By Hamed Soleimanzadeh. By bringing attention to the challenges of the surrounding world, exotic protest cinema encourages audiences to take responsibility against the injustices and inefficiencies.” The concept of political-cultural exoticism in protest cinema refers to the presentation and understanding of ethnic, national, and regional cultures and policies in films […]
Australian Horror Now
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. As a diverse and multicultural country, I would like to see us producing horror that represents the wide range of storytelling styles and lived experiences that come together to make this country what it is.” –Isabel Peppard “It was a difficult decision to make it even using […]
To Love the Uncanny – Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Then and Now
A Book Review by Dávid Szőke. The book’s eleven chapters approach the master’s film from broad, yet intersecting angles, allowing the reading and cinematic audience into the colourful patterns that weave the filmic narrative threads into a magnetically composite unity.” “Scottie, do you believe that someone out of the past, […]
War at a Distance: Aurora’s Sunrise
By James Slaymaker. In its intricate tapestry of storytelling modes and its profound engagement with the ethics of representation, “Aurora’s Sunrise” stands as a cinematic work that dares to confront the complexities of historical memory. It forces us to re-examine the role of cinema in shaping and distorting the past….” […]
Rescuing Girls from the Taliban: Marie Margolius on Ayenda (Future)
By Ali Moosavi. For these girls it was such an intense month of failed attempts, sleepless nights, terrifying moments that at the end was sort of a blur. While they have memories of how they felt in those moments, it was on me to figure out the timeline. I had […]
Scorsese’s Night Moves: After Hours (1985)
By Jeremy Carr. Scorsese’s follow-up to The King of Comedy (1982) can be as stressed as any thriller or even a horror film, or as ostensibly innocuous and banal as a plaster of Paris bagel and cream cheese paperweight.” It starts with a pen that doesn’t work, just as he’s […]
The “Idiot Trier” Redux: The Kingdom Exodus
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Undeniably clunky plotpoint aside – and it is, admittedly, a pretty major one that’s hard to miss – The Kingdom Exodus is otherwise a playful, spooky and at times genuinely moving return.” With the passing of legendary Swedish actor Ernst-Hugo Järegård in 1998, Lars von Trier said […]
Starting from Scratch: Asmae ElMoudir on The Mother of All Lies (Kadib Abyad)
By Yun-hua Chen. For the story that I wanted to tell, there were no pictures and no proofs of what happened. I just started with one picture, and I finished with 500 hours of footage. I wanted to tell the story, but how I tell this story should be different.” […]
In the World of Pre-Code: Geoffrey O’Brien on Arabian Nights of 1934
By William Blick. My novel is not so much talk about these movies as a story that inhabits their world, as if in the mind of a young spectator – an intelligent adolescent, say, old enough to have a growing awareness of the movies’ frequent unreality and still young enough […]
A Commodified Future: Sophie Barthes on The Pod Generation
By Ali Moosavi. When I wrote this film I had no idea [that the advance of AI] would happen so fast…. We have to talk about it and raise the questions; is that the world that we want?” Writer-director Sophie Barthes was born in France but grew up in South […]