May 6, 2026

Visions du Réel 2026

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Argentina, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of Cuba, Cinema of France, Cinema of Spain, Cinema of Switzerland, Cinema of the UK | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Vacío Luminoso

Visions du Réel, Nyon, continues to grow in stature and size into one of the most significant documentary festivals in the world; its recently concluded 57th edition featured a whopping 164 films from 75 countries. With a strong industry segment, co-production market and curation of special programmes, it is veritably an institution for contemporary documentary practice.

Which means it also flirts with the risk of institutionalization. I haven’t watched enough titles from the festival’s main section — International Feature Film Competition — to make a qualified judgement. But at a cursory glance, the section seems populated by commercially viable titles that embody a dominant tendency in documentary cinema today: human-interest stories featuring common people playing themselves, enacting fictionalized exchanges against the abstract backdrop of hot-button crises such as climate change, neoliberal plunder or geopolitical upheavals.

Like with all big festivals, the juicy, challenging and most rewarding films seem to be found in the sidebars, such as the experimentally oriented Burning Lights Competition. Here are a few of the titles from across the festival’s sidebars that I found most interesting.

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In the winter of 1973, a team of astronauts embarked on an 84-day-long stay aboard Skylab, NASA’s first space station. Not only was this the longest manned spaceflight thus far, the crew was also made of first-time astronauts. Assigned an unprecedented volume of tasks and experiments, they fell behind their schedule. Mission control, with whom they had brief contact over every orbit, urged them to catch up without paying heed to their deteriorating mental and physical conditions. Overworked and cooped up in a poorly designed environment unfit for long-term dwelling, the crew went quiet just before Christmas.

Accounts of what happened during this communications blackout differ significantly. The Case Against Space pursues the theory that the crew went on an organized strike, with the unstated demand that the working hours that apply on earth be applicable in space too. An extremely reduced kammerspiel, Graeme Arnfield’s film largely consists of performers talking to a frontal camera that simulates the radio equipment. These actors re-enact the crew’s experience in the days preceding the strike, their monologues based on transcripts of real communications with mission control, but complemented by creative speculation about what must have likely happened onboard. They describe their absurdly overstuffed to-do lists, their frustrations with faulty equipment and their dwindling faith in the top brass back home.

As the recent euphoria around Artemis II reminds us, space missions have historically been viewed in supra-political terms, as collective human accomplishments. At best, they have been proxies for national and ideological conflicts. The Case Against Space reframes the matter in starkly materialist terms. In Arnfield’s film, the work of astronauts isn’t the expression of human enterprise or techno-nationalist superiority, but concrete labour carried out for demanding bosses on earth. There’s no velocity high enough to escape the class struggle.

The Case Against Space

In 2019, Argentinian filmmaker Ignacio Ceroi bought a used camcorder on eBay and found that it was full of fascinating home and travel movies. Wishing to make a film from this material, Ceroi reached out to the camera’s old owner, an elderly man with a potbelly and an insistent moustache who figures regularly in the videos. This man, named Charles, gave the filmmaker the go-ahead and even shared personal stories that will help explain the footage. Ceroi went to work with this information and produced a film titled What Will Summer Bring (2021), a documentary about a man who went to Cameroon on an accidental adventure, fell in love with a woman there and ended up in the jungles in search of her renegade son. Since the film is entirely narrated by Ceroi on behalf of Charles, it is hard to know how much of all this is fabricated.

As it turns out, all of it was. While the footage and the camcorder were real, Ceroi never really found its owner. The entire story was made up, and there was no person named Charles. Those appalled by this impish piece of media-hacking wouldn’t probably care for Ceroi’s follow-up film titled Don’t Tidy or Clean My Room, I Like It as It Is. Here, Ceroi admits to being anxious all these years about the real owner getting a whiff of his heist. To find closure, he sets out in search of the owner — this time for real — with the help of a professor from Paris and contextual clues from the footage.

It would be revealing too much to say what happens next. But I found the film strangely touching. Whether intended in apology, curiosity or respect, Ceroi’s journey in search of the camera’s owner is a pilgrimage, a reparative attempt to wrest truth from fiction and return it to reality. His first film was the fruit of pure coincidence — the resale of an old camera — but the sequel suggests that even anonymous, arbitrary images can be the catalyst for meaningful relationships. While the former was based on a fake correspondence, the second one strives to create a real one. Through this striving, Don’t Tidy or Clean My Room honours the memory of “Charles”, whose afterlife in recorded images comes to hold personal significance for those who have encountered them.

Don’t Tidy or Clean My Room, I Like It as It Is.

At first sight, Uberto Rapisardi’s Vacío Luminoso is a straightforward making-of documentary about Oliver Laxe’s arthouse hit Sirāt (2025). It details the filmmaker’s intentions, the casting and shooting process, the contribution of actors and technicians, and the craft behind the film’s most memorable — and shocking — scenes. But Rapisardi’s account does something more: it shows how the film was almost not made. Rapisardi intercuts footage from the sets of Sirāt with an interview with Laxe recorded at a moment of crisis during the last days of the shoot. Laxe is evidently dejected by something he doesn’t fully name and has retreated from the sets in frustration. Shot in extreme closeup, Laxe outlines the influence of Sufi thought and practice on his work. He also expresses horror at the flagrant incongruity between the spiritual origin of Sirāt — which is, among other things, a religious parable about ego loss — and the megalomaniacal behaviour that mounting such an international, quasi-super-production instils in him. Rapisardi also interviews actors who express their misgivings about the mismatch between the stated intentions and the methods of the film. In prying open the contradictions at the heart of Sirāt, Vacío Luminoso points to the resistances that lie at the heart of all creative endeavour.

What Lauren Dällenbach’s debut feature Nicole Nicole pries open are the contradictions of Western family relations. Winner of the National Competition section, Dällenbach’s endearing domestic documentary centres on the filmmaker’s grandmother, Alberte, and her maternal aunt, Nicole, who live together in mutual dependence – the former afraid of being alone, the latter neurodivergent and seemingly incapable of striking out on her own. This dependency, although functional, is a ticking bomb since Nicole cannot live forever with her ageing mother. What’s more, Nicole, we learn, has a secret lover, whom she sneaks out to meet without ever being able to bring him home.

To address this, Nicole’s wider family, primarily her elder sister (the filmmaker’s mother), hatches a plan to help her move out. Working with public institutions, they find a way for Nicole to find a job, a new apartment and, most importantly, the courage to tell Alberte that she will be leaving. Part of the challenge for them is in defining Nicole’s unique mental condition: her intellectual metrics are too low for a completely independent life, but too high to be considered autistic so that the state’s disability support system can come into effect.

As a maker of exterior images, however, the filmmaker has no need to label Nicole. With great affection and care, she spends time with her aunt, probing with hopeful thrill into her secret romance and even conspiring to turn her life into one of those softcore photo-comics that she loves reading. At one point, when Nicole breaks down at the thought of her mother’s eventual death, Dällenbach puts her camera down to go embrace her aunt — an acknowledgement of the filmmaker as a human that I have rarely seen in documentaries.

