Spirits Rebel: On Julius-Amédée Laou’s Cinema of Revenants
by Ruairí McCann In his poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), Aimé Césaire, through the painful, rocky passage back and forth between Africa, Martinique and France, arrives at the following commitment. “And I should say to myself: << And most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of … Continue reading Spirits Rebel: On Julius-Amédée Laou’s Cinema of Revenants
Stream: ‘Gestures’ by Vincent Guilbert
October’s Movie Club stream: GESTURES by Vincent Guilbert Continue reading Stream: ‘Gestures’ by Vincent Guilbert
Celluloid Now, More Than Ever
by Olivia Hunter Willke On my way home from the first program of the all-analog avant-garde film festival organized by the Chicago Film Society, Celluloid Now, I received the call that my grandmother was dying. The next evening, as I sat watching the beautiful 35mm program unfold, my grandmother was read her last rights and I was confronted by the film III. (2022) by Alexandre … Continue reading Celluloid Now, More Than Ever
Looking for Clues: Mary Helena Clark’s First Films
by Sam Warren Miell At a certain point in the career of an artist, early work will begin to be regarded as a repository of clues to understanding what follows—rough drafts of what will be fully integrated in a ‘mature’ period, that is in turn cast as the fruition of a promise latent or only intermittently present in that early work. If this tendency risks … Continue reading Looking for Clues: Mary Helena Clark’s First Films
Run Towards the Screen, or Reality’s Return: An Interview with Koji Enokido on Shinji Somai
Ed McCarry interviews Koji Enokido, a close collaborator of Shinji Somai, prior to the theatrical release of Typhoon Club. Continue reading Run Towards the Screen, or Reality’s Return: An Interview with Koji Enokido on Shinji Somai
Five Films by Ellie Epp
A 2-week streaming program of five films by Ellie Epp, alongside an essay by Sophia Satchell-Baeza. Continue reading Five Films by Ellie Epp
Deciphering Death: An Interview with Kateryna Gornostai
by Sofie Topi The Sarajevo Film Festival has built a tradition of picking up strong upcoming voices from South-East Europe and providing a solid network for promising talents and established film professionals. During a quick peek at this year’s CineLink Co-Production Market (the generous platform for projects in development) my eyes caught the name Kateryna Gornostai, the director of Stop-Zemlia, which won the Crystal Bear … Continue reading Deciphering Death: An Interview with Kateryna Gornostai
Tokyo Melody: An Interview with Elizabeth Lennard
by Nel Dahl A rare 16mm print of Elizabeth Lennard’s Tokyo Melody: A Film About Ryuichi Sakamoto (1984) has been unearthed from the filmmaker’s basement for a sold-out screening at Japan Society’s Japan Cuts and is in the process of restoration. As we learn from Lennard herself, the film’s genesis, production, and resulting resonances were full of surprises for both the filmmaker and subject. How … Continue reading Tokyo Melody: An Interview with Elizabeth Lennard
Dancing Towards Oblivion – The Cinema of Teo Hernández
“I was thinking about the movement of my films that seem to shake in a dream linked to the movements of oblivion: it is an agitated, hallucinated movement, a relentless swing… The shaken film emerges from these bruises: from a confrontation between the filmmaker and oblivion. The theme of my films is oblivion, which is why it is inexpressible.” – Teo Hernández Continue reading Dancing Towards Oblivion – The Cinema of Teo Hernández
Naked as the Silence Between Words: On Maryam Tafakory’s ‘Nazarbazi’
Playing with a film history fraught with codes and tensions, Tafakory presents techniques that both conceal and illuminate, prohibit and point towards the forbidden in the same gesture. It is within this strange tension that the erotic emerges. Continue reading Naked as the Silence Between Words: On Maryam Tafakory’s ‘Nazarbazi’