Avalyn Wu draws on Cezanne to discuss Jean-Claude Rousseau’s penetrating and vivid materialist filmmaking.
Do These Images Give Voice?: Machete Gillette…Mama (1989)
Ruairí McCann on Larry Gottheim’s Machete Gilette…Mama, a travelogue marked by ghosts and perceptual vicissitudes.
Archival Surprises: On the Re-Emergence of ‘Nujum an-Nahar’ in Film Historiography
Najrin Islam on Ossama Mohammed’s Syrian satire, Nujum an-Nahar (Stars in Broad Daylight, 1988) and the politics of its new restoration.
Kaleidoscopes of Solidarity: Light Field 2025
Dan Ziegler writes on San Francisco’s Light Field Film Festival 2025.
Amir Naderi: Fragmented Modernities
Alonso Aguilar on the striking abrasions and velocities of Amir Naderi’s international modernist cinema.
Revolutionary Desires: Films of The Afro-Asian Film Festival and the ‘Bandung Spirit’ at IFFR 2025
Cici Peng on the revolutionary dynamics of several films featured at the ‘third worldist’ Afro-Asian Film Festival and screened at IFFR for the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference.
Reading Through Loss: Archival Film Practices at IFFR 2025
Emily Jisoo Bowles on 3 films that screened at this year’s IFFR, which use found footage to interrogate historical, political and representational fissures.
The Expanding Universe: On Standish Lawder’s ‘Raindance’ (1972)
Ruairí McCann on ‘Raindance’, Standish Lawder’s optically printed miracle, a vast universe of light and motion scrambled and remade anew.
Peasants of the Cinema: António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro
Liam Kenny on Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis’s revolutionary cinema of Tràs-os-Montes, its lived-in and dreamlike poetics and their ethos of close communal collaboration.
The 24-Hour Working Girl
Ayanna Dozier writes on ‘Anora’ and its reductive vision of sex work as a client’s fantasy.