“Dear comrades, do not allow them to make me anything other than what I am, and what I wish to be: a revolutionary fighter.” These are some of the last words of a letter that Michèle Firk left to her friends-in-arms, titled “to be opened in case of”. What this unmentioned case might be was perhaps clear to Firk’s comrades engaged in militant struggles against imperialism in various corners of Latin America. Born in Paris in 1937, Firk began as a film critic at the magazine Positif (a role later memorialized in Luc Moullet’s Les Sièges de l’Alcazar), but her real calling was politics. At 24, as part of the Jeanson network, Firk was a voice for Algerian independence, and her interest would soon expand to international Third World movements.

Firk was acutely aware of the hypocrisies of armchair intellectualism and, unlike many of her peers in France, sought to refashion her life in line with her beliefs. “What is shameful is speaking casually of Vietnam without changing one’s life, being objectively informed from afar without getting involved,” she wrote in her final letter. In the early sixties, she moved to Cuba, where in addition to working the fields and meeting Che Guevara, she was an interpreter at the Tricontinental Conference of 1966. After years of pseudonymously moving across countries in service of the cause, she found herself involved in armed struggle in Guatemala. Implicated in the kidnapping of an US ambassador, Firk allegedly shot herself in her hotel room when the police came knocking.

Swiss helmer Laura Cazador’s rousing cine-portrait of Firk, Tricontinental, Letter to Open in Case Of, takes the words of the letter to heart, presenting the subject on her own terms, without distance, condescension or historical relativization. It helps that Cazador is committed to the same causes as Firk and has a shared affinity for Havana where she works at the EICTV film school. Cazador structures her film wittily, borrowing chapter titles and clips from anti-imperialist Third Cinema works. This is supported by a dense and propulsive voiceover composed of a mix of Firk’s own words and the filmmaker’s second-person account of Firk, creating a sense of complicity between the two across time. Cazador’s Firk is not a girl lost to history, but a model to be emulated, a guiding light shining on the horizon.

Tricontinental, Letter to Open in Case Of

Cuba, specifically the EICTV, also features prominently in another title I was very taken by: Peter Mettler’s While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts (which premiered in Toronto in 2025). Mettler’s seven-part, seven-hour-long diary film is an utterly unique object — part home movie, part travelogue, part visual experiment, part philosophical essay. But this colossal documentary is foremost a record of Mettler’s life over three years, which includes the passing of his aged parents as well as a major health scare for himself. Alternating between time spent with parents and encounters with people during professional trips, the filmmaker weaves a sprawling meditation on human striving, material and spiritual. Weighty considerations on what lies beyond immediate human experience rub shoulders with life as it is lived one day at a time.

Mettler incorporates vast amounts of natural vistas, especially water bodies, while the soundtrack carries his monologues and conversations. This oblique arrangement prompts us into reveries and reflections of our own, but integral to the subject at hand. Internal rhymes and echoes abound — remarks, themes and images from one section are reprised in others in subtle and surprising ways. At once ambitious and unassuming, Mettler’s film doesn’t shy away from overt philosophizing, but also lets the beauty, banality, frailty and absurdity of life trickle through in its quieter passages. I can’t recall a recent film in which every moment, every element becomes such a thorough expression of the filmmaker’s state of mind and life situation. Possibly one of the most vital documentaries of the decade.

 

April 2, 2026

Cinéma du Réel 2026

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Canada, Cinema of France, Cinema of Italy, Cinema of the USA | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |
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There’s little doubt that Cinéma du réel, Paris, continues to offer an expansive, challenging programme (and definition) of documentary cinema, one that is as formally adventurous as it is alert to the iniquities and bloody upheavals of our world. Working through this year’s competition lineup, I was, however, struck by the considerable amount of space the festival has secured for works of an opposite kind, films that seem to take deliberate flight from the tumult of the times and find refuge in a serene, rarefied realm beyond politics and history.

To be sure, the festival is still dominated by urgent, pointedly political work, with special sections dedicated to Palestine, Eco-feminism and “Artists and the peoples’ struggle”. Even within the competition, titles such as With Love and Rage (which revisits a feminist organization’s picketing of the Pentagon in 1980), El León (an elliptical commemoration of those killed by the military in Colombia in the 1980s and 90s) and Narrative (centring on a workshop regrouping the family members of those killed in the pro-democracy protests in Thailand in 2010) grapple directly with specific political moments.

Yet, for all the confrontation Cinéma du réel enables with the sordid state of things, this year’s competition section also opens up a vast space for calm and contemplation, for beauty beyond all the bloodshed.

Perhaps no other work embodies this transition better than Ben Russell’s Another Earth. This 13-minute film begins in a kind of tautology: a closeup of a mouth uttering a short text about humanity’s long history of living underground, an experience forever lost after the industrial age. As the actor repeats the text with minor hiccups, the film incrementally layers new visual information over her face — colour-saturated shots of caves, a child playing by the lake, fingers doomscrolling through harrowing war news and, finally, glimpses of protests — suggesting that, underneath layers of civilizational debris, may lurk primal instincts of the Platonic cave. “Time is not what it is, but how it is felt”, go the final words of the looping text. The idyll of the child by the lake indeed evokes a sense of time starkly different from the accelerated sensorial assault that the omniscience of contemporary life enables. Is it possible, desirable to return to subterranean bliss?

A response may be suggested by some of the other titles in competition: meditative landscape films, pastoral portraits, vehemently non-didactic essays and durational experiments that have the salutary effect of calming the viewer’s nerves.

Among the more rewarding entries is Sharon Lockhart’s Windward, set on the scarcely populated Fogo Island, located near the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The film is something of an extension, a chromatic inversion of Lockhart’s mid-length Eventide (2022). Where that single-shot featurette took place under the twilight skies, its actor-participants piercing the dark frame with their torchlights, this new work unfolds entirely in daylight. Comprising twelve static shots of about five minutes each, the film also echoes Pine Flat (2006) in that it centres on children or young adults engaged in leisurely, summertime activities outdoors.

In extremely long, wide shots that turns them into little more than mobile pixels, we watch the youngers take a swim, chase each other, fly kites, walk on stilts or just sit quietly on the rocky coasts of the island. The landscape is breathtaking, particularly in Lockhart’s painterly composition of them, but it’s the human elements that invigorate it. Our gaze is locked on the children’s activity, which is both a vehicle of chaos within a stately pictorial order and a dynamic formal element that activates the frame. This is most spectacularly felt in a shot where a girl feeds a flock of seagulls on a rock. The birds lunge at the fish that the young woman tosses one by one, and their moving mass keeps shifting the visual centre of the shot to thrilling effect.

