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 …
Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake is a difficult film to watch. For 105 minutes, the Iraqi filmmaker’s directorial debut puts us in the middle of Saddam Hussein’s despotic reign and shows us harsh realities that many Western viewers are unfamiliar with. Even with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and economic sanctions …
Hard work should always be enough, and yet we all know it never is. The excellent Shame and Money makes it clear what we lose when that’s not the case. Late in the film, about an ethnic Albanian family’s financial struggles in Kosovo, there’s a street scene in downtown Pristina …
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 …
The ways in which adults make decisions on behalf of children, and how those decisions are, or aren’t, in the child’s best interests are the stuff of life. This wonderful movie begins with questioning what it takes to be an artist, and ends by questioning what it means to be …
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 …
It’s not so much that Jaripeo is therapy – a reductive way to think about documentary, especially when the director is documenting their own experiences – but Jaripeo is maybe the first time some of its participants have ever been asked to think about the things they do. This is, …
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 …
Filipino genre filmmaker Pedring Lopez world premiered his first English-language film, the neo-noir thriller Shadow Transit, at last year’s QCinema International Film Festival. An independent co-production between the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Canada, Shadow Transit centers on a chance encounter between a grieving singer-photographer and a drifting DJ, resulting in …
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 …
Catholic guilt is the monster that constantly rears its ugly head in Little Trouble Girls, a feature debut by Slovenian director Urška Djukić about an introverted choir girl who grapples with a sexual awakening and a renewed identity amidst pervasive conservatism and social pressures. The coming-of-age drama won the FIPRESCI …
Šarūnas Bartas is one of the most prominent Lithuanian directors. Over three decades, the filmmaker has produced films such as Few of Us, The House, Peace to Us in Our Dreams, Frost, and In the Dusk. Those films would premiere at the world’s principal film events, such as the Cannes …
Documentary filmmaking is a tool for encapsulating time. Actually, all films are, but the non-fiction frames a specific portrait of an individual in a particular period. Despite the apparent manipulations, such as camera angles and editing, the documentary features a level of realism that fiction fails to reach. Therefore, we …
The central plot point of The Stranger – a coloniser kills one of the colonised, and there are consequences – lands very differently now that it did when the original novella was published by Albert Camus in occupied France in 1942. For one thing, the world is trying with mixed …
The Costa Rican filmmaker Kim Torres is one of the most exciting emerging voices of Latin American cinema. In her short-film efforts, she presented Atrapaluz at Locarno and Luz Nocturna at Cannes. Yet, she made a splash in the festival circuit with her Solo La Luna Comprenderá (The Moon will Contain Us), a beautiful …
Few countries in the world have invested in documentary filmmaking as much as Spain. In recent years, films like Tardes de Soledad by Albert Serra have impacted the festival circuit with their gut-wrenching observations of bullfighting. Also, there are new names in the Spanish non-fiction community, such as Patricia Franquesa in My Sextortion Diary. …
Annemarie Jacir is a crucial filmmaker to understand modern Palestinian cinema. In 2003, she made history with her short film, Like Twenty Impossibles, the first Arab short selected at the Festival de Cannes, and later earned an Academy Award nomination. In her subsequent efforts, Jacir reached the principal international stages. …
The Romanian director Radu Jude is one of the most prolific filmmakers of our time. A member of the Romanian New Wave, a group of new voices in the mid-2000s, which generated great works from Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, and Alexander Nanau. Since 2020, Jude has released 11 …
The Malaysian/Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang is one of the most prominent figures in slow cinema. This philosophy of filmmaking contradicts the modern postulates of the commercial cinema, where the film features multiple cuts and plenty of scenarios to compose its story. As the name suggests, this form of filmmaking contemplates …