“We are in the midst of chaos, we can't stretch the ‘ala’* the way we thought, the way we dreamed all this time. But we are together”. These words by Camila Xavier, president of...
By Rachel Morais
on January 13, 2020 10:33
During the screenings of the 21st Rio Int’ Film Festival, and in the process of finding a theme for an essay that would answer the...
By Bruno Galindo
on January 13, 2020 10:31
I remember when the film critic Jean-Claude Bernardet took the stage of Cine Brasília to receive the Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes Medal,...
By Adriano Garrett
on January 13, 2020 10:28
After the 2018 election, with Jair Messias Bolsonaro's rise to power, it was impossible to turn a blind eye to the presence of...
By Lorenna Rocha
on January 13, 2020 10:24
Cinelandia, Downtown Rio de Janeiro, December 10, 2019. At the stage of Odeon cinema theater, Ilda Santiago, director of the Rio de Janeiro Intl’ Film Festival, introduces the...
By Taiani Mendes
on January 13, 2020 10:21
Chão, by Camila Freitas, follows the struggle of the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement, specifically the Leonir Orback Camp in Santa Helena, Goiás. In the tradition of...
by Raquel Morais
on December 16, 2019 18:37
“No one let go anyone’s hand” became the slogan of resistance against the currently harmful political ruling groups in Brazil and a concept that has long been present in the...
on December 16, 2019 18:35
It’s impossible to watch Alice (2019), by Josephine Mackerras, and not be immediately reminded of Louis Buñuel's Belle de Jour. The surrealist classic that revealed Catherine...
By Chissana Magalhães
on December 16, 2019 18:30
Like all sprawling traumas of its kind, the Rwandan genocide has spawned a significant amount of literature, the most visible being Hotel Rwanda and its now demystified...
by Kayode Faniyi
on August 6, 2019 15:53
1. The day, the part of it I’m willing to recount, ended as it began—with Mo Scarpelli somewhere in the picture. The Anbessa director was there at the media room at the...
on August 6, 2019 15:43
Bongile Mantsia made for a good lead playing the role of a down-and-out boxer from Mdantsane in Jahmil Qubeka’s latest film, Knuckle City. Raw, unfiltered, thrilling and...
by Jeoffrey Mukubi and Nkululeko Zilibokwe
on August 6, 2019 15:30
After exploring rural Brazil in Ventos de Agosto (Winds of August) and Boi Neon (Neon Bull), Gabriel Mascaro turns his attention to the city, speculating for the first time...
By Armando Quesada Webb
on April 11, 2019 12:12
When the Festival Internacional de Cine de Guadalajara chose Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), an animated film directed by Carlos Gutiérrez, for its opening night, it was...
By Denise Roldán
on April 11, 2019 11:58
The bustling Nigerian film industry – popularly known as Nollywood – is one of the largest film industries in the world, at least in terms of volume of output. The Berlin...
By Wilfred Okiche
on February 19, 2019 14:29
“One of the most challenging misconceptions that thwarts filmmakers from being able to portray female desire in a way that is seeped in authenticity, is that female bodies are...
By Poulomi Das
on February 19, 2019 14:27
Wars do not simply claim lives – they also create new ones that are integral to their continuation. This lesson is not lost on Colombian-Ecuadorian Alejandro Landes’ MONOS...
By Leonardo Goi
on February 19, 2019 14:26
“There is no archive fever without the threat of [the] death drive,” wrote French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The act of archiving is a response to our fear of death; it is...
By Devika Girish
on February 19, 2019 14:24
Pioneer feminist video activists Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig only had a domestic video camera. Chilean queer artist Pedro Lemebel did not even have a camera, just...
By Andrea Guzmán
on February 19, 2019 14:18
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s first feature-length essay film MOTHER, I AM SUFFOCATING. THIS IS MY LAST FILM ABOUT YOU (Lesotho/Qatar), part of this year’s Berlinale Forum, creates...
By Victor Guimarães
on February 13, 2019 17:46
The filmography of Argentinian director Manuel Abramovich has been quite a journey. The “Better be careful: Intimate Dialogues” session of the Berlinale, moderated by Dutch film...
By Narjes Torchani
on February 13, 2019 17:45
Russian director Alexander Gorchilin captures the aimlessness and alienation of Russian youth, but offers a too limited perspective to lead the way himself. At its best,...
By Hugo Emmerzael
on February 13, 2019 17:42
Delphine Seyrig may be best known as a Nouvelle Vague acting icon or for her signature role as the subversive housewife-sex worker Jeanne Dielman. Nevertheless, Seyrig was a...
on February 13, 2019 17:41
From the credits, the dispositif of Jean Gabriel Périot’s OUR DEFEATS (NOS DÉFAITES, France) is explicit: in Ivry-sur-Seine, the suburbs of Paris, exactly fifty years after May...
on February 11, 2019 14:49
The disappearance of a father is like an apocalypse. You walk through a new life, unknown, and your old life is gone forever. The hell of grief has somehow also been a heaven...
on February 11, 2019 14:45
Although he is established as one of the best-known Latin American writers, Pedro Lemebel was a provocative Chilean countercultural icon that caused a lot of trouble and...