But the children in the film are, above all, a source of emotional warmth. Very simply, the sight of boys and girls, frequently dressed in white, enjoying themselves in sunny nature is deeply gratifying. As they say, not a phone in sight, just people living in the moment… As always with this filmmaker, there is a touch of theatre beneath the apparent spontaneity of action. Lockhart often captures the children’s actions midway, but ends the shots just after they have exited the frame — in a manner that recalls the trains in James Benning’s RR (2007). Despite the overwhelming presence of nature, man, quite literally, becomes the measure of things in Windward.

Rebecca Digne’s Barefoot Maria operates in an adjacent thematic territory, but limits its scope to one young girl. Eight-year-old Maria leads an enchanted childhood in the Tuscan countryside, with cats, dogs, geese and horses for playmates, in a lovely country house that is marked for eviction by its new owners. Digne pays remarkable attention to Maria’s leisure-time behaviour (and leisure is all that she seems to have), shaping the material to give us the impression that she lives alone in this heavenly demesne. She also lends Maria a Super-8 camera, and the girl regularly sends back tapes that she has filmed of her own life. What emerges from this intergenerational correspondence is a charming, almost timeless picture of a childhood at once insular and privileged, untouched by the anxieties and demands of modern life. Maria grapples with boredom, invents ingenious ways to pass time and manages to achieve perfect harmony with her environment just as it is taken away from her.

The horrors of the world are scarcely to be seen in Matter of Britain too. Peter Treherne’s enigmatic, rapturously shot debut feature unfolds in an unnamed, lushly wooded village in the south of England. Vignettes from everyday life in the village – farming, deer hunting, sheep rearing, churchgoing, cattle trading — are interspersed with fictional passages in which the villagers enact episodes from Arthurian legend, particularly the Knights’ quest for the Holy Grail, in full costume. Realized in a high-theatrical style, and bathed in Caravaggian darkness, these passages monumentalize ordinary lives in a manner that recalls Roberto Minervini’s use of rural Southerners in The Damned (2024). Treherne’s film doesn’t expound on this strange mix of fantasy and ethnographic document, although an early radio soundbite about climate change-induced agrarian crisis hints at a possible connection to the Holy Grail’s capacity to restore barren lands. Does the Quest represent a living myth for the villagers, a collective, subconscious yearning? Are they looking for some kind of deliverance? Matter of Britain doesn’t explain.

Several titles in the competition take this refusal of discursivity to its furthest limits, almost to the point of unintelligibility — a tendency that has become increasingly common in experimental documentary, both in the fly-on-the-wall and the essay traditions. Presented without context or comment, large parts of these ‘slow’, solemn films come across like unprocessed inventories of found images that ask the viewers to make what they will of them.

That’s perhaps why I found Juliette Achard’s Labore Nobile appealing in its openness, sincerity and capacity for commitment. The film is a fairly dense, focused treatise on the evolution of labour and industry as seen through the changing fortunes of Saint-Nazaire, a port town in Northern France. The film’s lucid voiceover is conceived as a sort of letter to a future where work has ceased to have the meaning it has always had in human history, and the narrative is completed by interviews with people working in different sectors of Saint-Nazaire.

While the filmmaker takes us through the economic history of the town — dominated by heavy industries such as ship building and aircraft assembly that have proven to be increasingly indifferent to worker rights and public health — she also weaves in short, poetic monologues performed by its blue-collar residents. Labore Nobile (which translates to “Ennobling through work”, not free of the ominous echoes of Arbeit macht frei) makes many small inventions within the framework of a classic essay film. Despite specific subject matter and a limited geography of focus, Achard manages to undertake considerable formal and thematic digressions, pushing a traditional form from within in the vein of Harun Farocki. Her film amply demonstrates Luc Moullet’s maxim that “thirty square kilometres or a little more is enough to know the whole world, to have all its keys.”

 

March 25, 2026

Sketchy, Incomplete, and Doubtful: An Interview with R. Gowtham

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[The following interview was conducted for the Forum section of the Berlinale, where the filmmaker’s debut feature Members of the Problematic Family had its world premiere in February 2026.]

 

Berlinale Forum: Welcome, Gowtham. I’m extremely honoured to have your film in our lineup. I’d like to start by asking you to kindly describe your journey to becoming a filmmaker.

R. Gowtham: Thank you. It took quite a long time, actually. I was preparing for competitive exams for the civil services for a while. I had plenty of time to watch movies and read literature. People at home were hoping to see me as a government official, but I wasn’t doing that. I was totally into stuff like Andrei Rublev (1966), 8½ (1963), the film magazine ‘Sight and Sound’, and the website ‘They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?’. I was downloading things through torrents. I didn’t pass the exams, not even the preliminaries. But the exposure to literature and movies helped. I went on to study journalism and made some short documentaries. After that, I made this film. I had multiple other jobs before becoming a filmmaker.

Since you didn’t have connections to film schools or the industry, what did it take for you to get together all the people and equipment to start this project?

The people who made this film, we’re a bunch of talkative guys. We’d always talk about making things, but never actually do anything about it. So much so that people would ridicule us for our empty talk. We could’ve spent our entire lifetime in a tea shop talking. But then, Pebbles (2021, directed by P.S. Vinothraj) happened, and its international success gave us the confidence that we could go out and make something. I convinced my childhood friend to put in the money. It was more difficult than convincing a regular producer, but it happened. We didn’t have any hands-on experience; we just went ahead and shot.

But you’re working with actors, not with non-professionals, right?

It’s a mix. Ajith Kumar, who plays Prabha, is from the theatre. So is Karuththadayan, who plays Sellam (and the lead in Pebbles). A couple of them are movie actors, a few others non-professionals. I didn’t give instructions to the actors; it was rather an art of negation. ‘Don’t do this’, ‘I don’t want this’… I didn’t go for too many takes either. One or two were enough for me. You can’t push non-professionals too much; they would be unnerved and would refuse to perform. So we used to pre-roll before the actual action. That’s how we were able to grab certain emotions.

How many days did you shoot altogether?

We shot for 27 days, but the bulk of it was done in 8 to 10 days. Other days were for preparation. There was another section that we shot, a kind of genesis that tells the backstory, but we didn’t include it in the movie.

What about the script and its relation to the preparations? What did you give the actors and what does the script look like with respect to the structure of the film?

RG: It was conceptualised as a four-part work, and we didn’t change anything. This script was decent, I would say, but not conventional. There’s no save-the-cat template or things like that. I thought, let’s treat it as a kind of novella. A single line was equivalent to a shot. It wasn’t formatted like a screenplay. I wasn’t too worried. I had Andrei Tarkovsky’s book ‘Sculpting in Time’ (1985) next to me; I was re-reading passages from it. We were praying. We thought this would be like a cinematic prayer and let the movie find its way.

