By Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo. At the heart of changing relationships may be changing environments. I wanted to portray the moment when people’s desires begin to diverge. I hoped audiences would not overlook the real struggles faced by young people on the threshold of independence.”–Jeong Jae-eun There are films that […]
The Red Sea Phenomenon: A Genealogical Erasure of Female Pioneers
By Betty Kaklamanidou. This patriarchal structure operates like a ‘fixer,’ a sophisticated, centuries-old system that protects male supremacy by eliminating the names of women who achieved greatness, leaving behind a male-centric narrative.” This spring semester my two elective courses focus on the history of Greek cinema, specifically the work of […]
Reclaiming Cinema History: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on 1000 Women in Horror (Shudder)
By Ellie Dean. We have very clear socially constructed, stereotypical ideas of what girlhood means, what femme adolescence means, what motherhood means, etcetera, and horror works so well as a forum to explore and deconstruct these cliches because it defamiliarizes them, makes them strange, and at its best transgresses and […]
Replicating Neoliberal Reform: Failed Mothers in John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991) and Baby Boy (2001)
By Indya J. Jackson. Ultimately [through the depiction of failed mothers] Singleton replicates the anti-Black, anti-poor, and misogynistic rhetoric of neoliberal reformists by embedding a definite preference for fathers and the heteropatriarchal family structure within his films.” After Boyz N the Hood (1991) launched John Singleton into rarefied air, he […]
Coming Out of the Soundtrack: Alexandros Voulgaris on They Come Out of Margo
By Yun-hua Chen. It started when I went to a concert by an artist who was quite similar to the one portrayed in the film. The whole experience of watching her on stage was very intense. So I began writing something based on that, and over these 11 years, the […]
Images and Conditions: Mohammad Rasoulof on The Seed of the Sacred Fig
By Yun-hua Chen. All the value of images—particularly those from social networks—is deeply tied to the circumstances in which the films are created. A film like this would have been entirely different had it emerged under different conditions.” —Mohammad Rasoulof A gripping and intensely charged drama, The Seed of the […]
What the 80s Mean in Czechoslovakia: Alexandra Makarova on Perla
By Ali Moosavi. It was clear for us that we wanted to have an observer’s perspective so that it feels like I am invisible and standing with the camera and looking at these people.” –Alexandra Makarova One of the films showing at this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival is Perla by […]
Architects of Their Own Stories – The Cinema Coven: Witches, Witchcraft and Women’s Filmmaking
A Book Review by Dávid Szőke. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas reveals the potential of contemporary filmmaking to challenge conventional cultural narratives about the witch, offering these figures greater space where they are no longer just passive objects of our anxieties but architects of their own stories.” The figure of the witch as […]
Redefining Modernist Acting and Feminist Resistance: Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance
A Book Review by Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo. Author Florence Jacobowitz argues that Huppert’s artistic career represents a form of cultural resistance, using her art to challenge social norms and redefine what it means to be an actress in contemporary modernist cinema.” Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance by Florence Jacobowitz (Wayne […]
The Unmanageable Maid
By Robert K. Lightning. Whether through indifference, innuendo, or caustic commentary, she makes her opinions apparent to her employers and, essentially, subverts any pretense of absolute authority over her. She is effectively unmanageable.” In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in 1973, I recently pulled Donald Bogle’s Toms, […]