on February 11, 2019 14:41
As a student of Russian auteur Alexander Sokurov, Alexander Zolotukhin employs some of his mentor’s strategies in this harrowing, essayistic and critical debut about the worth...
on February 11, 2019 14:21
The role of a film critic is to guide the reader through the movie: its narrative and cinematography, the different layers of its characters, and to underline why it is an...
on February 4, 2019 19:09
I was making my way to the bar with some American film critics, during an industry party at the Cairo International Film Festival, when we ran into the International Director of...
on February 4, 2019 19:06
I was born and raised in Nagpur, a small city in central India, and I moved to the United States six years ago to study film and semiotics in college. Since then, I’ve been...
on February 4, 2019 19:05
I landed my first gig as a film critic as a middle schooler, in the back seat of my mother’s car, outside my hometown’s only cinema. As the son of a hardcore cinephile who’d...
on February 4, 2019 19:00
Bertrand Bonello’s Zombie Child left me with a double impression: while it became one of the best experiences I had in a movie theater this year, it brought some disappointment...
by Adriano Garrett
on December 16, 2019 18:38
Period images and newspaper sheets start Melina León's Canción sin nombre (Peru, 2019). The chosen historical-temporal perspective informs us about the economic crisis and...
Intervenção (Intervention, Brazil, 2019), a film directed by Caio Cobra and produced by Mídia Bridge, had its première at a gala screening of Rio de Janeiro Int’l Film Festival....
on December 16, 2019 18:33
With the 40th season underway and judging from all the excitement in the air, DIFF’s 40th year will be one for the books. The International Durban Film Festival is one of...
by Nkululeko Zilibokwe
on August 6, 2019 15:55
Some five years after work began on it, Roads to Olympia finally premiered at the Durban International Film Festival in 2019. Directed by first-time director Ramazan Nanayev,...
on August 6, 2019 15:50
This heartfelt documentary tells the story of Tawfiq, a scorned man, helpless father and ex-jihadist who has been sent back to his country of origin after spending six years in...
on August 6, 2019 15:36
The art of cinema, emulating reality, allows questions with no answers to be asked and answered. With Buñuel En El Laberinto De Las Tortugas (Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the...
on April 11, 2019 12:13
In an age of walls and migrant caravans, the story of Steevens Benjamin becomes significant. He is an immigrant worker from Haiti who, for defending his friend against the...
on April 11, 2019 12:10
We when talk about others from a position of privilege, it is not at all uncommon to fall into frivolities and a sense of complacence regarding the subjects of our discourse....
on April 11, 2019 11:55
Everyone who has experienced the atmosphere of a major film festival in recent years can testify: rhetoric is all over the place. We can see it in the plethora of press...
on February 19, 2019 14:28
Since the birth of the first moving images, filmmaking and intention were linked to each other. First there was the intention to capture a moment in time, like no art or...
Condemn the present, examine the past or escape to a better future? Three films at the 69th Berlinale reflect upon Russian youth culture and its sensitive relationship to the...
on February 19, 2019 14:25
As part of the Talent Press workshop all eight participants wrote a review about Peter Parlow’s Berlinale Forum contribution THE PLAGIARISTS. The whole group discussed the...
on February 19, 2019 14:19
In THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND, the stirring directorial debut by British-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, an interesting moment arrives in the final quarter when the hero,...
There is an inceptive sequence in Ritesh Batra’s PHOTOGRAPH that reproduces the chasm between force-feeding traditional biases and brandishing a somewhat performative modernism...
The teens at the centre of Alejandro Landes’ electrifying survivalist saga MONOS live in a foggy landscape suspended above the Colombian Andes. They go by aliases that echo...
on February 13, 2019 17:44
“There’s no space for liberty,” says filmmaker Suhaib Gasmelbari about the state of contemporary Sudanese cinema, as we chat over a cup of coffee on the fifth day of the...
Opening the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section of this year’s Berlinale, Tamer Jandali’s feature length debut, EASY LOVE, is a hybrid documentary-fiction experimental foray that...
by Wilfred Okiche
on February 11, 2019 14:52
There is a scene late into Dan Salitt’s Berlinale Forum entry FOURTEEN (USA) where the film’s lead, Mara (Tallie Medel), recounts a bedtime story to her daughter, familiarising...
on February 11, 2019 14:46
Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia began photographing Mafia murders on her home turf in the 1970s. Nearly fifty years later, she becomes the subject of Kim Longinotto’s...
on February 11, 2019 14:42
In the haunting opening sequence of Wang Quan’an’s ÖNDÖG, a car stumbles upon a dead woman in the heart of the Mongolian steppe, its headlights eerily illuminating her naked...
on February 11, 2019 14:36
There isn’t a time in my life that I haven’t been fascinated by moving pictures. This quietly morphed into a lifelong fixation with movies, and books, and movies about books,...
My mother-tongue is Bangla, an Indo-Aryan language that is the lingua franca of West Bengal, India’s fourth most populous state. It’s the language that I think in, although...
on February 4, 2019 19:08
It all started with an almost unconscious desire to continue the experience of films. It felt necessary to create short circuits in consumption, to keep some of the works alive...
Although I always try to remain optimistic, I recognize that I do not write during a very encouraging moment in Latin-America, and more specifically, in both of my places of...
on February 4, 2019 19:04