 

[Read the full interview here]

 

March 18, 2026

In the Belly of the Beast

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Cinema of Bangladesh, Cinema of Germany | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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A film about a politician, a novel about a filmmaker. Two works that dissect the nature of power with precision and nuance: Bangladeshi filmmaker Rezwan Shahriar Sumit’s second feature, Master (2026), winner of the Big Screen Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Daniel Kehlmann’s 2023 German novel Lichtspiel (also available in English translation as The Director), longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.

Master centres on Jahir (Nasir Uddin Khan), a high-school history teacher who runs for the office of the Chairman in Mohangunj, rural Bangladesh. An idealist loved by one and all, Jahir campaigns for the protection of the forests and improvement of living conditions in Mohangunj. His idealism is matched by political acumen, on ample display when, right after winning the election, Jahir visits the rival candidate in a spectacular gesture of bridge-building.

As Chairman, Jahir sets about solving local problems while managing to keep the opportunistic designs of his businessman friends at bay. But soon, the UNO (Upazila Nirbahi Officer, played by Badhon) of his sub-district, a bureaucrat adjacent to Jahir in power and responsible for land acquisition in the area, proposes a plan for the development of a 5-star hotel in Mohangunj. The project, she says, would not only boost tourism, but will also protect the pristine forests that Jahir has been campaigning for. Only hurdle: it would require the clearance of an illegal slum in Mohanjung, whose population forms Jahir’s core electorate.

Jahir feels beholden to the UNO, who, in addition to supporting his campaign promises, also helps with the arrest of a hired thug threatening his life. What the UNO expects from him, in return, is nothing more than inaction, to keep his underlings in check while the slum is cleared by authorities. With great finesse and good faith, Master charts the gradual corruption of Jahir’s ideals. Jahir doesn’t become so much a terrible person drunk on power as someone who convinces himself that what he does is indeed what he wants to do.

Sumit’s nuanced saga of moral loss finds resonance in Kehlmann’s riveting novel. Mixing concrete biographical details with invention and speculation, Lichtspiel recounts the life of renowned German filmmaker Georg Wilhelm Pabst, known at home as “the Red Pabst” for his left-leaning films from the Weimar era such as the Greta Garbo starrer The Joyless Street (1925) and the controversial Brecht adaptation The Threepenny Opera (1931).

Lichtspiel begins in Hollywood in the 1930s, where Pabst’s career has prematurely ended following a box-office disaster. Confused about his future, the director sets out to Austria, with his wife Trude and son Jakob, to meet his bedridden mother, but finds himself stranded in the country after war breaks out. Here, the Pabsts lead a sorry existence under the yoke of Jerzabek, the coarse caretaker their country house who now calls the shots, having become a minor party member after the annexation of Austria. Lifeline arrives in the form of Kuno Krämer, a mid-level functionary responsible for bringing Pabst back into the German movie industry. Following Krämer’s ‘invitation’, Pabst visits Goebbels in Berlin, and it’s not long before he is directing an imposed, albeit apolitical, film project in Munich.

Paracelsus (1943, G.W. Pabst)

Pabst encounters Nazi power at various levels of the society, in various forms of sophistication and at various degrees of remove from the political centre: in the naked cruelty of the working-class Jerzabek, the slimy, white-collar persuasion of Kuno Krämer, the dangerous vanity of Leni Riefenstahl, whom Pabst is assigned to help out with Tiefland (1954), and of course, Goebbels himself. Kehlmann fleshes out these characters with a great deal of wit and humour, never letting us forget that they all relish their power to send their interlocutor to the camps at the snap of a finger.

Kehlmann bestows the narrative with such unrelenting inner necessity that Pabst’s journey into the heart of darkness feels inevitable, that it becomes hard to determine just at what point the director loses his moral bearings. Why did Pabst agree to make films in the Third Reich? Did he really have a choice? After all, his decisions were all made under duress, under the real threat of arrest and deportation. Pabst is defined not so much by his actions as his continuous accommodation to radically altered circumstances.

Throughout his time in the Reich, Pabst holds onto the belief that this nightmare will blow over and that normal life will resume. But it doesn’t perhaps matter what Pabst believed in; that he participated in the rituals of the fascist machinery, that his arm involuntarily went up in response to Nazi salutes, that his lips uttered the accompanying words, even though he never subscribed to any of this sham, is damning enough. What Pabst undergoes during his years in Germany isn’t just an inner exile – a retreat into an unsullied sanctum sanctorum beyond reproach – but a numbing of his moral consciousness, the formation of a self-protective belief that the iniquities around him would be the same even without his participation.

With stunning clarity, Lichtspiel reveals that civilization yields to barbarism precisely because it is civilization. A wryly funny chapter finds a captive English writer named Rupert Wooster (a stand-in for P.G. Wodehouse, who made broadcasts from Berlin radio in exchange for limited freedom as a German detainee) at the gala premiere of Pabst’s Paracelsus (1943) in Salzburg. When Krämer tells the author that they are on the same side, Wooster is outraged. He stands up in protest, preparing to exit the theatre, but takes his seat again because leaving would inconvenience others seated in the row.

Kehlmann lays bare people’s capacity not just for forgetting, but active self-deception when faced with moral quandaries. In his novel, Pabst spends the last phase of his life ruing a lost masterpiece in The Molander Case (1945), whose negatives he loses on a train to Vienna. Adapted from what Pabst judges to be a terrible novel by regime darling Alfred Karrasch, The Molander Case represents for him a difference in degree, an artistic elevation of dubious source material that sets him philosophically apart and rescues him from collaboration. That it remained lost perhaps only reinforced this self-mythology.

Master (2026)

Unlike the filmmaker Pabst, Jahir in Master is in the very business of compromise, saddled as he is with the hard task of finding common ground between competing aspirations and ideals. Sumit’s film remarkably lays out the bargains and quid pro quos involved in day-to-day political decision-making, the ethical tussles involved in solving the most minor of squabbles. Although a tough and cynical work, it doesn’t take the easy way out by demonizing its protagonist. Rather, it unveils his corruption as the very nature of the game.

Master does an equally commendable job of portraying the domestic life of its protagonist, who is incrementally lost to the family as he becomes a public figure. Jahir’s wife Jharna (Zakia Bari Mamo) acts as his conscience keeper, just as Trude does with Pabst, witnessing him succumbing to seemingly harmless enticements of power. After Jahir wins the election, their modest home turns into a veritable public space, with Jharna obliged to ply tea and snacks to everyone who drops by. Trude, on the other hand, experiences her own version of self-censorship when she unwillingly takes part in a Nazi women’s reading club, an echo chamber in which the faintest expression of dissident taste can trigger catastrophic reactions. Over the years, she loses her wits watching Pabst become increasingly self-absorbed to the point of narcissism, preoccupied with nothing more than the completion of his films.

