
A Radical Resurgence from the Rubble: Duncan Reekie’s BOOM! The Exploding Cinema and the New London Underground Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2026 Book Reviews In the suffocating, sanitized corridors of contemporary media, where slick, over-produced corporate content passes for art, the arrival of Duncan Reek...
Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the age of Neorealism by Stephen Gundle Ashish Dwivedi May 2026 Book Reviews Stephen Gundle’s critical undertaking on the establishment of postwar Italian film stardom is more than just biographical: it is cross-disciplinary be...
Reality Strikes: Simon R. Troon’s Cinematic Encounters with Disaster Scott Robinson May 2026 Book Reviews Simon R. Troon’s Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene aims to expand and diversify the disaster genre. It challenges the ...
A Hapless Perfectionist: Akira Kurosawa’s Long Take Tony McKibbin May 2026 Book Reviews In Long Take, Akira Kurosawa says he doesn’t think that films should be seen as having “must-see” points. Instead, “each person has elements that they...
Billy Liar Peter A. Yacavone April 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Film studies has never properly reckoned with film performance. As its scholars are primarily concerned with the cultural symbology and influence of s...
The Girl in the Empty Dress – Julie Christie and Darling David Melville April 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film HE: How do you feel? SHE: Empty. – Dirk Bogarde and Julie Christie, Darling The iconic opening scene of Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965) shows th...
The Sound of Waves Iris Chen April 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Photographs and films cannot show you that the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake was “the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan” nor say outright that ...
Heaven Is Still Far Away Andréas Giannopoulos April 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film “A lot of journalists have asked me why my characters are always roleplaying If somebody wants to be or have something, the fastest way to make it ha...
Lost in a dream: Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s Asako I & II Danica van de Velde April 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film The prologue of Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s Nete mo samete mo (Asako I & II, 2018) is imbued with the adrenaline-inducing intoxication of love at first si...
I Love Thee For Good and Like Nothing Happened Darragh O’Donoghue April 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Archaic and awkward in its phrasing, the English title of Eien ni kimi wo aisu (I Love Thee For Good, Hamaguchi Ryūsuke, 2009) refers to a wedding, an...
Between Stops: Non-Places in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy Tito Ramos Quiling, Jnr. April 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film A woman steps onto an escalator in Sendai Station. She believes she recognises someone on the ascending side – a face from 20 years ago, a friend she ...
“To all those who said we couldn’t do it – get stuffed!”: 27A Stephen Gaunson March 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Esben Storm and Haydn Keenan first crossed paths at University High School in Melbourne in a cohort that also included future luminaries of Australia...
Wings of Desire Danshi Antinoph March 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film German auteur Wim Wenders’ dream-of-Berlin film, Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987), poses a question of existence: “Why am I me, and why ...
The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Alice Yao March 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Wim Wenders’ second feature film opens onto an aerial shot of a football match, largely obscured behind a massive ballooning title card appearing in b...
Everywhere is Nowhere: Wrong Move Rolland Man March 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much ...
Chambre 666: Cinema’s Existential Crisis at Cannes ’82 Wheeler Winston Dixon March 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Prognostication is a tricky business, especially when one works in a technological format that is constantly changing. Chambre 666 (Wim Wenders, 1982)...
The Construction of Images: Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road David Heslin March 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film “For the first time, I see myself as someone who’s gone through a certain time, and that time is my story.” – Bruno Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), Kings o...
Pierre ou, les ambiguïtés Indigo Bailey March 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film So the rule for cultural Europe is to organise the death of the art of living, which still flourishes When it’s time to close the book, I will have n...
It’s Not Me: Portrait Without a Mirror Corey P. Cribb March 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me, 2024), the seventh feature of the French cult director Leos Carax, is arguably the most anomalous film in what can only be...
Boy Meets Girl Martyn Bamber March 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film I. “le look” Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. A tale as old as time, except that writer/director Leos Carax shuffles these familiar sto...
Holy Motors Faith Everard March 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Who were we, when we were who we were back then? Who would we have become if we’d done differently…?” – Kylie Minogue in Holy Motors Nothing ever...
Mauvais Sang Inge Fossen February 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film Alexandre Christophe Dupont is one of the most elusive major figures in contemporary cinema. This is quite fitting, given the slippery, intoxicating e...
Les Amants du Pont Neuf: Paradise Lost and Found Sankeerthna Vedamtam February 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film The “Pont Neuf” (“New Bridge”) in Paris is a standing contradiction, a literal and metaphorical bridge between the city’s Early Modern era and the adv...
Wanda Indigo Bailey February 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels...
Vanishing Point Jeremy Carr February 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film To those who have in some way been affected by his mad dash drive from Denver, Colorado, to San Francisco, California, this man Kowalski is something ...
The Sugarland Express Darragh O’Donoghue February 2026 CTEQ Annotations on Film The first image of The Sugarland Express (1974) shuts down the mythic possibilities of the American open road even more decisively than Steven Spielbe...
