Rehearsed Realities: Cecilia Mangini’s Documentary Fictions of Rural South Italy
In a post-war Italy ravaged by two decades of fascism, reckoning with the ruins of its urban landscape, young photographer…
Documentary
What Is Democracy?: A Conversation With Astra Taylor
This interview was first published in Another Gaze 03 Astra Taylor is a Canadian-American activist, writer, musician, and documentary filmmaker. Her…
Seeing, and Seeing Through, Art History: The Resurrection of Hilma af Klint in ‘Beyond the Visible’ (Halina Dyrschka, 2019)
Sometime last year, I tweeted: “are Hilma af Klint selfies the new [Yayoi Kusama] infinity mirror selfies?” Selfies taken in…
Towards a Quilombo Cinema: An Afro-Brazilian Feminist Roundtable
A conversation between Everlane Moraes, Janaína Oliveira, Kênia Freitas, and Tatiana Carvalho Costa. Translated by Lillian Maguire and Natalia Davies….
Strike on Film: Madeline Anderson’s ‘I Am Somebody’ (1970)
This essay was originally published in Another Gaze 04 (March 2020) i. Your colleagues probably won’t want to strike until,…
Mr Zuckerberg, Tear Down My Wall
A common narrative about social media goes like this: something something anxiety and deep insecurity; it’s hard to see an…
Those Who Keep and Those Who Throw Away: On Hoarding in ‘Grey Gardens’, ‘The Gleaners and I’ and ‘Tidying Up With Marie Kondo’
“That’s all I need: an ordered life” —Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale, Grey Gardens Early last year, I experienced my…
Towards a Diffractive Cinema: The Video Works of Amanda Melissa Baggs (1980–2020)
Amanda Melissa Baggs, also known as Mel Baggs, died on 11 April 2020. This essay was originally published in print…
Cinema, Carcerality and Covid-19: On Watching Brett Story’s ‘The Prison In Twelve Landscapes’ (2016)
How do you represent the prison system cinematically? A certain syntax of images springs to mind: a concrete wall, coils…
‘Still Moving’: Ulrike Ottinger’s Shifting Archive of Identity
An experimental documentary that unpacks a personal archive without exposition, narration, or dialogue, Ulrike Ottinger’s Still Moving (2009) relies instead…
The Great Digestive Machine: Inside the Choreography of Loie Fuller and the Underwater Cinema of Geneviève Hamon and Jean Painlevé
If the afterlife exists, I’ve always imagined that I’d like mine to be underwater. I’d be reborn as something with…
The 57th New York Film Festival: Looking Towards Convergences in a Cluster of Films
Having just seen Alla Kovgan’s documentary about the monolithic figurehead of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, it is now my job…
Who gets to be ‘the people’? Astra Taylor’s ‘What Is Democracy?’ and Gabrielle Brady’s ‘Island of the Hungry Ghosts’
An impromptu interview on a beach in Miami. A casually dressed white woman in her thirties is perched comfortably on…
Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger: A Canadian Wake-Up Call —TIFF
“Racism and discrimination is what’s keeping services away from our children and that’s the bottom line.” So says Carolyn Buffalo,…
Finding freedom in Sturla Pilskog and Sidse Torstholm Larsen’s ‘Winter’s Yearning’ —Open City Docs
It would have been too precious for Winter’s Yearning to have been titled Waiting for Alcoa, yet Beckett’s existential drama…
Notes on the City: Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Adrian Jackson’s ‘Here For Life’ —Locarno
In an interview in 1968 Pasolini described going especially from Casarsa to Udine to see Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle…
A House That Is Not A Home: Yoon Sung-A’s ‘Overseas’ —Locarno
How can cinema show social reproduction? Yoon Sung-A’s documentary Overseas (2019), focuses on a training centre for overseas domestic workers…
The Woman Everyone Knows: In Conversation With Aminatou Echard
In her most recent film, French filmmaker Aminatou Echard takes up the eponymous heroine of Jamilia, the 1958 novel by…
On Solitary Companionship: ‘A Wild Stream’ (‘Una corriente salvaje’) by Nuria Ibáñez Castañeda at Cinéma du Réel
Nuria Ibánez Castañeda’s Una corriente salvaje (A Wild Stream, 2018) opens on Omar, wading waist-deep off a remote beach in…
After Agnès Varda: A Discussion
Following Agnès Varda’s death and inspired by the importance of collaboration in Varda’s work, we asked eight writers, programmers and…
“A Habit of not Talking about the Past” in Eritrean Italy: Documenting a Diaspora
Asmarina (2015), by Alan Maglio and Medhin Paolos, explores the multiplicity of Eritrean migratory experiences and tells the many stories…