Sumit’s film adopts a pared-back, realist style, observing its characters from up close, but maintaining a degree of objectivity. Lichtspiel, in contrast, presents a highly subjective narrative that unfolds entirely through the perspectives of half-a-dozen characters. There is no authorial comment or editorialization to be found here, very little ambience-setting flab; Kehlmann steps out of the characters’ heads only to describe concrete facts that the characters themselves can perceive. If Master offers a fine-grained character study of novelistic heft, Kehlmann’s novel registers as eminently cinematic, brimming as it does with sharply observed actions and gestures that reveal character and power relations: hands placed on shoulders and elbows, expressing love or threat, glances returned and avoided, telling silences and repetitions in speech, Pabst constantly rubbing his temples, Riefenstahl the actress repeating her movements with robotic precision in every take… It’s a work that cries out for a screen adaptation.

 

January 1, 2026

Favourite Films of 2025

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2025 was disappointing, even frustrating in both personal and historical terms. At the beginning of the year, I had set myself simple goals, all of which I failed at. My reading plummeted to almost zero, as did my public writing. I had hoped to add more entries to the Curator’s Corner column, but it was not to be. A few projects and opportunities that I was looking forward to didn’t materialize. Not to mention a host of health issues and family emergencies.

The political optimism of 2024 proved not just short lived, but derisory given the impunity with which the lunatics in power and their rabid supporters continued to destroy everything decent, human and life-sustaining. In India, state and market censorship alike have reached absurd levels, awards are now so compromised as to make satirists twiddle their thumbs, festivals are pushed to the brink of dysfunction by a philistine information ministry, naked propaganda seems to be the only way to box-office salvation, critics have been harassed by industry insiders and barbaric hordes on social media for precisely doing their job, celebrities continue to toe the line or silence themselves out of a justified fear of reprisal. All this, just in the domain of cinema.

The only respite for me came in the form of encounters with interesting, reasonable and committed people, especially at the Jakarta Film Week and International Film Festival Kerala, both of which I attended for the first time. The passion and the international camaraderie that I witnessed were welcome assurances that, no matter its immediate currency, bigotry and parochialism will forever be uncool.

In more solitary undertakings, I had the chance to explore parts of Indian documentary history I was unfamiliar with. Among these, I strongly recommend Chalam Bennurkar’s Children of Mini-Japan (1990), Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar’s YCP 1997 (1997), David MacDougall’s Doon School Quintet (2000-04), Deepa Dhanraj’s Invoking Justice (2011) and especially R.V. Ramani’s My Camera and Tsunami (2011).

Besides acclaimed and popular films from Kerala made after 2010, I also caught up on a significant swathe of Malayalam cinema from the 80s and the 90s. This included two canonical masterpieces in Perumthachan (1991) and Ponthan Mada (1994) in addition to numerous remarkable features emerging from a short, bountiful period of heightened creativity: Irakal (1985), Deshadanakkili Karayarilla (1986), Thaniyavarthanam (1987), Amrutham Gamaya (1987), Ponmuttayidunna Tharavu (1988), Dasharatham (1989), Varavelpu (1989), Sandhesam (1991), Bharatham (1991) and Njan Gandharvan (1991), to name but a few. Farewell Sreenivasan, the recently departed actor-director-screenwriter behind many of these titles.

As always, the following list is based on an arbitrary eligibility criterion: films that had a world premiere in 2025.

 

1. Happiness (Firat Yücel, Turkey/Netherlands)

Fatigued and sleep deprived, a Turkish filmmaker in Amsterdam tries to find ways to reduce his excessive screen usage and catch some shuteye. But the horrors of the world, beamed onto digital screens in real time, know no respite. Firat Yücel’s extraordinary desktop essay departs from this premise in all directions, only to return to it with new insights and dizzyingly far-reaching associations. Tracing the agonized drifts of a sensitive, hyperconnected mind, Happiness lays bare a highly contemporary double bind: if the screens we are hooked to keep us away from living in the real world, it is these very screens that helps us make sense of our lived experiences. The filmmaker’s investigation into his bodily malaise leads him to unpack its historical conditions: the colonial legacy that underpins the prosperity of his host country, its flourishing happiness industry and its dubious foreign policies. Yücel’s inward observation takes him ever outward; his exasperation at the immediate present, into the distant past. Rigorous as it is witty and playful, Happiness perfectly embodies the agitations of the modern liberal consciousness, present everywhere and nowhere at once, all too aware of the immensity of human misery as well as its own impotence in the face of it. [World Premiere: Visions du Réel]

 

2. Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs, USA)

Ira Sachs’ eminently cinematic re-creation of a tape-recorded conversation, from December 1974, between writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall) and photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) is an object lesson in the creative possibilities of redundancy, a vital illustration of how the film medium can actualize itself, not by shunning the written word but, on the contrary, by faithfully embracing it. Over 76 condensed minutes, Hujar recollects a day from his life in New York City in rigorous detail — a fascinating mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary, recalling The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975) — to an attentive, sympathetic Rosenkratz amid the changing light of his apartment. As Hujar’s endless stream of speech washes over us to the point of exhaustion, our focus turns from its specific content to the process by which memory becomes material. Drawing from transcripts of the conversation — and not Rosenkrantz’s original recording, now lost —Whishaw’s incredibly textured performance reveals the task of imaginative translation that underlies all actorly work. For all its thrilling verbosity, Sachs’s film is a tribute to the art of listening, to this intimate space of friendship in which the hierarchy between the memorable and the mundane ceases to exist. [WP: Sundance Film Festival]

 

3. Manal Issa, 2024 (Elisabeth Subrin, Lebanon/USA)

Where Elisabeth Subrin’s powerful Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022) — based on a televised interview of the eponymous French actress — created doubles, Manal Issa, 2024 proposes a negation. Here, Subrin asks the Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa, one of the three participants of the former film, the same questions that Schneider was posed in the original interview. Vocal about her stances, Issa talks about the poverty of meaningful roles offered to Arab-origin actresses, the limitations of the capitalist production model, the choice of moving back to Lebanon during crisis and the importance of speaking up against political iniquity. She adds that she feels professionally isolated for voicing her opinions, for calling out Israel’s bombing of Gaza. While we listen to her responses, Issa herself remains offscreen, her refusal to sustain her career by censoring herself echoed by Subrin’s refusal to show her. “If I can’t be true to myself, there is no point showing myself,” the actress concludes. Like Schneider’s palpable reluctance, Issa’s self-negation stems from an outlook that privileges life over films, reality over fiction. Six hours after the shoot, an end card notes, “Israeli airstrikes escalated throughout Lebanon, killing over 500 people in one day.” [WP: Cinéma du Réel]

 

4. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

All appeal is sexual, political appeal especially so. Among other things, Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild, action-filled, hysterically funny ride through a caricatural America torn between white supremacists and antifa insurgents — each more paranoid than the other about imagined contaminations — lays bare the erotic drive animating ideological cohesion (and ideological sabotage). Leonardo DiCaprio’s failed revolutionary, mentally arrested in the 1970s, and Sean Penn’s boyish, waif-like sergeant are twisted projections of each other’s fears. Whether the film is reactionary, apolitical or progressive is beside the point. This is a work by an artist who contemplates a polarized society, its excesses and its mess-ups with sage amusement, or a stoner’s delight, without giving in to cynicism or misanthropy. DiCaprio delivers the performance of the year in a movie filled with performances of the year, each one on a different register, all of it nevertheless brought into perfect harmony by dint of sheer directorial orchestration. One Battle After Another stands tall in a movie culture dominated by safe, anaemic films calculated to say the right things and avoid broaching the wrong things. It made me wish we had more filmmakers who actually felt something between their legs. [WP: international commercial release]

 

5. Beyond the Mast (Mohammad Nuruzzaman, Bangladesh)

In this rapturous slice-of-life portrait, a small commercial boat with an all-male crew goes from port to port along a river in Bangladesh selling oil. When the crew’s kindly cook takes a stowaway child under his aegis, he runs afoul of the boat’s ill-tempered, scheming helmsman, covetous of the captain’s job. Despite a good deal of on-board intrigue, there is very little drama, strictly speaking, in Mohammad Nuruzzaman’s artisanal second feature, which doesn’t even seek to create lyrical moments in the vein of, say, Satyajit Ray. Yet, this is a highly poetic work, the poetry arising primarily from the filmmaker’s intent, non-judgmental way of looking at a small, enclosed world, its rituals, its diverse people and their human foibles: touches of jealousy, compassion, malevolence, ambition and camaraderie; a parade of life simply passing by. The form is meditative yet brisk — with very elegant camera choreography — and remains indifferent to fashionable arthouse formulas, stylistic shorthand or established screenplay structures. Even the film’s casual neo-realism doesn’t aim at traditional qualities of empathy and psychological description; it rather inspires Ozu-like contemplation. Just a lovingly crafted film. [WP: Moscow International Film Festival]

 

6. Roohrangi (Tusharr Madhavv, India/Netherlands)

With a camera in hand, a gay filmmaker from South Asia walks around in a park in Amsterdam known as a cruising hotspot. What he finds in this place of fleeting encounters is a kind of time warp, the apparent permanence of its majestic trees, their gnarled roots and variegated textures reminding him of his own roots back in Lucknow, India. They recall, in particular, his grandfather’s discoloured skin, caused by leukoderma, which made him look like a white man — a dual identity paralleling the filmmaker’s own. Echoing this image, Roohrangi starts to lose its colours too, shedding its skin to reveal various layers of memory, history and fantasy underlying a leisurely stroll, as different geographies and eras interpenetrate one another. Like in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the forest in Roohrangi is a liminal, essentially queer space that enables communion with other lives, other worlds — a glimpse into different possibilities of being. With curiosity and formal openness, Tusharr Madhavv mixes stylized, essayistic passages with casual interviews with the park’s denizens. The result is an evocative, visually striking work, at once experimental and accessible, that achieves the right balance of discursivity, mystery and invention. [WP: Ann Arbor Film Festival]

 

7. Past Is Present (Shaheen Dill-Riaz, Germany/Bangladesh)

In 2007, Berlin-based Bangladeshi documentarian Shaheen Dill-Riaz found himself in the midst of a family scandal: while studying abroad, his sister Mitul had secretly married her cousin to the great chagrin of her parents. As this taboo union began to tear the family apart, Dill-Riaz decided to mediate between Mitul in Australia, his elder brother Amirul in the USA and his heartbroken parents back home in Dhaka. In Past Is Present, Dill-Riaz turns his camera onto himself and his dear ones, producing a sweeping domestic saga shot over fourteen years and across four continents. Tracing his parents’ journey from rural Bangladesh to Dhaka, and their three children’s subsequent drift to far-flung corners of the globe, the filmmaker examines the complex personal fallout of voluntary migration, presented here in all its liberating and melancholic dimensions. Dill-Riaz seamlessly interweaves moments of torrid drama with passages of mundane poetry, his handheld camera adopting a transparent, unassuming style. The film’s international narrative produces a startling contrast of textures and lifestyles, but also crystallizes the profound continuities in emotional and moral values across cultures. A touching study in the tyranny of distance, Past Is Present actualizes the immortal struggle between the home and the world. [WP: International Film Festival Rotterdam]

 

8. Obscure Night – Ain’t I a Child? (Sylvain George, France)

The concluding chapter of Sylvain George’s trilogy on illegal immigration is an extraordinary object of close, unflinching observation. The film follows three Tunisian teenagers who take temporary refuge in Paris after having been shuttled by immigration authorities across various cities in Western Europe. With remarkable intimacy and equanimity, George’s camera films the gang at slightly below the eye-level as they wander the roads of night-time Paris, huddle around fire, get into nasty fights with their Algerian counterparts, listen to street music or make the occasional phone call back home. An indifferent Eiffel Tower glitters perpetually in the background as the boys find themselves prisoners under an open sky. Shot in stark monochrome with eye-popping passages of abstraction, George’s film lends a monumental weight to images and lives we would rather not see. As a white artist making films on vulnerable sans papiers, George is bound to ruffle some feathers. But his film demonstrates that, sometimes, you need to strain certain ethical boundaries to arrive at newer forms of looking and understanding. Neither incriminating its subjects nor making any apology for them, Obscure Night – “Ain’t I a Child?” reveals the herculean difficulty of creating a truly humanist work. [WP: Visions du Réel]

 

9. May the Soil Be Everywhere (Yehui Zhao, China/USA)

Yehui Zhao’s winsome debut feature begins as a personal documentary about the filmmaker’s search for her roots, but it gradually blooms into a sprawling examination of Chinese society and its evolving relationship to the land across modes of production. In her quest to unearth her family tree, the filmmaker finds herself peeling back layers upon layers of violent history — an excavation that takes her back to the soil, to a primordial ecology: caves that have now become sand mines, dogs that were once wolves, high-speed rail that now cut through unmarked graves. May the Soil Be Everywhere offers a rare and unusual glimpse into China’s pre-revolutionary past that takes us across vastly different terrains, time periods, generations: we learn of landlords who, during the revolution, became persecuted cave dwellers who then turned into Stakhanovite foot soldiers of Mao and are now digital filmmakers in a globalized world. The film’s direct and unaffected voiceover enables the overdone format of the personal documentary to break loose into a free-form essay featuring humorous animation and re-enacted tableaux. If the filmmaker’s attachment to familial lineage feels a little excessive, it undeniably carries a subversive force within post-revolutionary Chinese society. [WP: True/False Film Fest]

 

