Pedro Lima 
Cinema works as a personal diary for filmmakers. The camera as an instrument substitutes the pen, words shift to images, and the stories build upon a different logic. Similar to the process of writing in a journal, there is a process involved in the act of storytelling. The written story …
In 1979, Iran underwent a severe transformation after the Iranian Revolution. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of the country, fell due to the dissatisfaction of the population, which organized itself politically. The figure of that revolution grew to power, Ayatollah Khomeini, a central individual who established the morality police …
Throughout the more than a hundred and twenty-five years of filmmaking, the film history organized itself into canons and critical retrospectives that analyzed cinema through various prisms. Similar to all of the arts, this canon is white-centered and Anglo-European, excluding the works of people of color, women, and those located …
James Benning is one of the most prominent experimental directors in history. Labeled as a researcher of the American landscapes, his work features a formally rigorous study of the United States and its structures. His interest in the composition of the country is evident in his most well-known films: The …
The Brazilian director Gabe Klinger has built his career entirely in the United States. Based in Chicago, he directed the documentary Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater, Porto, and the short film Bergman’s Ghosts, a complementary work to Bergman Island, the Cannes film by Mia Hansen-Løve. For the first …
In 2023, the Brazilian documentary veteran, Eliza Capai, released her Incompatível com a Vida (Incompatible with Life). Despite being a mix of talking head with diary documentary, it is an utterly personal telling of her experience with the traumatic loss of her baby in her womb. The director tells her …
In 1976, the genius puppeteer Jim Henson released his masterpiece The Muppets Show. Despite early versions of the characters in decades before, such as Kermit the Frog in a short-form production in the 1950s, the TV show popularized Kermit and his gang. Again, Henson crystallized himself in the American popular …
The legendary filmmaker Robert Flaherty made history with his documentary Nanook of the North, a pioneering film, considered the first non-fiction work. Despite the controversies and claims of its stagings, it establishes the medium’s interest in the study of the human organization and the different cultures. A century later, we …
In 2022, the Academy-nominated documentary Filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground) impressed the audiences with a sonic experiment in his 32 Sounds. Mixed as an experiment to watch at the theater and scenes where the sound echoes differently in each soundbar, it illustrates how, underneath the technical experimentation, Green’s films …
The young Canadian director Ben Proudfoot is one of the most prominent names in the documentary short film community. Through his Breakwater Studios, Proudfoot releases two shorts each year, which premiere in major festival venues such as the Tribeca Film Festival or Telluride Film Festival. In 2021, he won his …
In this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a post-screening reaction surprised tons of cinephiles following the festival’s attendees. Despite premiering after a veteran French filmmaker, Dominik Moll, with his Case 137, the most talked-about film of the second day of the festival was Sirât by the French-Spanish director, Oliver Laxe. In …
Even if it sounds ironic, nepotism might be a burden. It is one of the topics of grief shown in Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost. Arguably one of the most popular names in mainstream comedy in the last three decades, Ben Stiller comes from a royal family in comedy. …
In the early 1950s, the legendary French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma popularized a new manner of analyzing cinema. Hence, the politique des auteurs (auteur theory) became their central thesis, in which film criticism analyzed films through the lens of the whole and the filmmaker’s style. Thus, in a subsequent consequence …
Political filmmaking goes beyond documenting political movements and principally records the individuals who make the choices. A classic example of that is Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk, a groundbreaking documentary that immortalized Milk’s work and brutal murder. In this sense, these sub-genres of docs crystallize the life of …
In 2020, due to the pandemic and the lack of releases in theaters, a few films got unusual spotlight. One of them was a black-and-white documentary about a pig. Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda is one of the films from that year that people remember and discuss. NEON released it in the …
The Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason is one of the most fascinating voices in the current European cinema. Known for his 2022 film Godland (Vanskabte land), a project about a young Danish priest traveling to the remote parts of Iceland. It premiered at that year’s Un Certain Regard of the Cannes …
Filmes de Plástico (which translates to plastic films) is a Brazilian production company based in the outskirts of Contagem, in the greater Belo Horizonte, one of Brazil’s largest capitals. The city is primarily a refuge for the working class, where rentals are less expensive than in the capital, which is …
In the history of cinema, the Anglo-Saxon perspective has been the most prominent in mainstream filmmaking. As society seems to include and understand diverse ethnicities, different ethnicities may develop their own viewpoints of reality. Unfortunately, the Palestinian history told by its people took plenty of time to get an opportunity, …
Historically, Brazil has had a complicated relationship between maids and houseowners. The long slavery trade in the country, one of the last to abolish it, spread its evil seeds to the hierarchical association between those who have the power and those who obey. In this sense, the abolition of slavery …
Lucile Hadžihalilović has only four works in her filmography, but each of her new releases draws attention from the audience. Directing her feature debut, Innocence, in 2004, starring Marion Cotillard, the Bosnian filmmaker established a connection with the Toronto Film Festival, where she premiered her subsequent two films: Evolution and Earwig. …