10. Admission (Quentin Hsu, Taiwan)

Panicked by the rejection of their six-year-old ward at an elite boarding school, an affluent tiger couple convenes an emergency meeting with their “fixer” and one of the school’s board members at a resort. Emerging from their negotiations and blame games is a stark portrait of a childhood labouring under someone else’s dreams. Quentin Hsu’s razor-sharp debut is a formalist kammerspiel that is Mungiu/Farhadi-like in its dissection of the moral corruption of the Chinese middle-class. But the approach to the material is entirely anti-naturalistic, pointedly theatrical. The film makes phenomenal use of its 4:3 aspect ratio and off-screen space, with the masquerade and subterfuge of the dramatic situation reflected in actors constantly gliding in and out of the frame, their bodies now eclipsed by the décor, now irrupting into the shot. The frame is constantly energized and de-energized by these microscopically choreographed movements in a way that recalls the Zürcher brothers. The actors are little more than props in the director’s precise, Kubrick-like design, but it’s bracing to witness a work that articulates its ideas through brute mise en scène, especially for a subject that would have called for a more psycho-realist treatment. [WP: Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival]

 

Special Mention: Living the Land (Huo Meng, China)

 

Favourite Films of

2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019

2015 • 2014 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011 • 2010 • 2009

 

December 11, 2025

Silence (2025)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Spain, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Glancing back at life during the Covid-19 outbreak, the atmosphere of dread that reigned – the pervasive fear of infection, suspicion of the other, the heightened awareness of the fragility of civilization – feels a little quaint and remote. The swift response of modern medicine in curbing the pandemic has made a cataclysmic past seem somewhat abstract, even if the ravages of the virus were anything but.

Spanning three eras, writer-director Eduardo Casanova’s sprightly tragicomedy Silence contemplates not one but two epidemics from the vantage point of the present. The first act, set in a gothic mansion in the 14th century, centres on a family of vampires grappling with an existential threat: with the bubonic plague raging, there are fewer healthy people left to feed on. Worse, one of them, Veronica (Ana Polvorosa), has fallen in love with a human, to the great dismay of her orthodox sisters. Seeking to save him from her siblings’ wrath, Veronica reveals the truth about herself to her lover, only for her trust to be betrayed.

Cut to the 20th century. It’s the late 1980s, and the plague has given way to the AIDS epidemic. Broke, bedridden and as conservative as her sisters once were, Veronica is under the care of her daughter Malva (Lucía Díez), a bleeding heart who prefers synthetic blood to the real thing. Malva is in love with a human too, a drug addict to whom she isn’t confident enough to disclose her identity. But when the contagion outside comes home knocking, she is forced to set things straight.

Full of comic situations and lines, dramatic compositions, rapid-fire editing, and baroque musical passages, Silence is a buoyant, quick-footed work. It bends vampire lore to humorous ends, using it, for instance, to satirize generational differences and political correctness. Yet an unmistakeable tragic undercurrent courses through the film. In the figure of the vampire, Casanova locates both the shame of having to lead a double life and the anguish of having to outlive your loved ones.

More importantly, Silence processes the trauma that the queer community had to suffer during the AIDS epidemic, or what was dubbed the “gay plague” in an act of political weaponization. The prohibitions on love, the stigma of contamination and the self-imposed invisibility that Veronica and Malva endure mirror the experience of the protestors outside their apartment. “Silence = Death,” goes their slogan, questioning the omerta that reigns around the subject of HIV.

Looking back from a more humane world in 2030, the closing stretches of the film evoke at once a sorrow for those who succumbed to AIDS and a relief at the normalization of the disease, which has ceased to be the death warrant that it once was. As Malva and her lover exchange bodily fluids in passionate embrace, Silence becomes as much a celebration of this freedom from mortal fear as the inescapable sensuality of cinema itself.

 

December 6, 2025

The Bride (2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Rwanda, Review | Tags: , , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Strolling home through the countryside, insouciant teenager Eva plays mock bride, gathering white flowers to adorn her billowing hair. Her aunt warns her about the danger that lies buried in these parts. “Keep playing in those bushes, and you’ll say bye to those legs,” she cautions. In a few moments, Eva’s life will indeed turn upside down, but these landmines, remnants of the recent civil war in Rwanda, won’t have been the cause.

After her aunt walks ahead, Eva’s dreamy idyll is interrupted by a group of young men who whisk her away. Eva, now a kidnapped bride, finds herself in a suburban house, married to a functionary named Silas. If the casualness with which Eva loses her freedom is shocking, it pales in comparison to what follows. Deferring to tradition, Eva’s relatives advise her to accept her fate, which entails not just a psychological adjustment to her new situation, but also painful acts of forced sexual maturity.

Eva spends her days in silent protest, yielding to Silas physically but without an iota of emotional involvement. However, she finds solace in the company of Silas’s female cousin, residing in the same house, who informs Eva of the unfathomable trauma their family had to endure during the Civil War.

Bonding over a shared history of deprivation, the two women forge an empowering dynamic that oscillates between the maternal and the sisterly. As Silas’ cousin, Aline Amike cuts a wise, world-weary figure who navigates this male-centric world with a mix of resignation and caution. Sandra Umulisa’s Eva is the image of innocence defiled, her residual girlishness exorcised in agonising routines of precocious conjugality. Together, the women engage in nourishing conversations and rituals of mutual care, carving out a space of healing from the violent strictures of family life.

The premise of The Bride is the stuff of high melodrama, but in her assured debut feature, director Myriam U. Birara adopts a measured, pared back approach that keeps the temperature of the material in check. There is no musical score here to amplify the emotions, only occasional acapella vocals of a haunting quality. The austerity of the sound design makes Eva’s helpless cries all the more harrowing.

To the same end, Birara develops her scenes entirely in static shots whose simplicity belie their exquisite colour and compositional balance. Shot by Bora Shingiro in soft natural light and an earthy palette of browns and whites, the film keeps us at a critical distance from Eva even as it makes us intimately familiar with her predicament.

 

December 1, 2025

Some Notes on the Current Situation (2025)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

What are conscientious artists to do, especially those dependent on state support for their work, when their country is waging a lopsided, genocidal war? Challenging the state, if it is possible at all, could invite reprisals. Dramatizing one’s personal anxieties risks producing narcissistic exercises in self-flagellation. Trying to find nuance might amount to little more than well-intentioned handwringing, while dodging the political altogether would smack of cynicism.

In Some Notes on the Current Situation, Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin gestures at one possible way out of this impasse, crafting a work where politics exists as a substructure, as a kind of collective unconscious that rises to the surface in all its nastiness every now and then. Bearing the subtitle “a film set before World War 3”, Kolirin’s 79-minute feature is divided into half-a-dozen loosely connected chapters, several of them set in nondescript countryside, devoid of all signs of the ongoing war. In fact, if not for its title, one could hardly say that the film deals with “the current situation” at all.

Kolirin, though, is no stranger to tackling politics head-on. His last feature, Let It Be Morning (2021), was an Arabic-language adaptation of Palestinian author Sayed Kashua’s Hebrew-language novel of the same name. It featured an all-Palestinian cast that boycotted, with Kolirin’s approval, the Cannes premiere of the film in protest against what they perceived as the Israeli state’s appropriation of their work. Like Morning, Notes is backed by the Israel Film Fund, but it’s a much smaller project with a cast of Jewish actors donning multiple roles.

Each chapter of Notes is something of an absurdist sketch, centring on rituals or interactions that defy rational explanation. In the film’s overture, for instance, a woman pushes against a concrete building with all her might, in the zealous belief that it is collapsing. She demands a passerby to lend her a hand. The man is confused, but obliges nonetheless. With the help of two others, they manage to prevent the impending catastrophe and, in the process, restore colour to their monochrome world. What begins as an individual delusion snowballs into a collective psychosis.

In another segment, a couple drives endlessly around the desert, their delivery truck loaded with snow, looking for the set of Theo Angelopoulos’ new movie. It turns out that the pair are time travellers from the past who have teleported themselves to a country they don’t recognize anymore. Elsewhere in the film, a sadistic military drill becomes the occasion for a return of the repressed.

This mosaic of humorously bizarre vignettes, a little reminiscent of the work of Roy Andersson, doesn’t yield easily to interpretation. The pleasure, on the contrary, is in their thought-provoking elusiveness. In the film’s Coen brothers-like coda, an elderly rabbi encounters a wayward husband and tells him the tale of a young Jewish scholar who meets his Inuit fiancée’s family. Suffice to say, the story ends with broken teeth and a tear-filled feast.

What moral lesson the husband, or we, are to draw from this outlandish parable is not immediately clear. But the inchoate, oppressive feeling of meaninglessness that it leaves behind is undeniable. Faced with film’s many Kafkaesque situations, we find ourselves in a state of fugue, just like the characters. Coursing through Notes is a strong sense of confusion and dislocation, the sentiment of finding oneself profoundly out of step with the logic of the world. In that, the film is perhaps entirely emblematic of “the current situation”.

 

November 26, 2025

Nova ’78 (2025)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Portugal, Cinema of the UK, Cinema of the USA, Review | Tags: , , , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

 

In December 1978, the Entermedia Theatre in East Village, Manhattan, was host to a three-day celebration of writer William S. Burroughs and his vision of the space age. Titled Nova Convention, the event brought together a range of avant-garde artists and thinkers who responded to Burroughs’ work through readings, conversations and performances. The then-64-year-old writer was a central presence himself, dressed in grey suit and a green fedora hat, reciting various unpublished pieces with his distinctive nasal twang.

A student at the New York University, Howard Brookner filmed the convention as part of his ongoing documentation of Burroughs’ life. Much of this material remained unseen until 2012, when Brookner’s archive was rediscovered in Europe and the USA, and subsequently restored through the efforts of his nephew, the filmmaker Aaron Brookner. In Nova ’78, the younger Brookner and co-director Rodrigo Areias offer a kaleidoscopic reconstruction of the event, liberally mixing on-stage performances with intimate behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with friends and other everyday vignettes.

Each number is emblematic of the freewheeling nature of the convention: Philip Glass producing hypnotic loops on a synthesizer, Merce Cunningham dancing to a baritone vocal piece by John Cage, Patti Smith offering to reimburse disappointed viewers before shredding her guitar, Frank Zappa reading the ‘talking asshole’’ bit from Naked Lunch (1959), or Laurie Anderson performing her song “From the Air”, assisted by Bobby Bielecki’s electronic effects.

Armed with a zoom lens, Brookner’s nimble camera floats around the artists and the audience, now capturing Burroughs lost in thought, now filming street scenes around the theatre. Inspired by the writer’s style, Nova ’78 juxtaposes starkly disparate material, such that actual poetry often rubs shoulders with poetry of a more mundane kind, one that grasps life in motion. Emerging from the film is an image of Burroughs as a fiercely independent, politically committed figure, opposed to every stripe of fundamentalism and authoritarian control.

Above all, Nova ’78 provides a precious glimpse into a creative community untouched by the logic of technocracy and corporatization. The convention isn’t any ‘gig’, and the artists and thinkers gathered here register as real individuals with eccentricities, not self-styled brands in thrall to showbiz mandates. The ease and spontaneity with which they participate in the event, and the unaffected warmth and respect with which they speak of Burroughs, attest to a high degree of personal integrity as well as a sense of genuine camaraderie. In that, Nova ’78 truly feels like a time machine.

 

November 21, 2025

The New Man (2023)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of Cape Verde, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Time seems to stand still in the village of Ribeira Funda, tucked between the boundless ocean and the majestic mountains on the island of São Nicolau in Cape Verde. The moss-laden rocks, dilapidated stone houses, jagged pathways that comprise its expressionistic scenery appear to have existed since time immemorial.

Haunting this eternal landscape is old man Quirino, at once a king and a castaway, who leads a self-sufficient life in one of these houses, with a rooster for company. Signs of history soon surface — a radio bringing news from elsewhere, batteries, razor blades, cigarettes — cutting down this mythical figure to human scale. On the voiceover, Quirino recounts his memory of Ribeira Funda, once a thriving agricultural land, now drought-stricken and deserted.

The old man, we learn, has continued to live in this ghost village decades after its original inhabitants abandoned it for greener pastures. But now his faculties are failing him, and he must prepare for the great voyage beyond.

In his second feature The New Man, Carlos Yuri Ceuninck adeptly blends historical fact, lived experience and personal memory, crafting an ambitious, contemplative work that ventures beyond simple documentary portraiture. Part a sociological sketch, part a philosophical parable, Ceuninck’s film interweaves intimate observational vignettes, breathtaking landscape photography and a polyphonic voiceover in a way that both explains its subject and endows him with an irreducible mystery.

The New Man stands in interesting conversation with Wang Bing’s Man with No Name (2010), another absorbing record of a recluse at the edge of civilization. But where Wang remains a strict chronicler of the present, Ceuninck introduces what seem like visions from the past and the hereafter. Unfolding on a metaphysical stage lit by the celestial bodies and the scored to the churning seas, The New Man seamlessly melds myth, dreams and reality, illustrating that even a single, unremarkable life embodies the drama of the cosmos.

Ceuninck keeps pace with Querino’s quotidian rhythms, developing his film in long shots with little dramatic action, relieved regularly by glimpses of young boys playing, dancing or working the fields. Are these images from Querino’s own youth? Or are they part of the many legends that surround the village?

Querino’s sense of self is evidently bound to his memories of growing up in Ribeira Funda, but we also perceive that the land has an identity only insofar as its inhabitants bestow it with meaning. “There were many storytellers here,” Querino laments, “but death came, and it spared nothing and no one.” The New Man thus registers as an elegy, not for the man or his land, but for the intangible ties that bind them together. Death is on Querino’s mind as he too prepares to leave the village, but something far more significant will have died before his mortal end.

 

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